Posthuman New York: Ground Zero of the Anthropocene

Ahuja calls our attention to the ways that environmentalists, artists, writers, and ecocritics have deployed the idea of “the Anthropocene” in order to critique human-caused climate change and environmental destruction. While this critique might be urgently needed, Ahuja reveals how it also tends to rely upon a universalized and essentialized construction of “the human” that glosses over major differences between various human groups, in which less privileged people are both less culpable and more vulnerable in relation to the dramatic effects that climate change will increasingly have on the planet. Exloring a range of texts emerging after 9/11, from the paintings of Alexis Rockman to Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, Junot Diaz’s “Monstro”, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Ahuja calls for paying more attention to what he calls “the human of precarious futures,” a figure that seems necessary for dramatizing the dangerous coming results of climate change, but one that also risks flattening out all the ways that racism and inequality and injustice distinguish human groups today and might continue to do so into the future.

Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction

Wolfe’s chapter takes up the question of species extinction in relation to a particular example, that of the Passenger Pigeon. Focusing primarily upon an art installation titled “Requiem: Ectopistes Migratorius” by Michael Pestel, Wolfe explores the poetics of extinction that are exemplified in the various elements of Pestel’s work, as well as related issues, from the technology and mass killings that led to the extinction of the species to the present discussion of “de-extinction” projects stemming from revived DNA. Installations such as Pestel’s help us to recognize species as “spaces” rather than codes or scripts, in which systems and environments—like the performances and performativity within the installation itself—continue to evolve and change.

Looking the Beast in the Eye: Re-animating Meat in Nordic and British Food Culture

Syse defends Nordic and British chefs, cookbooks, television shows, and food magazines advocating for meat-eaters to face up to the animals that must be killed before they are eaten. Slaughtering one’s own pig and eating all parts of an animal from nose to tail, for example, are put forth as better ways of “respecting” animals, and as a critique of industrial food production and factory farms. In this kind of food culture, looking back nostalgically to times when people were more likely to live on farms and slaughter their own animals is seen as a way of finding “authenticity” in the modern world. This desire to “re-animate” one’s meat can construct traditional forms of masculinity and gender roles, but in Syse’s analysis it is more important to focus on the stated intentions of the chefs and writers at hand, which includes condemning the distance between carnivores and the real lives of the animals they consume.

The Nature of Birds, Women, and Cancer: Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge and When Women Were Birds

Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end of life. Animality is invoked in the texts as a model for constructing supposedly the right way to approach a diagnosis of cancer, suggesting what kind of death could be seen as a good one, if that might ever be possible. Williams’s two memoirs are linked by the ways they use birds and the discourse of what should be considered “natural” to explain when or how to resist not only death, but also patriarchal gender norms, imperialist U.S. aggression in the “War on Terror”, atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site, and the destruction of environments from Utah to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lundblad’s emphasis is on how constructions of birds can naturalize problematic human discourses, but the chapter also points toward the ways that these essentialized constructions are limiting for nonhuman animals as well.​

Introduction: The End of the Animal – Literary and Cultural Animalities

The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.

Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals: Zoophilia in Law and Literature

Garrard explores the idea and practice of zoophilia in recent legal and cultural discourses, with particular attention to relevant literary texts and films. He reads representations of animals in human sexual contexts not as allegories but as reflections upon interspecies sexuality, tracking examples that he believes dramatize provocative interspecies sexual encounters: David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, Robinson Devor’s Zoo, and Marian Engel’s Bear. Rather than reading the literary texts as allegories, Garrard insists upon reading the animals as animals, with particular attention to the narrative strategies that make it harder to see them as either defenseless creatures without agency and in need of protection, or as simply hypersexualized and masculinized bundles of instincts.

Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Tsai explores Ghosh’s novel in relation to intersecting histories of both human and nonhuman violence. Set in the tide country of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and India, the novel dramatizes vulnerable forms of life, including endangered river dolphins and dispossessed people, threatened not only by storms and floods stemming from global warming but also by the neo-imperialist violence of the state. Tsai’s reading of the novel draws upon the concept of the Umwelt from Jakob von Uexküll, as well as the fields of animality studies, biopolitics, systems theory, and phenomenology, in order to argue for what he calls a “critical bioregionalism” in which advocacy for vulnerable places needs to be attentive to the overlapping forms and histories of violence that connect human and nonhuman inhabitants.

Staging Humanimality: Patricia Piccinini and a Genealogy of Species Intermingling

Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what look like hybrid creatures with both human and nonhuman characteristics. Orning’s focus in these “humanimal” encounters is on the potential they hold for questioning easy distinctions between “the human” and “the animal”, while also drawing attention to the fact that human beings today can already be seen as hybrid, whether we have tissues or organs implanted from nonhuman beings or we recognize that human bodies are made up of cells and micro-organisms that are not necessarily human. Orning connects the uneasiness associated with unsettling what it means to be human to a longer genealogy of putting “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies on display, whether in the form of humans with animal-like features, or animals with human features, particularly in nineteenth-century circus sideshows. But the “species intermingling” that is staged by Piccinini, according to Orning, holds more potential for ethical engagement with “others” of various kinds or species than earlier settings such as freak shows.

“Sparks Would Fly”: Electricity and the Spectacle of Animality

Pick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early cinema in the U.S., but also to its use in electrocution as capital punishment, in the torture of vulnerable bodies, and in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in psychiatric institutions. Focusing primarily on the film that Thomas Edison made depicting the electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903, as well as Sylvia Plath’s work in The Bell Jar and other poems, Pick follows the development of electricity as a less visible instrument of control in democracies supposedly committed to human rights and the monitoring of punishment and interrogation methods, up through and including the current use of Tasers by police targeting communities of color. But there are surprising inconsistencies and ambiguities in these histories as well, such as constructions of nonhuman agency in which an elephant can be judged culpable and therefore deserving of capital punishment, while Sylvia Plath can exemplify the logic of ECT that can claim the ability to restore human agency in the mind of a schizophrenic or psychotic person.

Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds

Boggs focuses on a volume of poetry titled Whym Chow: Flame of Love, which was published pseudonymously by Michael Field in 1914. While Victorian and queer studies have focused on other works produced by this author, who was actually two women—Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, both friends with Robert Browning—less attention has been paid to their later privately-published volume that commemorates their dog who had passed away several years before, a Chow named Whym. Boggs finds great potential in the poems for complicating theoretical explorations of “dog love”, and for rethinking subjectivity and kinship, particularly in terms of the queer potential of human-animal relationships. Rather than reading the poems as examples of anthropomorphism and a privileging of the human over the animal, Boggs sees them as deconstructing these distinctions, with the dog Whym as an “equal partner”.