“Mackerel and Porpoise / Was This the Last of Us”: The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”

Abstract

This article reads Susan Howe’s poem “Periscope” (2017) to examine how it challenges liberal humanist strands of thinking about the supposed centrality and privileged position of humans while opening up new ways of representing humans vis-a-vis the non-human. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concepts of “nomadic subjectivity,” “figuration,” and “transversality,” Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” and Pieter Vermeulen’s “Posthuman Affect,” the study looks into how the poet’s preoccupation with the agency of the other-than-human species depicted in the poem leads to a posthumanist interpretation. It also examines how the narrator questions the boundaries between human and non-human, animate and inanimate in order to evoke uncanny effects that are best realized in the form of post-human defiant challenges to liberal humanist models of subjectivity. The poet, it is argued, creates a suggestive visionary engagement and encounter with the natural world and “anthropomorphized things” in an attempt to awaken historical consciousness to give voice to the non-articulated Other.