The Interplay of Human and Nonhuman Realities in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia

Abstract

In this article I discuss the interplay between human and nonhuman realities in Shaun Tan’s collection of stories Tales from Outer Suburbia. Although recent discussions of children’s literature take into account the mesh of human and nonhuman elements in several classic and contemporary examples of children’s literature, studies addressing Tan’s works tend to focus more on their political and social aspects, ignoring thus their intense engagement with the nonhuman. By discussing the interconnectedness between human and nonhuman realities in Tan’s stories, I argue that children’s literature can be a powerful tool to engage with debates in the posthumanities concerning our relation to nonhuman animals and to objects. Moreover, whereas such theoretical debates generally tend to keep separate analyses of human-animal and human-objects interaction, I show that literary work such as Tan’s can help us draw connections between the two areas of inquiry and thus offer new directions for philosophical and scientific research.