Tana Jean Welch, Advancing Medical Posthumanism through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) xv + 200 pp. £99.99. Hb: ISBN 978-3-031-49887-9
Tana Jean Welch inhabits a space where poetry, posthumanism, and medicine converge to show how poetry can provide a posthumanist perspective that activates an ethical understanding of what it means to be ‘human’ in the world. Drawing on theorists like Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, and Cary Wolfe, Welch challenges humanism’s constructions that ‘mark some lives as more important than others…. have long dictated what counts as human, as well as who and what is worth saving’ (14). Instead, Welch emphasizes embodied co-constitution, co-emergence, and values of ‘kinship, mutual accountability, becoming with, shared vulnerability, and posthuman subjectivity’ (15, italics in original).
Over six chapters, Welch considers a selection of poetic works by Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Brian Teare, Sam Sax, and Franny Choi, emphasizing important posthuman values that describe our existence and becoming in the world with all other beings (living and nonliving). This review will focus on aspects of trans-corporeality, vulnerability, and heteronomy. Trans-corporeality describes the porous boundaries between humans and other beings that make the consequences of our intra-acting practices and shared existence unpredictable (31). Because different bodies operate within ‘health-producing or health-diminishing assemblages’ (30), Welch calls for a ‘cultural shift’ (30) that sees health as ‘multispecies entanglement—as an emergent expression of relations across diverse bodies, signs, and systems’ (30). Such practices, according to Welch, would enact posthumanist ethics that recognize our corporeal vulnerability or ‘what a body can [or can’t] do physically, psychologically, and socially…within the landscape of western medicine’ (135). Welch warns against the ‘dangerous divides in medicine: mind / body, whole / fractured, ill / healthy, patient / doctor, subject / object, science / humanities, nature / culture, and autonomy / dependence’ (135). Instead, Welch’s posthuman perspective allows her reading of poetry to unsettle these divides by revealing political, historical, imperialist, economic, etc. valences that haunt and (re)shape medicine and see humans, not as autonomous creatures, but as heteronomous in their interdependency with other creatures. By emphasizing aspects of ‘kinship, mutual accountability, becoming with, shared vulnerability, and posthuman subjectivity’ (15), Welch unsettles the tension between autonomy and heteronomy.
Welch examines aspects of trans-corporeality in Julian Spahr’s collection, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, where she contemplates the ‘unpredictable material agencies’ (31) that emerged post 9/11 attacks. For Spahr, an ‘ill-health assemblage’ (31) that ‘comprises myriad material, physical, psychological, social, and cultural relations and affects that intra-act with a body during an ill-health experience’ (134-135) emerges in the space of the 9/11 attacks. This assemblage constitutes ‘all the material agents that make up the air we breathe … including sulfur, titanium, nickel, and minute silicon particles’ (3), the U.S military actions in different countries including Hawai’i where Spahr was living (37), George Bush’s decision to attack Iraq, the emerging rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ (3), and the polluting effect of the collapsing WTC towers on the lungs (3). Welch explains how, for Spahr, the ‘lungs’ become a site where health, politics, imperialism, and more intra-act and (re)shape our embodied relation to the place / country (America), enacting a ‘politics of location’ (37) that prompts us to rethink our subjectivity as embodied beings and ‘what it means [to be a] part of the country that bombs a lot of other countries’ (37). Chapter three is also grounded in the racial violence that followed 9/11 events. Welch explains how Claudia Rankin’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely contemplates practices like the ‘excessive use of [prescription] antidepressants’ (86) in America, the consequent rise in the number of liver failure cases, and ‘the media’s refusal to engage intellectually and critically with American political policy’ (86). As an example of an ill-health assemblage, these intra-acting practices reveal a dangerous hierarchy that prioritizes sales (capitalism) over knowledge and care. Here, the ‘liver’ becomes a site (re)configured by intra-acting medical, political, and (anti)racial practices.
Chapters four, five, and six rethink aspects like citizenship, vulnerability, and marginalized bodies, respectively. In chapter five, Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution imagines a new community and invents a Creole language, which is ‘an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects’ (105) to unsettle language barriers, promote ‘plurilingualism’ (118), and create the possibility of a shift in the dominant hierarchical discourse (116). In such a community, Hong suggests, citizenship is shaped through understanding that the individual’s well-being is dependent ‘on the well-being of the whole’ (129) through time and space. Welch explains that, for Hong, this requires ‘ending capitalism’ (129) which is founded upon the ‘valuing and devaluing of certain lives over others’ (129). In chapter five, Brian’s Teare’s poems draw on his personal experiences. Empty Form documents Teare’s suffering through an undiagnosed illness. Welch explains how Teare’s work demonstrates a corporeal vulnerability that entangles patients with other beings like physicians, viruses, our own changing bodily cells, and the ecosystem. Recognizing our common vulnerability, Welch contends, could be the foundation for ‘non-violent solutions to global problems like human exploitation and climate change’ (138). Finally, in chapter six, Sam Sax and Fanny Choi challenge ‘historically constituted’ (157) ideas of the body that dehumanized women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people (155). Sax’s Madness and Choi’s Soft Science respectively use the figuration of the monster and the cyborg to defy classification, unsettle binary thinking, and demonstrate the fluidity of identity.
Welch’s book might seem dense especially for readers unfamiliar with posthuman philosophies. Nevertheless, it is an important and timely book that problematizes how we relate to violent events around us. Her note on vulnerability, ‘to be honest about our material vulnerability and our knotted relations is to realize that what’s happening elsewhere, is actually happening here, to all of us’ (168), reminds us that we have a responsibility to reject complicity and to rethink our subjectivity as part of a global ill-health assemblage that constitutes bodies (human and nonhuman), genocidal practices, and a climate crisis.
Shahira A. Hathout, Peterborough Ontario, Trent University
