ABSTRACT
The chapter studies Karen Tei Yamashita's novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, through the lens of critical posthumanism. Postulating that the right to be human is essential to any discussion of human rights, Barco asks how to reconcile the human subject's relation to nature in a transnational world, where nonbiodegradable waste produced by human industry becomes earth, is later rendered a new organic superproduct, and is then used to construct a new material reality, including redefining and reconstructing the human body, itself. Much of Barco's essay comes to terms with Yamashita's esthetic choice to personify plastic, and to imagine a world in which Kazumasa and his ball share a vitalist materialist posthuman identity. Yamashita's plastic metaphor makes visible how ecological conservation and Indigenous rights in the Amazon are under threat given the rise of populism under President Jair Bolsonaro in contemporary Brazil. What this helps us to consider, Barco argues, is not only the danger in disappearing the human subject to which rights attach, but also of the power of a critical posthumanist reading to reveal the exclusionary processes of dehumanization. Reimagining the posthuman in terms of becoming, she concludes, allows us to humanize the transnatural world and strengthen our ethical responsibility to it and its guardians.
