Posthumanist Sentimentality

Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird (2018) fuses speculative fiction’s project of cognitive estrangement with sentimental literature’s project of dispersing ethically charged affective experience. The resulting mode of narrative, what I term posthumanist sentimentality, estranges readers from established forms of both thought and feeling, opening them to models of care that operate in more-than-human worlds. Entangling the traumatic account of the eponymous posthuman creature with the romantic history of the humans who made her, The Strange Bird highlights both the dangers of anthropocentrism and the values of radical ontological vulnerability when learning to witness for and with posthuman and post-traumatic subjects.