Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World ed. by Anita Tarr and Donna R. White (review)

This collection begins by posing the deceptively simple question, "What does it mean to be human?" (ix). In their introduction, Anita Tarr and Donna R. White make it clear that in their view, to be human means to be posthuman. They define the posthumanist position as one that rejects human exceptionalism and boundaried individualism in favor of interconnectedness with other species and the environment (xi). Because of this openness, the liminal space of adolescence, already a complicated developmental stage of exploring identity boundaries, is particularly ripe for posthumanist study. In addition to the introduction, the collection consists of four parts, each of which takes on a different concern of post-humanism to "reveal how writers for young adults have their typing fingers on the pulse of new thinking" (xxi).

Part 1, "Networked Subjectivities," presents oppositional views to posthuman subjectivity in young adult fiction. Mathieu Donner, in "'Open to Me. Maybe I Can Help': Networked Consciousness and Ethical Subjectivity in Octavia E. Butler's Mind of My Mind," rejects conceptions of posthumanist subjectivity that rely on traditional epistemological models of labeling self and other. Rather, he argues that Butler's work "exposes the inherent process of exclusion that dominates any attempt at classification and labeling, including those intrinsic to posthumanist thought" (23). In the second essay of this section, "Information Disembodiment Takeover: Anxieties of Technological Determinism in Contemporary Coming-of-Age Narratives," Shannon Hervey argues that books such as #16thingsithoughtweretrue, The Future of Us, Feed, and The Unwritten present negative views of posthuman subjectivity through their depictions of social media dependency.

Part 2, "The Monstrous Other: Posthuman Bodies," is the largest section, containing five contributions that focus on cyborg, hybrid, and clone embodiments. First, Angela S. Insenga's "Once upon a Cyborg: Cinder as Posthuman Fairytale" provides a close reading of Cinder that shows that the original fairy tale of "Cinderella" was already consumed with issues of embodiment and that Meyer's revision uses posthuman embodiment of the cyborg Cinder to articulate the body itself as "a text in the process of revision" (66). Ferne Merrylees also discusses Cinder in "The Adolescent Posthuman: Reimagining Body Image and Identity in Marissa Meyer's Cinder and Julianna Baggott's Pure." Merrylees finds that the posthuman body is a battleground in both of these novels, providing readers with ways of exploring body image and identity creation within the complex systems of which they are a part (93). In "'Those Maps Would Have to Change': Remapping the Borderlines of the Posthuman Body in Leigh Bardugo's Grisha Trilogy," Maryna Matlock examines the illusion of borders of the body that demarcate "the human(e) from the monstrous" (97) and argues that the posthumanist approach allows for the transcendence of a binarism that positions the Other as monstrous alongside the human. "'Superpowers Don't Always Make You a Superhero': Posthuman Possibilities in Michael Grant's Gone Series," by Patricia Kennon, also explores the boundaries of the monstrous, although for Kennon, the Gone series "ultimately asserts a conservative humanist view regarding what constitutes being human and privileges conservative concepts of normality, adult authority, and hegemonic power regimes" (118). Finally, White's "Posthumanism in The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium" discusses clone embodiment to illustrate how the clone, Matt, is posthuman in both the biotechnological sense and the philosophical sense (145). White argues that Nancy Farmer's texts suggest that in posthumanism's move away from the binaries of humanism, the humanist self must also be part of the posthumanist assemblage (153).

Part 3, "Posthumanism in Climate Fiction," focuses on the posthuman's relation to the environment. "Coming of Age and the Other: Critical Posthumanism in Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities," by Lars Schmeink, takes a critical posthumanist approach that explores "zoe-centric subjectivity," which is "concerned with the interconnectedness of all life," including ecosystems...