Posthuman Southeast Asia

Reviews / Votes

The pathbreaking volume Posthuman Southeast Asia: Ecocritical Entanglements Across Species Boundaries, edited by Ignasi Ribo, offers a rare insight into ways in which various literary and cultural texts across Southeast Asia negotiate the relatively new terrain of posthumanism through an ecocritical lens. The book is unique in thoughtfully combining Anglo-American theory with analysis of hitherto unavailable narratives accessed from native Southeast Asian languages. By doing so, it offers native and insider perspectives on ways in which indigenous worldviews on the more-than-human world merge with contemporary cutting-edge theories.
The chapters range from an analysis of narratives surrounding the unique fruit 'durian,' endemic to the region and a phyto-investigation of Indonesian poems on the banana and the papaya fruits, to exploring the animation landscape of Southeast Asia as posthuman ecoscapes and discussing animals and performance. These are only a few examples of the exciting new scholarship that the volume offers. All these converge to present the enriching developments that are occurring all over Southeast Asia in the field of posthuman ecology. This is a 'must-read' critical volume that opens a whole new world of academic insights that augment yet challenge, contravene yet support Western perspectives by offering unique insights from ancient and modern Asian traditions. -- Chitra Sankaran, National University of Singapore Humans are not the center of everything. The book's discursive use of critical posthumanism reminds us human readers that our planet is shared and must be shared equitably. The essays' engagement with posthumanist issues in Southeast Asian literature and culture attests to the region's growing interest in what lies beyond human. -- Lily Rose Tope, University of the Philippines Diliman