AustLit

'This piece by Shaun Tan was originally written as a keynote address to the 33rd International Board on Books for Young People Congress, held in London in August 2012. The version presented here has been edited, with additional questions, by Harriet Earle. For Tan, the comics form offers the freedom and space to discuss issues of identity creation and the role of narrative in this process. As a child of mixed nationality parents, the question of how cultural and national mores have shaped his personal identity looms large in Tan’s work. He asks, “Where is the ‘train station’ through which all these cultural railways pass?” and, although no definite answer is necessarily forthcoming, uses the comics form to begin to respond to his own question. Alongside these issues of cultural migration, Tan considers the classification of his work and how the label of “children’s literature” both affects the reception and offers new freedoms. Beginning with his origins in Western Australia and the impact of his parents’ mixed ethnicities on his formative years, Tan charts his personal and artistic development and offers new insight into what comics and graphic narratives can tell us about migration, multiculturalism and curiosity.' (Publication 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of such a relationship in the age of the Anthropocene where the privileged anthropocentrism of western humanism has been replaced by an egalitarianism of species.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.' (Publication abstract)