“No Longer Just Human”: The Posthuman Child in Beth Revis’s Across the Universe Trilogy

Abstract

This article explores posthumanism in Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy (2011–13). As dystopian young adult fiction, the trilogy considers how the posthuman turn can offer ways of interrogating and disrupting conventional notions of human selfhood that adhere to a fixed Western Cartesian embodiment. In Revis’s vision, by spatio-temporally relocating the next generation of citizens, posthumanism’s liberatory potential enables a cosmopolitical transgression of static boundaries in favor of heterogeneous diversity. These adolescent protagonists offer new possibilities through a trajectory that charts the unlimited cartography of endless becoming.