Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism and Its Afterlives

But all that talk about the post-human, the non-human, the inhuman and the problem of lumping allhumans into the Anthropocene provides a way of sustainingthe human as a problem. What if the humanwere an effect of its own delusions of self-erasure?

—Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols¹

Renaissance literature contains many afterlives. Shakespeare's Hamlet, for example, ends with the Prince of Denmark's impossibly pseudo-posthumous "Horatio, I am dead," whereas the play's ghostly beginning, "Who's there?," blurs the distinction between this life and the next (5.2.340, 1.1.1).² The play's gravedigger asks about Christian burial, whereas Hamlet himself considers a thoroughly materialist afterlife, in which the body is recycled among the Earth's various elements. As this brief example suggests, the concept of Renaissance afterlives raises a series of important questions about time and agency: When does the "after" of an afterlife begin, and where does the agency for transmission to a future moment reside? The question of the afterlife as a religious proposition in early modern thought and writing is, of course, ubiquitous. But the ethics and politics of life on Earth do not arise only out of religious doctrine. From Giordano Bruno to Margaret Cavendish, monist and vitalist theories shaped debates on the proper relationship between human and nonhuman life; these theories resonate for many current scholars with the turn to the "posthuman" in our own literary-philosophical moment.³

For scholars working in the environmental humanities, the turn to the posthuman signifies in various ways the "afterlife" of the human, itself a response to the destabilizing pressures of climate change, toxic ecologies, biotechnology, and species extinction on many levels. In an era in which the distinction between human and posthuman has lost much of its force, environmental scholars have begun to theorize the afterlife of the human as "intra-active" (Barad), "compositional" (Latour), "companionate" (Haraway), "vibrant" and "affective" (Bennett), and "trans-corporeal" (Alaimo).⁴ Still others have begun to question the very category of life, suggesting that we have always already been "after life" (Thacker), "postlife" (Colebrook), or living/unliving, like a zombie or virus (Serres).⁵ Do these entanglements suggest the death of the human, its survival in other forms, or both? And what do we mean by death or survival? How do terms like "sustainability," "composting," or "recycling" enable different visions of the afterlife?

This special issue attempts to answer these questions by focusing our attention on the afterlives of the Renaissance. We treat "afterlives" as a contronym, a word so contradictory that it undoes its own future: on the one hand, "afterlife" suggests a life after death, but it also signals the end of life. Both senses of the word, afterlife and after life, or survival and extinction, mingle inextricably in the literature of the Renaissance, as we've seen already with Hamlet's postmortem address. Although the scholarship on Renaissance posthumanism has flourished in recent years, this work tends to focus solely on the first definition of afterlives, emphasizing what is lively or animate in the early modern text. But as feminist, queer, disability, and critical race scholars have pointed out, terms such as "life" and "animacy" can also be violently exclusionary, since what is deemed "alive" may very well encode the same racist, ableist, and colonial ideologies that have historically shaped Western ideas of the human as white, patriarchal, and masculine (we return to this point at the end of our introduction).⁶ This special issue provides the occasion to meditate on the second definition of afterlives. We are interested in lives gone askew and in forms of un/living that disjoin the present, like Hamlet's ghost. In short, we theorize the posthuman as a problem, precisely a problem of time and materiality, and one that puts pressure on the logic of pre and post.⁷ The Renaissance afterlives gathered in this collection challenge readers to dwell in the ecologically precarious, at times unlivable, spaces shaped by inequalities directly impacting the Earth system. For...