Andrea Casals Hill
Andrea Casals Hill
Roundtable title: Imagining Interspecies Kinship, Earth’s Aliveness, and an Ecological Civilization: On the Cultural Work of Fantasy in the Anthropocene
Participants: Marek Oziewicz, Andrea Casals, Tereza Dědinová & Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Title: Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City: a cast of unexpected storytellers
Abstract: In Tales from Inner City (2018), Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan not only makes “room for beings that do not fit into [conventional] cast[s] of characters” (Haraway 2018), but crafts the imaginative space to give voice to more than twenty critters (Haraway) that narrate their own stories from their own perspective. The illustrated collection of short stories is an invitation to consider our human entanglements with other beings, but also to question our anthropocentric gaze upon them –when and if we notice them – as we read their visionary contemplations that eventually falls back upon us, returning that gaze (Derridá). Tales from Inner City and Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) are exemplary fantasy exercises that amuse the readers as they invite is us to a more meditative space, contributing to deconstructing and destabilizing our human exceptionalism myopia. After presenting and attempting to characterize Shaun Tan’s imaginative stories, I will argue that these two collections can perform by way of an antidote to our epoch’s – the Anthropocene – anthropocentrism.
Bio: Andrea Casals Hill holds a Master’s in Human Settlements and Environmental Studies and a Doctor’s degree in Literature, both from Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), where she currently conducts a 3 years research on YA dystopian narratives funded by the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID); she was also a postdoctoral fellow at UC researching on environmental awareness in Chilean picturebooks (also funded by ANID). She teaches at graduate and undergraduate programs and is co-editor of the academic journal English Studies in Latin America, all at Facultad de Letras UC. In 2019 she published Futuro esplendor: ecocrítica desde Chile (Orjikh), co-authored with Pablo Chiuminatto, and in 2022 she published Los territories de Gabriela, co-authored with Valeria Oppliger.
