Akash Belsare Dissertation Prospectus English and African American Studies

Humanimal Narratives: Genre and Animality in Contemporary Ethnic Literatures

Argumentative Overview

This project asks why 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. What types, or genres, of narratives do ethnic writers utilize when taking up animal spaces, themes, and subjects? How do these authors, given their own individual positionalities, navigate what appears to be an utterly damaging association? How do such texts challenge primarily western epistemological assumptions regarding the relationship between the human animal and the nonhuman animal? Finally, what are the implications—not just for our understanding of race, but also gender, sexuality, and nation—that emerge as a result of works that ultimately destabilize the very conditions for human-animal distinction? Before proceeding, I would like to explain the function of the term “humanimal” as the titular guiding force for this study. For Kalpana Seshadri, the term “humAnimal” perfectly encapsulates the human condition of the feral, or “ferality.” Here, the feral child produces a “hole,” or gap, in our epistemological understanding of taxonomic classification, and the “humAnimal” functions as the “cross-stitching” necessary to “open and close the weave of power that separates and unseparates human and animal” (22). Similarly, Dipika Nath has argued that the “feral person throws into disorder the taxonomic status of the human as animale rationale because it shows up the arbitrary and nonessential nature of the ontological and ethical hierarchy between nonhuman and human animals” (253). While my use of the term certainly recalls the instability of taxonomies, this study seeks to expand its purview from the feral child to all sorts of “in-between” figures in fiction (the slave, the immigrant, the talking animal, among others). As such, the “humanimal” is meant to pry open the “hole” between human and animal orders, thereby revealing how each category is wholly compromised in the context of the Western idea of (human) being. The historical correlation between oppressive discourses of race and animality in the west is well-documented in the fields of black studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and animal studies. Claire Jean Kim, in Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, traces the philosophical separation of human animals and nonhuman animals from Plato and the ancient Greeks to the Christian Great Chain of Being to the biological determinism of the nineteenth century. Kim describes how these taxonomies of power did not merely divide whites against nonwhites but used animalization to subjugate people of color. Here, race “lumps and splits” nonwhite groups according to how close to nature they are perceived (24). Blackness, Chineseness, and Indianness represented different levels of animality depending on the situated context. Of course, this oppressive association occurs analogously in the reverse, with the appearance of animals often suggesting an allegorical reading of race. Thomas LaMarre refers to such “speciesism” as a “displacement of race and racism onto relations between humans and animals” that is also used to indicate “discrimination against nonhuman animals” (76). The back-and-forth association of race with animality and vice versa facilitates the co-constitution of both groups: “The less-than humanity of one type of being reverberates across time and space with the less-than-humanity of the other” (Kim 18). Humanimal narratives, I argue, intensify and exploit this reverberation—often to the point of categorical splintering—while remaining cognizant of an intractable history that continues to subjugate raced beings and nonhuman animals alongside each other. It should be no surprise, then, that scholarship on race seldom engages with theories of animality, despite efforts in critical animal studies to abolish the rigidity of a human-animal dualism or binary. For instance, Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human uses “race” to refer to “all ‘-isms’ versus only one specific form of subjection such as sexism” (23). However, while the abject is situated as a relational figure—the “not-quite-human”—that includes “black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the colonized, the insane, the poor [and] the disabled,” the animal remains wholly “nonhuman,” a biological category devoid of political charge. For Weheliye, the utilitarian purposing of black liberation in the field of animal studies is an underhanded “sleight” by critics “attempting to achieve animal rights” at the expense of black subjects by relegating the “thought of nonwhite subjects to the ground of ethnographic specificity” (10-11). Animal liberation is perceived as a cooptation that risks the already limited status of nonwhite peoples. However, the language of “linkage”—the causal connection between violence toward animals and violence towards minority peoples—is equally of concern to animal studies scholars. As Margo DeMello has noted, critics are often wary of either reducing human loss and pain or treating animals as absent referents when confronted by comparisons of animal suffering and human exploitation (269). As such, this study does not offer a comparative model for reading humanimal narratives; instead, it is my aim to consider the relationality and entanglement of human-animal encounters in contemporary ethnic fiction. Writers of color might also be accused of capitulating to the demands of a neoliberal literary market