Abstract
ABSTRACT The picturebook Tales from the Inner City (2018), created by Shaun Tan, encompasses various surreal mysteries about humans and animals. His stories represent a sociopolitical intervention, beyond the conventional purpose of animal/object representation serving humanistic allegories and show animals as autonomous beings finding their long-ignored place in the world. These imaged stories stretch literature’s ability at interactions between humans and animals. Tan’s experiment with new styles of reading calls for a reconfigured rhetoric. An interdisciplinary approach of ecocriticism and biopolitics creates sufficient grounds to examine the boundaries of what is human/animal. It questions the centrality of humans in literature. This article uses the biopolitical readings of Mario Ortiz-Robles as he moves beyond allegorical readings of animal tropes, the companion species of Donna Haraway as she observes animal/human relations, and Frank Serafini’s methods at interpreting visual aspects of picturebooks. This paper looks at the selected tales – ‘Fox’, ‘Eagle’, ‘Hippo’, ‘Lungfish’, and ‘Frog’ to examine how Shaun Tan transforms humans in body and dreams through forceful encounters with animals, thus repositioning the power dynamic in human/animal relations.
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