Humanised Environments for Dehumanised Humans in Yūichi Yokoyama's Travel

This chapter discusses the manga Travel by author Yüichi Yokoyama as a cultural manifestation of the Anthropocene-a proposed new geological epoch resulting from transformations of anthropogenic origin to the Earth’s systems. The work undermines Western distinctions between nature and culture by (1) displaying landscapes as thoroughly engineered assemblages of landforms, plant cover, and infrastructures and (2) placing human characters and nonhuman features as equivalent subjects of representation. The humanised environment creates an ecological uncanny that is addressed as an exploration of a theoretical nonhuman perspective, somewhere from “outside” the anthropocentric gaze. Concomitantly, the manga represents humans as mechanised components of a nonhuman process-a flux-in which no intentionality or teleology is discernible. These features will be analysed in light of Steven Shaviro’s concept of accelerationist aesthetics, particularly how Travel addresses emerging posthuman and nonhuman shifts in culture brought about by perceivable ecological deterioration and dehumanising economic processes. These themes are present symptomatically, as reflections of contemporary quotidian life, in ways that both comply with and dissent from dominant norms and discourses on environmental change.