when taking up animal themes. Indeed, there is a danger in reading too much into every animal figure that appears in such cultural works. I remember taking an undergraduate seminar on multiethnic American fiction in which a spiraling class discussion on Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” was put to an end when the professor proclaimed, “sometimes a monkey is just a monkey.” Still, this study asks if the conditions of Western Man and Humanism—through a meeting of race and animal criticism—may be better articulated, resisted, and fundamentally undone in those works of ethnic literature that address animality. In making such a claim, I hope to show that representations of the animal can embody, to some extent, epistemologies of relationality beyond the scope of Western taxonomies. In this sense, I am building on Steve Baker’s argument in Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation, which explores the “representational strategies…that might have a chance to modify human perceptions of the nonhuman animal and to increase awareness of living animals’ circumstances” (xvii). He goes on to note that the purpose is not to simply identify what animals already signify, but to exact a “benevolent manipulation” and find “what animals might yet be made to signify” (xxxvi, italics in original). I argue that humanimal narratives produce a signification that paradigmatically encapsulates alternative, non-Western epistemologies. These works demonstrate the impossibility of isolating animality without simultaneously disturbing dominant conceptions of the human. The literary texts examined are thus denaturalized and treated as theories—in accordance with calls from Barbara Christian, Donald C. Goellnicht, and Kandice Chuh—in which unexpected intimacies between the not-quite-human and the nonhuman animal offer new, more expansive, opportunities for freedom “in the ethereal shadows of Man’s world” (Weheliye 138). Scholars of postcolonial studies have perhaps gone farthest in recognizing not only the imposition of racialized animality as part of a transnational colonial legacy that concretized an absolute differentiation between the human and the animal, but also the ways in which racialized, colonial, or subaltern writers can strategically invalidate Western discourses on race and species. In “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” Neel Ahuja refers to animal masking as an ironic appropriation of an animal guise that unveils a historical logic of animalization inherent in processes of racial subjection (558). Yet, he remains wary of literary critics who “reduce nonhuman characters to symbols” and thereby “foreclose transspecies relations underlying representation” (559). In “The Postcolonial Animal” Philip Armstrong is similarly concerned about reducing the agency of subaltern subjects. He argues that a collaboration between postcolonial and animal studies allows for “respect for local differences, suspicion of theories and values that claim absolute authority, and commitment to ongoing dialogue with formerly repressed cultural knowledge” (416-17). Ultimately, he suggests, this intersection encourages critics to “listen to the voices of all kinds of ‘other’ without either ventriloquizing them or assigning to them accents so foreign that they never can be understood” (417). Building on these arguments, this study argues that the entanglement of animality and race in contemporary ethnic literature has produced a level of epistemological experimentation that does not boil down to humanist symbolism or representation. Instead, writers of color often engage with animality to reject distinctions between the material and the semiotic in the lived “configuration of humans and nonhumans across a terrain” (Tsing 172-73). Therefore, the texts I engage do not necessarily privilege realist styles and often include speculative aspects that might otherwise be considered too anthropomorphizing in animal studies circles. It is my contention that the minority writers studied in this project temper the conflation of race and species discourses even when seemingly capitulating to modern associations. The works I highlight in this study often contain elements of the fantastic, presenting moments of uncertainty that undermine the ground rules of our perceived reality. Of course, this is not to say that such authors have a “unique responsibility to speak for animals,” (Ahuja 558) but that it is the critic’s responsibility to seriously engage works that do so (of which there are several examples).1 Such texts fundamentally disrupt the story of what Sylvia Wynter would call the “Western Man” genre of the human, by breaking down the clear separation between rational humans and irrational animals. I use the term “story” here purposefully: the human is not merely a noun but a storytelling praxis, a species she playfully calls “homo narrans” (67). The human is always already a hybrid subject, “simultaneously storytelling and biological beings” (29).2 Narrativizing has produced and sustained reward/punishment models that literally shape our biological bodies. An overarching goal of this study is to demonstrate how literary genres and forms impact our sense of genres of the human. Drawing from Frantz Fanon, Wynter theorizes how a “sociogenic principle”—the narratively prescribed “master code of symbolic life and death” that is “constitutive of the multiple and varying genres of the human in the terms of which we can alone experience ourselves as human”—helps determine our shifting perceptions of the human

