Transhumanism and/as Whiteness

Abstract

Transhumanism is interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to establishing its “algorithmic” relationship to historical processes of race formation (or racialization) within Euro-American historical experience. Although the transhumanist project is overdetermined vis-à-vis its raison d’être, it is argued that a useful way of thinking about this project is in terms of its relationship to the shifting phenomenon of whiteness. It is suggested that transhumanism constitutes a techno-scientific response to the phenomenon of “White Crisis” at least partly prompted by contestation of Eurocentrically universal humanism.