Reading the Posthuman Backwards: Mary Rowlandson's Doubled Witnessing

Taking its cue from theorists who note the persistence of a humanist imaginary in popular iterations of posthumanism, this essay queries how the posthuman subject projected by theory might "speak" the autobiographical, and troubles the notion of the posthuman as an epochal designation by turning back to consider what a posthuman lens might reveal about the earliest of colonial American autobiographical narratives, Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative. In The True Relation, Rowlandson affirms to her reader how the practice of Biblical exemplarity sustained the affl icted captive as she endured successive removals, and how it sustains the writer as she narrates the story of affliction and restoration. Yet, witnessing to survival, the narrator of The True Relation shifts discourse to become an accidental, unsystematic, proto-humanist ethnographer of encounter, dislocating the saint as posthuman subject through an incipiently humanist attentiveness to difference.