A Posthumanist Reading of Herman Melville’s “The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles”

The narrator in Herman Melville’s “The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles” leads the reader to a posthumanist world where human beings are no longer in a dominant position while nonhuman beings gain their agency. The exotic isles challenge the anthropocentric sense of temporality and defy the validity of human knowledge. The descent of anthropocentrism is accompanied by the ascent of posthumanism, which undermines the human sense of mastery through oceanic agency and geological agency. The posthumanist accentuation of the longevity of tortoises and the endurance of rocks forms a sharp contrast to the ephemerality of human existence. Melville weaves these elements together to tackle the anthropocentric hubris that resulted from the rapid socio-economic development in the nineteenth century. The exposure of human vulnerability in the unconquerable Enchanted Isles implicitly expresses Melville’s criticism of anthropocentrism and thus provokes human beings to reconsider their position in the vast universe.