Download or read book Becoming Human written by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."
Download or read book Becoming Audible written by Austin McQuinn and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Audible explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists who get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural. To frame his analysis, McQuinn employs Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway’s definitions of multispecies becoming-with, and Mladen Dolar’s ideas of voice-as-object. McQuinn considers birdsong in the work of Beatrice Harrison, Olivier Messiaen, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniela Cattivelli, and Marcus Coates; the voice of the canine as a sacrificial lab animal in the operatic work of Alexander Raskatov; hierarchies of vocalization in human-simian cultural coevolution in theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka and Eugene O’Neill; and the acoustic exchanges among hybrid human-animal creations in Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur. Inspired by the operatic voice and drawing from work in art and performance studies, animal studies, zooarchaeology, social and cultural anthropology, and philosophy, McQuinn demonstrates that sounding animality in performance resonates “through the labyrinths of the cultural and the creatural,” not only across species but also beyond the limits of the human. Timely and provocative, this volume outlines new methods of unsettling human exceptionalism during a period of urgent reevaluation of interspecies relations. Students and scholars of human-animal studies, performance studies, and art historians working at the nexus of human and animal will find McQuinn’s book enlightening and edifying.
Download or read book Disability and Animality written by Stephanie Jenkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fields of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of more-than-human animals and disabled humans are interconnected. Composed of thirteen chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Lori Gruen, the book is divided into four themes: Intersections of Ableism and Speciesism Thinking Animality and Disability together in Political and Moral Theory Neurodiversity and Critical Animals Studies Melancholy, Madness, and Misfits. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars, interested in Animal Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, philosophy, and literary analysis. It will also appeal to those interested in the relationships between speciesism, ableism, saneism, and racism in animal agriculture, culture, built environments, and ethics.
Download or read book Animals Animality and Literature written by Bruce Boehrer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.
Download or read book Inner Animalities written by Eric Daryl Meyer and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth’s creatures—our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality. The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity’s exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance. Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.
Download or read book Creaturely Poetics written by Anat Pick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence." With these words, she established a relationship among vulnerability, beauty, and existence that transcends the boundaries separating the species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new "poetics of species," that forces us to rethink the significance of the body, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh," or how art and culture use the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Offering a powerful alternative to more personalist visions of morality, Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts that prioritize the inhuman and challenge the familiar inventory of the human (consciousness, language, morality, and dignity). She reintroduces Weil's crucially important work and its elaboration of themes such as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, and she moves away from assumptions about animal "otherness" and nonhuman subjectivities. Pick identifies the "animal" within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her creaturely view, powerlessness is the point at which both aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.
Download or read book In the Skin of a Beast written by Peggy McCracken and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
Download or read book Colonialism and Animality written by Kelly Struthers Montford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fields of settler colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, as well as Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of Indigenous persons and more-than-human animals are interconnected. Composed of 12 chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Dinesh Wadiwel, the book is divided into four themes: Tensions and Alliances between Animal and Decolonial Activisms Revisiting the Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples’ Relationships with Animals Cultural Perspectives Colonialism, Animals, and the Law This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, as well as postdoctoral scholars, working in the areas of Critical Animal Studies, Native Studies, postcolonial and critical race studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as Cultural Studies, Animal Law and Critical Criminology.
Download or read book Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud written by Beth A. Berkowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers new perspectives on animals and animality from the vantage point of the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud.
Download or read book Animalities written by Michael Lundblad and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-24 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New and cutting-edge work in animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanismRepresentations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal and animality studies, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do aanimalities animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of aMichael Field, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume also raises further questions about disciplinarity itself, while hoping to inspire further work abeyond the human in future interdisciplinary scholarship.Key Features10 provocative case studies focused on representations and discourses of animals and animality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, art, and film in EnglishNew work from both internationally renowned and emerging figures in the burgeoning fields of animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, suggesting innovative and significant new directions to exploreBroad introduction to the kinds of questions scholars in the humanities have considered in relation to animals and animality
Download or read book Postcolonial Animalities written by Suvadip Sinha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial Animalities, co-edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, brings together ten essays to consider the interfaces between "human" and "animal" and the concrete presence of animals in postcolonial cultural production. This edited collection critiques monohumanist conceptions of the "human" and considers the co-constitutiveness of imaginaries of the human with grammars of animality. One of the central contributions of this volume is to decolonize existing conceptualizations of the human-animal relationship, and to consider the material representation of animals within the realm of colonial and postcolonial cultural production from the perspective of ethical alterity and alternative narratives of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. The volume also explores entanglements of race and species in colonial and neocolonial frameworks without transforming such inquiries into a zero-sum game that privileges one category over another. The essays in the volume, focusing on multiple geographical locations ranging from South Asia, Southeast Asia, post-Ottoman Turkey, the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa and Palestine/Israel, historicizes and understands multispecies, interspecies and transspecies encounters, affiliations and connections in and through their localized dimensions, and studies human-animal encounters in their varied and complex affective relationalities. Through such inquiries, the volume considers how modes of representing animals, including located forms of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, help us think-with and be-with different animals.
