Kinship between “companion species”: A posthuman refiguration of the immigrant condition in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Abstract

Academy Award-winning author and illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2007 graphic novel The Arrival poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience. Tan creates an ostensibly alienating and unfamiliar terrain which may be described as a “posthuman landscape”. Instead of presenting the traditional native-versus-immigrant framework typical of diasporic stories, Tan chooses to delineate an inter-species relationship where the immigrant man is assisted by a native animal. An odd-looking creature becomes the protagonist’s guide in the new country and assists him in a myriad of ways throughout the story. This article explores the implications of such a relationship in the age of the Anthropocene where the privileged anthropocentrism of western humanism has been replaced by an egalitarianism of species. Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “companion species” and Rosi Braidotti’s recent articulation of the posthuman, it suggests a connection between the posthuman and the postcolonial in Tan’s text and thereby explores the significance of a non-human Other coming to the assistance of the immigrant Other within the space of a posthuman, postcolonial world. Thus the article seeks to study the reconfiguration of otherness in the face of incommensurable difference, and articulate its implications for diasporic thought.

Keywords:

• Shaun Tan
• diaspora
• companion species
• posthuman
• Donna Haraway
• graphic novel

Notes

1. This term was introduced by Mary Louise Pratt ([1992] 2008), and given a posthuman take more than a decade later by Donna Haraway (2008).

2. Karan Barad (2007) uses this term.

3. All images used in this article are taken from Shaun Tan’s website www.shauntan.net and their use does not require the publisher’s permission.

4. “Worldling” and “becoming with” are terms used by Donna Haraway in her writing to signify the multispecies entanglements and relations that are forged when disparate species come together in work and in play. She uses these terms especially in the context of dog training.

5. Repetition in the original.

6. This is taken from an article written by Tan himself: www.shauntan.net/books/the-arrival.html#anchor.

7. Image, entitled “Immigrants spot the Statue of Liberty as they arrive in New York Harbor”, taken from http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/stop2.htm.