Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 Kinship between 'Companion Species' : A Posthuman Refiguration of the Immigrant Condition in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Academy Award-winning author and illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2007 graphic novel The Arrival poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience. Tan creates an ostensibly alienating and unfamiliar terrain which may be described as a “posthuman landscape”. Instead of presenting the traditional native-versus-immigrant framework typical of diasporic stories, Tan chooses to delineate an inter-species relationship where the immigrant man is assisted by a native animal. An odd-looking creature becomes the protagonist’s guide in the new country and assists him in a myriad of ways throughout the story. This article explores the implications of such a relationship in the age of the Anthropocene where the privileged anthropocentrism of western humanism has been replaced by an egalitarianism of species. Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “companion species” and Rosi Braidotti’s recent articulation of the posthuman, it suggests a connection between the posthuman and the postcolonial in Tan’s text and thereby explores the significance of a non-human Other coming to the assistance of the immigrant Other within the space of a posthuman, postcolonial world. Thus the article seeks to study the reconfiguration of otherness in the face of incommensurable difference, and articulate its implications for diasporic thought.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of Postcolonial Writing Trans/forming Literature : Graphic Novels, Migration and Postcolonial Identity vol. 52 no. 4 2016 10467842 2016 periodical issue 2016 pg. 399-414
Last amended 10 Oct 2018 16:37:37
399-414 Kinship between 'Companion Species' : A Posthuman Refiguration of the Immigrant Condition in Shaun Tan’s The Arrivalsmall AustLit logo Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Subjects:
  • The Arrival Shaun Tan , 2006 single work graphic novel
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