This panel examines posthumanism through Asian diasporic literature. Posthumanist theory, developed by scholars such as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and Rosi Braidotti, challenges anthropocentric worldviews and questions the boundaries between human and nonhuman life. Recent dialogues with environmental studies, animal studies, postcolonial studies, biopolitics, and indigenous studies have further expanded posthumanist inquiry. Bringing posthumanism into dialogue with Asian diasporic histories, this panel focuses on colonialism, migration, and global capitalism. We argue that Asian diasporic literature reveals how the boundaries between human and nonhuman are shaped by colonial extraction, racialized labor, and the global division of work. Asian bodies have historically been racialized as laboring, mechanical, or alien, positioned at the threshold between human and nonhuman. Through analyses of multiple literary genres, including poetry, short stories, and novels, the panel brings together scholars at different career stages. With each 12-minute presentation, the presenters explore how Asian diasporic literature reimagines posthuman life and challenges the racial and colonial foundations of the human.

The first paper, Zhou Xiaojing’s “‘My Coolitude Is of Whale Bone’: Rajiv Mohabir’s Interspecies Poetics of Diaspora,” explores nonhuman coolitude through environmental and oceanic frameworks. Coined by the Indo-Trinidadian Mauritian poet Khal Torabully, the term “coolitude” reimagines the identity of the “coolie,” the indentured Asian laborer transported across European empires. Indo-Caribbean American poet Rajiv Mohabir extends coolitude through a decolonial interspecies poetics that links South Asian diaspora to whale migration. By foregrounding the agency and sovereignty of whales—animals hunted, exploited, and endangered by imperial and military industries—Mohabir connects the oceanic crossings of indentured laborers with nonhuman migration and resistance. Zhou’s paper argues that Mohabir’s poetry reclaims coolie identity through an interspecies poetics that challenges anthropocentric and hierarchical definitions of life.

The second paper, Jinhui Wu’s “Fox, Woman, Cyborg: Gender and Colonial Technoscience in ‘Good Hunting,’” examines posthuman embodiment as a form of colonial exploitation. Ken Liu’s short story, set in a steampunk colonial Hong Kong, follows Yan, a fox spirit whose supernatural abilities disappear with industrial modernity and who is forcibly transformed into a mechanized courtesan. Wu argues that the story reframes posthuman hybridity not as liberation but as a colonial technoscientific apparatus that extracts value from racialized and gendered bodies. Drawing on postcolonial feminism and feminist science and technology studies, Wu's paper shows how technological modernization disenchants indigenous cosmologies while turning the female and nonhuman body into infrastructure for empire. Yan’s transformation into a mechanical fox, however, reclaims nonhumanity as a strategy of survival, demonstrating how Asian diasporic writing reshapes posthumanist thought by foregrounding coercion, repair, and repurposing.

The third paper, Eliko Kosaka’s “Resisting Racialization and Obsolescence: The Posthuman in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun,” examines the global division of labor structured by race, gender, and care work. Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to care for a chronically ill girl, is discarded as obsolete once her caregiving role is fulfilled. Kosaka argues that Klara reflects the position of racialized and feminized care workers whose labor sustains social life yet whose bodies are treated as disposable. Reading Klara as a continuation of Ishiguro’s engagement with imperialism and racial trauma, the paper draws on N. Katherine Hayles and Michelle Huang, and reframes Klara’s cosmological attunement as qualities that challenge anthropocentric definitions of personhood while exposing the racialized logic of technological obsolescence.

The final paper, Yasuko Kase’s “The Colonial Biopolitics of Posthuman Longevity in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees,” examines how Western fantasies of posthuman longevity rely on colonial extraction. The novel, which parodies the case of Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, reveals how the scientific pursuit of longevity depends on colonial biopolitics that transforms indigenous human and nonhuman life into exploitable biological matter. Framed as a collaborative memoir of a scientist whose research devastates a fictionalized Micronesian island through medical exploitation and pharmaceutical biopiracy, the novel exposes the entanglement of imperialism and medicine. Drawing on Mel Y. Chen’s concept of the animacy hierarchy and Alexander G. Weheliye’s theory of colonial biopolitics, this paper argues that colonial medicine converts colonized life into biocapital, revealing the biopolitical foundations of posthuman longevity.