This paper examines the concepts of hybridism as posthuman subjectivity and the alienation it engenders for the posthuman characters in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogies who become different from the anthropocentric norm due to genetic, sexual and cultural interconnections with other-than-human others. The study situates its analysis within a posthumanist framework which questions and challenges the anthropocentric ordering of Western humanist tradition and demonstrates how the posthuman subject is always othered and alienated due to conditions of posthuman/metahuman transformation. It demonstrates how hybrid connections between human and non-human components in fictional anthropocentric societies often result in posthuman conditions and subjectivities that transcend and decentre privileged human hierarchies and categories. The paper also explores the trials and constraints that being other, alien, hybrid and posthuman in each text has on the lives of characters who fall beyond the privileged categories of the portrayed fictional societies; and argues that biological and cultural hybridism results not only in the development of posthuman subjectivity but also translates into conditions of alienation and discrimination in anthropocentric societies.
