The Invitation of a Liminal Lover: The Human Animal Trapped between Labs and Waste(is)lands

Abstract

I offer a posthuman examination of the racial triangulation among a Pacific Islander adoptee, Vi, his White Father, Norton, and Norton’s Asian American queer lover, Dr. Kubodera, in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. The novel narrates the life of Norton, a Nobel Laureate known for discovering an eternal effect after consuming a kind of turtle from the fictional Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu yet later imprisoned for molesting his adopted children from that island. Building on the existing literature focusing on the confrontation between the neocolonial White Father and the Pacific adoptee reduced to a lab dog, I introduce Dr. Kubodera as the third term beyond the binary. He mediates between not only animals (or animalized racial others) and (white) humans as a model minority citizen but also organic beings and inorganic (is)lands /environment as a queer lab researcher escaping from normative human institutes. Following his invitation toward animalness and (is)lands, I argue that postcolonial and ecological critiques against the parallel sexual abuse of Vi and ecological exploitation of Vi’s native (is)land Ivu’ivu should not end with recruiting Vi into humanity. Rather, I envision a multiple self beyond the animal/human and human/environment binaries by exploring Giorgio Agamben’s notion of umwelt through Katerina Teaiwa’s elaboration of Islander’s self definition in relation to their (is)lands. It is by assuming such a multiple self that is simultaneously an animal, a human and a piece of land that we shall share the suffering with others across the racial and species boundaries.