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.
- "Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities"—Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya
- "‘A Strangeness beyond Reckoning’: The Animal as Surplus in Postcolonial Literature"—Gautam Basu Thakur
- "Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Animalities"—Amit R. Baishya
- "The Turk that therefore I Follow"—Efe Khayyat
- "Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?: Trauma and Colonialism in the Hebrew Canon"—Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi
- "Pariah Dogs, Precarious Cohabitation"—Suvadip Sinha
- "No Place for Waltzing Matilda: Uncanny Australian Swamps and Crocodiles in Rogue, Black Water, and Dark Age"—Isaac Rooks
- "Plotting the Elephant Graveyard: Anthropomorphism and Interspecies Conflict in Tania James’ The Tusk that did the Damage"—Jason Sandhar
- "Beyond Bare Life: Revitalizing the Animal in Dany Laferrière’s American Autobiography"—Rebecca Krasner
- "Breaking Down Borders: Animal Bodies in Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City"—Madeleine Wilson
- "Wilder Powers: Magical Animality in Tales of War and Terror"—Jean M. Langford.
Section I: Theoretical Considerations on Postcolonial Animalities
Section II: Dogs
Section III: Megafauna
Section IV: Human-Animal Interzones
Biography
Amit R. Baishya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018) and the co-editor (with Yasmin Saikia) of a volume titled Northeast India: A Place of Relations (CUP, 2017). His essays have been published in Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Review and several edited collections.
Suvadip Sinha is an Assistant Professor of South Asian literature and culture at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota. He is currently finishing a monograph on inanimate objects in Indian cinema.
