Respect the power of the beast: an ecocritical analysis into interspecies relationships in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal studies
• biopolitics
• ecocriticism
• natureculture
• Shaun Tan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was done without financial support from any funding body.