The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History

Second Language Learning and Teaching

This book brings together well-researched essays by established scholars as well as forward-thinking aspiring researchers to study how literary and non-literary texts highlight 'animal presence' and explore non-anthropocentric relationships between human and animals. To be precise, it offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric Literary and Cultural texts. The contributors take positions that put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by considering the animal presence in texts seriously. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied interdisciplinary and theoretically-informed perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts beyond geographical and period boundaries, and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "Animal turn" for the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers some fresh perspectives of Posthumanist theory, so that we can revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book will constitute a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed; and they explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics. This book does more than simply decentering the 'human' by bringing animals onto the center of critical discourse and challenging the anthropocentric hierarchical relationship, which are the basis of Posthumanist readings. It also highlights the theoretical intersections between Animal Theory and other relevant cultural theories, that is the latest advancement in this field. The volume is divided into four main sections

Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad, 2017

The End of the Animal--Literary and Cultural Animalities

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009

Jodey Castricano frames her fascinating edited anthology, Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, as an intervention into cultural studies, or more precisely, a challenge to cultural studies scholars. "Simply put," she reflects, "the aim of this collection is to include the non-human animal question as part of the ethical purview of cultural studies" (7). Specifically, the text attempts to demonstrate the relevance of the question to a field that has conventionally critiqued the human subject, centrally interrogating the ways in which the traditionally unmarked category is, in fact, particularly constructed through power-laden gendered, racialized, sexualized and classed discourses. The text illuminates the limits of cultural studies which, despite its scholarly and political impact, nonetheless reproduces a politics of exclusion in regard to non-human animals. Such disavowal helps reproduce an essential border against which "the human" of the humanist tradition can be sustained. As Cary Wolfe notes (2003),

Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis/ The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History

Journal of Religious Ethics, 2014

This essay examines several recent contributions to the growing literature on animal ethics from Christian perspectives. I categorize the four books under review in one of three ways depending on the scholars' methodological points of departure: (1) a reconstruction of the place of other animals in Christian history through a selective retrieval of texts and practices; (2) an identification of a key Christian ethical principle; and (3) a reconsideration of foundational doctrines of systematic theology. On the premise that social ethicists are interested in not only understanding the world, but also changing it, I observe that these authors have offered different answers to the following three questions: (1) whether the theoretical basis for reform is ultimately grounded upon notions of human sameness or difference with other animals; (2) whether scholar-activists should emphasize logic over passion or values over interests (or vice versa) in their calls for transformation; and (3) whether moral motivation for their targeted audiences is best served by reliance upon secular argumentation and interdisciplinary research or upon the distinctive claims of revelation and other tradition-specific norms. I conclude by offering my own thoughts about which approaches might prove more effective than others.

