Posthumanism, Animism, and Sérgio Medeiros’s Pluriverse Poetics

Authors

Malcolm McNee, Smith CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2017

Publication Title

Journal of Lusophone Studies

Abstract

The works of Sérgio Medeiros are populated by a multitude of beings of diverse and often shifting orders and species. Drawing upon intersecting conceptual orientations of animal and multispecies studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism, I survey a range of interspecies encounters and worldings in Medeiros’s writing, especially his collection of poems, O choro da aranha, etc.(2013). As Medeiros pointedly draws inspiration from diverse aesthetic and philosophical traditions—from Amerindian cosmogonies and verbal arts to Japanese Zen poetry and various strains of modernist avantgardism—I trace here as a unifying feature his engagement with animist imaginings and a post- or anti-anthropocentric unsettling of human/non-human binaries and boundaries.

Keywords

Brazilian poetry, indigeneity, literature and the environment, multispecies studies, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Volume

2

Issue

2

First Page

22

Last Page

37

DOI

doi.org/10.21471/jls.v2i2.193

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2017 Malcolm McNee

Comments

Archived as published.

Recommended Citation

McNee, Malcolm, "Posthumanism, Animism, and Sérgio Medeiros’s Pluriverse Poetics" (2017). Spanish and Portuguese: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/spp_facpubs/2