Download or read book The Gift of Kinds written by Stephen David Ross and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-09-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the idea of human and natural kinds, pursuing an ethics of the earth responsive to social, political, and environmental issues.
Download or read book Stalking the Subject written by Carrie Rohman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human and animal subjectivity converge in a historically unprecedented way within modernism, as evolutionary theory, imperialism, antirationalism, and psychoanalysis all grapple with the place of the human in relation to the animal. Drawing on the thought of Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille, Carrie Rohman outlines the complex philosophical and ethical stakes involved in theorizing the animal in humanism, including the difficulty in determining an ontological place for the animal, the question of animal consciousness and language, and the paradoxical status of the human as both a primate body and a "human" mind abstracting itself from the physical and material world. Rohman then turns to the work of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes, authors who were deeply invested in the relationship between animality and identity. The Island of Dr. Moreau embodies a Darwinian nightmare of the evolutionary continuum; The Croquet Player thematizes the dialectic between evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis; and Women in Love, St. Mawr, and Nightwood all refuse to project animality onto others, inverting the traditional humanist position by valuing animal consciousness. A novel treatment of the animal in literature, Stalking the Subject provides vital perspective on modernism's most compelling intellectual and philosophical issues.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Animal Philosophy written by Vanessa Lemm and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides the first systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole Lemm argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. Lemm provides an original contribution to on-going debates on the essence of humanism and its future. At the center of this new interpretation stands Nietzsche's thesis that animal life and its potential for truth, history, and morality depends on a continuous antagonism between forgetfulness (animality) and memory (humanity). This relationship accounts for the emergence of humanity out of animality as a function of the antagonism between civilization and culture. By taking the antagonism of culture and civilization to be fundamental for Nietzsche's conception of humanity and its becoming, Lemm gives a new entry point into the political significance of Nietzsche's thought. The opposition between civilization and culture allows for the possibility that politics is more than a set of civilizational techniques that seek to manipulate, dominate, and exclude the animality of the human animal. By seeing the deep-seated connections of politics with culture, Nietzsche orients politics beyond the domination over life and, instead, offers the animality of the human being a positive, creative role in the organization of life. Lemm's book presents Nietzsche as the thinker of an emancipatory and affirmative biopolitics. This book will appeal not only to readers interested in Nietzsche, but also to anyone interested in the theme of the animal in philosophy, literature, cultural studies and the arts, as well as those interested in the relation between biological life and politics.
Download or read book Animal Philosophy written by Matthew Calarco and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-07-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought. A collection of essential primary and secondary readings on the animal question, it brings together contributions from the following key Continental thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Ferry, Cixous, and Irigaray. Each reading is followed by commentary and analysis from a leading contemporary thinker. The coverage of the subject is exceptionally broad, ranging across perspectives that include existentialism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, phenomenology and feminism. This anthology is an invaluable one-stop resource for anyone researching, teaching or studying animal ethics and animal rights in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, environmental studies and gender and women's studies.
Download or read book Phenomenology and the Non Human Animal written by Corinne Painter and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-07-26 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of the relation between human and non-human animals in theoretical, ethical and political regards has become a prominent topic within the philosophical debates of the last two decades. This volume explores in substantial ways how phenomenology can contribute to these debates. It offers specific insights into the description and interpretation of the experience of the non-human animal, the relation between phenomenology and anthropology, the relation between phenomenology and psychology, as well as ethical considerations.
Download or read book Being Human written by Ron Broglio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology and animals often serve as the boundaries by which we define the human. In this issue contributors explore these categories as necessary supplements or as porous membranes which disturb the scaffolding of how the human is constructed. A lingering question throughout is whether we have ever been human or if such a category is a non-localizable ideal or perhaps a misnomer. In this collection of essays, internationally known theorists muddle the categorical boundaries such that animals and technologies become necessary components rather than limits for what it means to be human. They examine a range of subjects, including apophatic animality, critical media objects-to-think-with, biosemiotic insect resonances, the monstrous and horrific which dislodges our cultural animals, and the problem of thinking of animality as stupidity. Novels, films, digital objects, scientific laboratories, philosophical texts, animals on the road and in the fields serve as sites for inquiry. The result of these investigations is the spectral possibility that we are not the humans we make ourselves out to be. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
