Weirding the Other — Transgressing Toward Inhumanity

Abstract

This critical essay positions marginalized others as weird and inhuman others, exploring both the weirded experiences of an othered life and the potential for weird others to achieve radical alterity by relinquishing the fight for humanness, and instead finding kinship with the inhuman, and the further weird. This essay engages with seminal critical works regarding the weird, as well as contemporary fiction novels that are widely considered to demonstrate the weird, The City & the City by China Miéville, and The Ballad of Black Tom Victor LaValle. In addition, I put forth The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright and Henry Dumas’ short story, “Fon”, as illustrations of weirded marginalized experiences.