Human rights and posthuman poetics in contemporary Irish poetry: technology, media, ecology

Abstract

This article examines a series of poems by contemporary Irish authors writing in English, and focuses on the role of media technology in considering post-human ethics and human rights issues in these poems. Human rights discourse has faced the challenge of addressing the broadening of the category of ‘human’ through post-human ethics and aesthetics. What is therefore needed is a consideration of how the sphere or concept of human rights can encompass what Rosi Braidotti describes as ‘post-human subjects of knowledge–embedded, embodied and yet flowing in a web of relations with human and non-human others’. This theoretical framework informs the article's discussion of selected poems, how these poems approach human rights conflicts and violations in a distinctively post-human context, and how different manifestations of media technology shape and reflect such discussions. Poetry, technology, and the post-human subject are understood as equally embedded in the material, cultural, and political assemblages within which human rights and post-human ethics also emerge.