Posthumanist History and Animal History

This article examines the theoretical and methodological relationship between posthumanist history and animal history, asking where these frameworks converge, where they diverge, and how they might productively inform one another. While posthumanist history provides tools for decentering the human and conceptualizing agency as relational and distributed, critical animal history foregrounds the ethical and political significance of sentience, systemic violence, and the emancipatory stakes of recognizing nonhuman animals as historical subjects. The article argues that these differences reflect two distinct foundations of historical inquiry: posthumanist history interrogates the ontological and epistemological status of the human, whereas critical animal history is grounded in the recognition of animals as subjects embedded in structures of exploitation and resistance. To clarify these tensions, the article proposes distinguishing between subjective animal agency and three forms of posthumanist agency—corporeal, conditioned, and infrastructural—which together enable a more nuanced account of how animals participate in historical processes. Finally, the article suggests that a posthumanist animal history requires a methodological shift from reconstructing animal interiority to examining the biopolitical, technological, and material configurations that produce animals as living beings, laboring bodies, and commodities. Rather than treating posthumanism and animal history as competing paradigms, the article argues for their integration: posthumanism offers a critical framework for diagnosing the structural conditions of interspecies domination, while animal liberation theory provides the normative basis for transforming them.