Introduction

Abstract

This chapter suggests that questioning the ways difference is produced and mobilised by critique requires more than simply challenging humanism's attempt to extend its critical remit to other forms of cultural representation. 'Ontological', 'relational', and 'processual' turns, amongst the more prominent in recent critical scholarship, have attempted to account for how materials and their processes are understood to have 'more-than-human' agency. The argument goes, broadly, that reassembling human sociality through the relational agencies of more-than-human material assemblages enables a better, richer, more honest, and dynamic account of human life. In response, postcoloniality argues, thinking and knowledge making must decolonise, decentre, diversify, and, in many cases, reject the narratives that have come to over-represent and legitimise continued forms of colonisation, erasure, and violence, epistemic and otherwise. Posthumanisms can learn from postcolonial and decolonising efforts. Several features, however, characterise the often-divergent genealogies of these two critical trajectories, posthumanism and post colonialism.