Humanimal Narratives: Genre and Animality in Contemporary Ethnic Literatures
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Belsare, Akash
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 22, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Cynthia Young, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Rosemary Jolly, Outside Unit & Field Member
Tina Goudie, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Aldon Nielsen, Major Field Member
Shirley Moody, Major Field Member
Mark Morrisson, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Multi-ethnic literature
Race
Animality - Abstract:
- Humanimal Narratives: Genre and Animality in Contemporary Ethnic Literatures examines how authors of color engage with animals in contemporary literature—despite (or due to) a deep history in which nonhuman animals and raced bodies have been primitivized, animalized, or otherwise marginalized alongside each other—and what results from this engagement. Scholars in Black studies, Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies, comparative races studies, critical animal studies, and posthumanist studies have often debated the ways in which hierarchies of race and species are or are not connected. Instead of mapping out clear divisions, this project uses literary criticism to illustrate how racism and speciesism function as co-constituting discourses of violence and oppression. I offer the term “humanimal” to recall the ways in which “in-between” figures (the feral child, the slave, the immigrant, and the talking animal, among others) necessarily engender taxonomic instabilities and disruptions. In addition, this study seeks to expand the purview of the “humanimal” to describe the fiction itself. In doing so, I aim to interrogate and pry open the space between taxonomic classification—specifically between human and animal orders—revealing how each category is wholly compromised in the context of the Western idea of (human) being. Humanimal Narratives does not offer a comparative model for reading humanimal narratives; instead, I consider the relationality and entanglement of human-animal encounters in contemporary ethnic fiction. The texts examined here intensify and exploit this entanglement—often to the point of categorical splintering—while remaining cognizant of an intractable history that continues to subjugate raced beings and nonhuman animals. Collectively, works by authors such as Nalo Hopkinson, Bhanu Kapil, Sesshu Foster, Gene Luen Yang, Ruth Ozeki, Andre Alexis, Shaun Tan, and Alice Walker help articulate, resist, and fundamentally undo what Sylvia Wynter has called the conditions of Western Man and Humanism. The literature I review demonstrates how representations of the animal can embody, to some extent, epistemologies of relationality beyond the scope of the Anthropocene. In locating the unexpected intimacies between the not-quite-human and the nonhuman, authors of color imagine indeterminate literary spaces that provide more expansive opportunities for freedom in the shadows of Man’s world.