Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism

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

At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentioned the native are zoological terms.

2015

Lo sguardo – rivista di filosofia, 2017

The so-called 'animal turn' of the past couple of decades brought about a new focus on animals and animality that traverses the whole spectrum of the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Certainly part of a wider cultural phenomenon – the crisis of humanism in late twentieth century –, it has in turn influenced and transformed posthumanist thought itself, not only enabling it to probe the boundaries of the 'human', but also partially reorienting it towards questions of immanence, embodiment, affects, and providing a more marked ethical and political impulse. On the other hand, the encounter with posthumanism brought to the new discipline of Animal Studies the awareness of the limits of the traditional, still very humanist approaches to animal ethics, and of the necessity of an overcoming of the humanist paradigm, of a new theoretical and methodological approach.

Once marginal, knowledge that many other species share characteristics hitherto thought restricted to humans, including language, tool-use and consciousness, is now commonplace across many scientific fields, from ethology to biosemiotics to neurophysiology. 1 Such new scientific understandings of nonhuman life have been one important inspiration for posthuman theorists aiming to replace ontologies of division with those of connection and relative difference. Animal sexual selection, for example, is much more than an instrumental process. As theorized by Elizabeth Grosz, animal courtship and sex provide not merely the means for reproduction and genetic survival, but are playful, exuberant, creative articulations of the active, forward-moving force of life. 2 Similarly, Brian Massumi outlines how the play of young animals shows their 'capacity to mobilize the possible.' 3 The wolf cub nipping the ear of another wolf cub enacts a ludic gesture, saying 'this is play.' But for the cub to learn how to be an adult wolf, the play bite must also stand in for a real, violent bite. The distinction between violent-bite and play-bite is not simply that one is training for adult wolf-hood and one is childish play. Rather, both ways of biting operate in a zone of indiscernibility without the specific differences of either being erased. The paradox of play is its 'as if-ness.' For Massumi, when animals play, 'they are preparatorily enacting human capacities.' 4 In this vitalist mode, posthumanism places the human in a continuum with other animals, connected through both lines of descent and contemporary ecological relations. Animals become worthy subjects of academic attention in the humanities, while humans become creaturely beings.

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),

Proceedings of the “Posthumanism and the Ecological Crisis” Conference, 2023

This paper examines Samit Basu’s speculative fiction Turbulence (2012) to situate postcolonial posthumanism within the novel and to deconstruct the concepts of speciesism and ableism. Turbulence depicts how four hundred and three passengers travelling on a British Airways flight from London to Delhi fall asleep and wake up to find themselves possessing superhuman abilities. Among those passengers are Sher and Mukesh, who possess powers that enable them to transform themselves into animals at their own will. The boundaries collapse one after the other, whether it is the human-posthuman, body-mind, or even human-animal. The complex relationship between the external animalisation of Sher and Mukesh and their thoughts and emotions that remain recognisably human suggests that these boundaries might not be as rigid and impenetrable as is generally assumed. They abandon the centrality of the human body and choose animal shapes to initiate changes in being and erode any binaries, separations, and priority accorded rationalities. The animal is no longer seen as the other in the posthuman context and is part of an environment that is non-hierarchical. The essay establishes this along the lines of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of animals as individuals with personalities who block their appropriation into victimisation discourses. This elevation of animals to the status of ‘individuals’ frees them from their status as Other and denies the humans their species supremacy. This paper uses postcolonial and posthuman theories to demonstrate how posthumanism crossovers with empowerment and colonial affective practices. Using a postcolonial posthumanist framework, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of human-animal relations.