Fantasising with the animal : de-anthropocentrism in Tales from the inner city

Abstract

This dissertation is a textual and visual analysis of selected illustrated fantasy stories from Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City, arguing that Tan’s work embodies de-anthropocentrism which has been necessitated by the current Anthropocene. First, this paper outlines key philosophical discussions on the animal question, human-animal entanglement and posthumanism, while it attends to what fantasy can do to illuminate de-anthropocentric thinking. With this theoretical frame, the selected stories and their illustrations reflect on the theoretical concepts that problematise anthropocentric conclusions on the animal, the human and human-animal relationships. The notion of the animal gaze from John Berger and Jacques Derrida lays the theoretical underpinning, with which the gaze at and from the fantastical animal poses questions on human language and rationality. The proximity to the animals within the fantasy space fleshes out new modes of relating to the animal, following the concepts of Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Fantasy as a genre, meanwhile, textualises the concept of childhood and becoming-child. It also holds the potential to manifest, following a posthumanist perspective, the limit of imagination as a human specificity. The textual and visual analysis, overall, substantiates the potentiality of fantasy as a textual space for bringing about an open, new worldview that heightens a kind of self-awareness of our positionality and responsibility, as well as our approaches to the animal and nature, shedding light on who we humans really are and who we can be in future.