The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman Urbanism

The Not-So-Mean Streets of Hangzhou, China: Reflecting with Nietzsche, Freud and Marx

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The study of the city is one of the most challenging topics we explore as philosophers, but it is highly rewarding because the city is our most complex cultural artifact and draws in so many aspects of cultural studies. Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space (Shaw, 2017), does not disappoint in this respect of revealing how the city is the locus of so much of our neoliberal, and now neocolonial, culture of privilege in forms of classism, racism and genderism, and how the many "others" to these are relegated to the margins of city spaces so that the city becomes a de facto selection tool of sorting these into strata. City spaces are hierarchical, some New York residents, for instance, fit and trim, while away the hours at the ice rink in Rockefeller Center beneath the giant bronze of Prometheus bringing humanity the torch of fire, thus, to signify the divine origins of civilization, whose rise, otherwise inexplicable, is what separates us from animals, as goes the logic.

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“…and try to connect the dots between that question to the possibility of conserved trauma having a role in the rise of agriculture and the first cities and authoritarian culture and asking how that might be addressed. But any such search for deeper meanings is missing from Shaw's (2017) book, which winds up identifying the Posthuman City in circular terms. Moreover, in an opening caveat, Shaw (2017) states that the book's analysis is based on London, which then makes for a limited study and of a piece with the problem of failing to articulate a meaningful conception of the Posthuman City.…”

“…But any such search for deeper meanings is missing from Shaw's (2017) book, which winds up identifying the Posthuman City in circular terms. Moreover, in an opening caveat, Shaw (2017) states that the book's analysis is based on London, which then makes for a limited study and of a piece with the problem of failing to articulate a meaningful conception of the Posthuman City. Shaw (2017) writes:…”

“…Moreover, in an opening caveat, Shaw (2017) states that the book's analysis is based on London, which then makes for a limited study and of a piece with the problem of failing to articulate a meaningful conception of the Posthuman City. Shaw (2017) writes:…”

“…In this book, London is, more often than not, my exemplary city, not only because it is one of the capitals of modernity and postmodernity but because it is where I live and can write with confidences of first-hand experience. (ix) Shaw (2017) is quite correct to criticize the city as bizarre in its hierarchizing by space assignment, but the positive idea of what the Posthuman City should look like seems defeatist. Shaw (2017) writes:…”