Since the field of Animal Studies has opened up, the human and social sciences, in North American and in Europe, have developed an almost exclusive interest in the human side of this subject, examining human uses, practices and most particularly human representations of animals, in part because of a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s.1 After having used these approaches myself many times, I feel they are now insufficient because they have created and maintained a blind spot at their center: that of animals as feeling, acting, responding beings, who have their own initiatives and reactions. Scholars have had much to say about humans, and very little to say about animals, who remain absent or are transformed into simple pretexts, pure objects on which human representations, knowledge, practices are exercised without consequence. In this sense, the history of animals that has developed over the last thirty years is in reality a human history of animals where these latter have very little place as real beings. Looking at Real Animals We must move away from this approach rooted in a Western cultural worldview that has impoverished the dialectical theme of humans and animals, reducing it to a field with one magnetic pole (humans) and a single directional pull (humans towards animals) thus forgetting or dismissing much of its reality and complexity. We must look more closely at the influence of animals in their relationships with humans, at their role as actual actors, in light of ethology's growing insistence-at least for certain species and an increasing number of them-on the behaviors of each animal as actor, individual, and even person; on the cognitive capacities of animal individuals; and on the sociability and cultures of animal groups-and thus revealing the inadequacies of purely human approaches. Similarly, historical documents show, when this information is not rejected as anecdotal, that humans have seen or foreseen and assessed animal interests and have reacted, acted, and imagined as a result. We must leave the human side, moving to the animal side,2 in order to better understand human/animal relationships but also in order to better know these living actor-beings who deserve to be studied in and of themselves. This means that the definition of history must be broadened, abandoning the too restricted definition of "a science of humans in time,"3 in which many historians have become entrenched. This definition is not inviolable; it has been historically constructed, from Fustel de Coulanges to Bloch, with two events being of particular importance: first, the formation of the human sciences as a means to studying the human independently of the natural sciences that had a certain monopoly on knowledge; and second, the broadening of the human sciences during the 1900s to 1930s to include the study of all aspects of the human and not just those related to the political. It is now time to redefine history as the "science of all living beings in time" and to become interested in these living beings' evolutions, at the very least in those evolutions that have been recorded in diverse historical documents and that could be the object of study for a historian versed in the field. At the same time, we must go beyond the cultural approach-note that I did not say abandon this approach-that tends to reduce the human and social sciences to an exercise in deconstruction and close examination of social discourses, and thus arrive at representations that are considered to be the only observable reality. This work is necessary; but the success of cultural approaches has transformed an essential preliminary step into an ultimate finality. We must once again be searching for realities using the concept of "situated knowledges"4 to validate a building of knowledge that is not ignorant of, nor taken in by, its context of elaboration. We need to apply this to the diverse human actors who have used, become close to, and observed animals, and who have become witnesses to animals in varying degrees using observation and representation. We need to take into account the conditions under which these discourses were produced so that when we bring together, test and critique information that is partial-in the sense of being incomplete and biased-we arrive at some sense of that reality. We must also abandon the culturally constructed Western notion of animals as passive beings and see them instead as feeling, responding, adapting, and suffering. In other words, we need to start with the hypothesis that animals are not only actors that influence humans, but that they are also individuals with their own specific set of characteristics, they are even people with their own behaviors, in short, they are subjects. These ideas are no longer taboo5 and should be tested in the field while leaving room for some flexibility in how the definitions are used. We must refrain from starting with (too-well) defined concepts, whose reality we hope to prove, because then we simply configure these concepts according to the form we know best, that is, the human form, or more precisely the European human form at a given time, and once again we fall into the trap of ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism. We must realize that our concepts are always situated: in time, as historians show us; in space, as ethnologists point out6; and amongst living beings as ethologists are beginning to demonstrate.7 Western culture has defined the subject as thinking, self-conscious, and as having recourse to conscious choices and strategies, all the while forgetting that this definition-that it takes as the definition-is in fact a situated, inferred version of the human. Moreover, this underlying portrait includes a set of philosophical implications that place humanity at the top as absolute reference, just as the Western world placed itself at the top in the past. When one clings to this definition while observing animals, one uses a discourse of domination as a tool of investigation, arriving at the already-drawn conclusion that there are no subjects among animals. It is when more supple definitions are adopted that one can envisage the concept of animals as subjects or come to a conclusion even if not all the parameters are met. We must remember that we have just barely begun to search for these parameters in the animal world; if we find that these parameters lack some consistency, it may be that we need to consider a greater plurality of meanings. Experimenting with key concepts does not mean falling into the trap of anthropomorphism, just as attributing flexibility and suppleness to concepts under investigation does not mean sliding into vague impressionism. What such an approach entails is a form of critical anthropomorphism that watches with curiosity, asks difficult questions, tries out critical concepts, observes without prejudice, and avoids an already conclusive anthropomorphism that foists humanity on animality and thus denies their specificities. It also entails being as open as possible to the potential capabilities of animals, many of whom we still do not know very well. Finally, this approach means seeing the diverse expressions of different faculties in order to adopt wider definitions of them. This is already being done for physical abilities (we know that many species do not see the world as we do but we do not deduce from this that they can not see), but we remain reticent when it comes to doing the same for mental abilities because these are what allow us to value ourselves over animals. This is not a question of mixing up all living beings, but rather it is a question of appreciating the diversity of all and the richness of each one. This means abandoning the shallow, puerile, distorted dualism that opposes humans to animals and in which philosophies and religions have trapped us for the last 2500 years. First, this dualism is shallow because it opposes a concrete species, the human, to a concept, the animal, that does not exist in the fields nor in the streets and that is nothing more than a category masking the reality of a multiplicity of species that are each very different. Second, this dualism is puerile because it poses the question of a difference

Annals of Science, 2013

In 2005 a small group of academics gathered at the University of Western Australia for a modest yet highly significant interdisciplinary conference focused on scholarship in the emerging field of human-animal studies. A critical mass of academics from the University of Tasmania attended that first conference and pledged to host a second human-animal studies conference two years later. True to their word a second human-animal studies conference was held in Hobart, Australia, in 2007. The organisers called the second conference "Considering Animals" and the book under review here is a compilation of papers presented at that conference. The first striking feature of the book Considering Animals (hardback version), is the artwork on the dust jacket (Figure 1). While some may not pay a book's dust jacket much heed, I view Considering Animals stunning cover-art as quite a coup. In an age of publishing rationalisation and belt-tightening, I imagine that the editors must have fought hard for permission to display a colour image on the book's cover; and for the inclusion of such a large number of pictures throughout the book. If this is the case, then their persistence paid off. Not only is Yvette Watt's cover-art beautiful and thought provoking in and of itself, it also serves to remind readers that this book is dealing with a highly interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Human-animal studies is not only about words. It is about images, representation, art and interpretation. One of the most noteworthy features of the biannual Australian Animal Studies Group, and the Minding Animals, conferences is the extent to which visual and other creative artists contribute to the field. With the use of such powerful cover-art the editors give effect to the contribution made by creative arts to the emerging discipline of human-animal studies. The book opens with a forward by well-known ecologist Marc Becoff and an introduction by two of the book's editors: Carol Freeman and Elizabeth Leane. The remainder of the book consists of 14 papers by (often prominent) academics, all of who presented at the 2007 University of Tasmania "Considering Animals" conference.

Centering Animals in Latin American History (Duke University Press, 2013), 2013

Representing animals, 2002