1 Here I am referring to Ahuja’s criticism of Cary Wolfe’s dismissal of major critics of color including Homi Bhabha and Toni Morrison for not (explicitly) speaking to issues of animality in their work. 2 Wynter marks this “bios/mythoi” hybridity as a third level of existence in which the study of the Word determines the study of nature. In this context, Wynter highlights a first and second set of instructions (genetic and nongenetic codes) operating via processes of simultaneous entanglement. This dynamic is shown to play out as follows in our imagined, ethno-class nation-state communities: “the genre-specific subjects of each such nation-state are enabled to subjectively experience themselves/ourselves in fictively eusocialized terms…as inter-altruistic kin-recognizing member subjects of the same referent-we and its imagined community. As such, kin-recognizing member subjects law-likely and performatively enact themselves/ourselves as ‘good men and women’ of their’ our kind according to a nongenetically determined, origin-mythically chartered symbolically encoded and semantically enacted set of symbolic life/death instructions. At the same time, at the level of bios/the brain, the above second set of instructions are genetically (neurochemically) implemented. This implementation occurs according to the ‘laws of nature’ first set of instructions, with the second set of instructions, thereby, being alchemically made flesh!” (27, italics in original). (183, italics in original). Put differently, genres of the human are dependent on narrative strategies and origin stories. Wynter labels the modern conceptualization of Western Man “homoeconomus,” an agent of modern bioeconomics and liberal humanism. The combined hegemony of a capitalist mode of production and post-Darwinian evolutionary thinking has enabled the material conditions for a global middle class that has managed to attain its ethno- class criterion at the expense of the not-quite-human. In each iteration of Humanism, then, the “Negro-as-slave is projected as the missing link between rational animals and irrational animals,” while the Western bourgeoisie is further legitimated (182). People of color must realize their own circumcision as a necessary prerequisite to becoming “fully human” (132). Wynter deconstructs such progressive narratives by suggesting that they are goal-oriented (predetermined and certainly not natural) and adhere to a circular logic in which we are “always already dysselected by evolution, until it proves, by its success in the real world…that he/she and/or his/her group or race has indeed been selected!” (205, italics in original). Jaques Derrida’s work in “The Law of Genre” follows a similar logic. While arguing that literary genres are neither fixed nor stable, but rather always in the process of crossing, combining, and recombining as they play out in individual texts, Derrida affirms that the naturalization of genre and its laws is “hardly natural, but…complex and heterogeneous” (60). Ultimately, Derrida notes that despite our efforts to taxonomize it is “impossible not to mix genres” (57). In fact, he argues that the “law of the law of genre” is “precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (59). The interplay between these theories drives this study to remain attentive to the form, structure, and genericity of the literary texts examined. Several of the narratives that follow emphasize their own contaminating qualities as a means to undercut the exceptionalism we have been taught to associate with the human-animal divide, the so-called natural order. As a result, the study focuses especially on human-animal relationships that occur in the borderlands, what Claire Jean Kim characterizes as an “imaginative space where both liminal humans and the most human-like animals are located…a space wrought by power but illustrative of power’s indeterminacy” (25).3 To more effectively demonstrate how the disjuncture between human/animal categorizations is reciprocally informed by the breakdown of given literary forms, I conclude this argumentative overview by examining two contemporary works of poetry belonging to what might be considered the quintessential genre of animal literature: the bestiary.4 In “Bestiaries, Past and Future,” Debra Hawhee reflects on the continuities that define the bestiary as a genre containing its own particular conventions. She notes: “the focus…is decidedly on the animal in question, its methods, its ways, its movements” (290). In addition, the genre is said to value description and depiction because such representational modes influence readers to deeply consider the “featured species,” and determine whether they will “work to save or abandon them” (290). I wonder, though, what is the “featured species” in Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium and Donika Kelly’s Bestiary: Poems. The former is written as an abecedary containing entries that are, for the most part, named for marine animals; however, these poems provide little—if any—illustrative details depicting the aquatic animal in question. Often, the entries leave readers less certain about the animal subject. For instance, “Orca” delivers the following line: “Taxonomically / the orca’s a whale within a dolphin within a whale” (33). Other poems reference the non-western history of particular species, drawing primarily from indigenous cosmogonies. “Coelacanth” includes the Algonquin phrase nind owiawina, which translates to

