Hybriditales: Posthumanizing Calvino

Conceptualized by theorists such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Roberto Marchesini, Bruno Latour, and Cary Wolfe, posthumanism is a vision that rejects the essentialist separation between the human and the nonhuman, and, quite like Calvino’s narratives, emphasizes their hybridizations, co-operative configurations, and active interplay. The essay examines Calvino’s works via the posthumanist lens of a “relational ontology”. Tracing posthumanist motives in Calvino’s work, a particular attention is drawn to Palomar and The Cosmicomics, here considered as the major expressions of his attempt to build stories that move the narrative focus “past the human,” coalescing in a hybrid world of matters, forms, beings, and signs.