大话西游之悟空 [A posthumanist account of becoming: an immigrant teacher’s journey to the West]

Becoming-River is a posthumanist, post-experimental project that offers a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technology for encountering ontological sense-events. Engaging with semiotic practices, this article extends beyond Asian philosophies and world literature to interrogate the tension between the actual and the imaginary—especially as it pertains to cultural representation, identity, belonging, and the situated encounters of migration. Occupying the standpoint of an immigrant schoolteacher entering the West and the academy, I use canoeing as a central event to explore a sense of political depression embedded within academic life—while also tracing the emergence of hope and insight. By foregrounding embodied interplay and affective engagement as central modes of inquiry, this article advances discussions on psychological well-being within the context of place-making. Through the entanglement of time, place, people, and material things, this project offers creative ways of understanding the world and the lives in which the posthuman subject emerges.