Posthumanism, Animism, and Sérgio Medeiros's Pluriverse Poetics

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.