3 Of course, this idea is preceded by Glora Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera that characterizes borders as “unnatural boundaries…in a constant state of transition” (25). 4 While I am merely gesturing to this analysis for the purpose of the prospectus, it is my intention to flesh this argument out in the introduction of the dissertation project. “he is another myself” (8). Between the fish species, the aborigines, the speaker, and the reader, it becomes difficult to surmise definitively how these “selves” are being intermixed. The aesthetics of Yang’s poetry indeed “shape what others see,” (Hawhee 290) but in its blurring the resulting image is neither familiar nor exotic. The form of Donika Kelly’s Bestiary breaks even more sharply from its generic conventions. Nikki Finney’s introduction describes the indistinction that follows: “Bestiary is a first book of poems by an all Black girl who teaches us nothing is all black, or all female, or all male, or all belonging to humans, or all tidy” (x). Here, poems rarely focus on a single species and several take up the old generic tradition of identifying what Hawhee refers to as “otherworldly hybrids”—including the chimera, centaur, and griffon, among others (287). The nonhuman animals amalgamate within and around Kelly as poet and speaker to produce a person the likes of which I would not call human: Soon you will be a person. Nothing will change. Your body will be of a piece with all other bodies: the thrush, the dormouse, the great black bear. (7) The intimate collision of various animals and the poem’s speaker help reveal that the “featured species” model, so foundational to the bestiary genre, is inadequate. For her, the bestiary is much more than a fascination or set of scientific observations. Kelly imagines herself in relation to and entangled with her animal subjects. She—and they—are humanimal. Ultimately, this study argues that it is within imaginative and indeterminate spaces that the categories of human/animal are interrogated and productively redefined. The sense of confusion between narratively prescribed borders produces an unstable field of knowledge— what Homi Bhabha might call a “hybrid site”—that muddles the performative praxis of human genres, thus encouraging negotiation and ambiguous relationality between subjects (37). The chapters that follow bring into relief artistic strategies and techniques that reveal the co- constituted taxonomies of human and animal subjugation, while also denaturalizing the rigid hierarchies that work to cement species difference. Moreover, the four narrative types that structure this study draw from scholars invested in renegotiating the dividing line between human and animal: Claire Jean Kim, Mel Y. Chen, Donna Haraway, and Matthew Calarco. A goal of this study is to outline those specific narratives recurrent in ethnic literatures that deal with animal themes and figures. Of course, these categories are in no way rigidly defined or without overlap and entanglement. The fictional texts examined here are representative of larger narrative patterns but they must also be situated in specific (trans)cultural and (inter)ethnic discourses.

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter 1: Human-Animal Crossings in Slaughterhouse Fiction

This first chapter is informed by texts that demonstrate how oppressive taxonomies co-constitute the subjugation of animals and people of color from the vantage point of the slaughterhouse. Charlie Leduff’s “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die,” Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, director Bong Joon-ho’s film Okja, and Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex all focalize the slaughterhouse as a prime site for taxonomical synergism through varying degrees of realism. By synergism, I am referring to Claire Jean Kim’s call to reconsider Valeri Plumwood’s notion of interlocking dualisms by instead thinking in terms of synergistic taxonomies. Here, I suggest that while slaughterhouses have been a prime site for studying co-constituted forms of racial and animal domination—one of the earliest literary instances being Charles Chesnutt’s conjure tale titled “Dave’s Neckliss”—these oppressions are far from the same or predictable. Neither race nor species difference is accurately expressed in terms of simple binaries (black/white or human/animal). By emphasizing taxonomies of power this chapter recognizes the “complex hierarchical ordering” that governs the intrinsic value of their subjects (17). In doing so, I perform a reading practice in which “we are less likely to fall into the trap of mindless pluralism and more likely to remain attuned to the unevenness, messiness, complexity, fluidity, and unpredictability that actually mark the dynamics of difference production” (18). In conjunction, these narratives demonstrate how the slaughterhouse, as a recurring locus, brings into relief a deep history of entangled racialization (of animals) and animalization (of raced peoples) in terms of commodification, labor conditions, reproductive regulation, and ultimately control over the life and death of its occupants.

Chapter 2: (Re)Claiming the Animal Through Folkloric Reimagining

The second chapter moves away from a particular, physical location and instead interrogates an historically popular source of human-animal storytelling: folklore and mythology. These narratives, in content and in form, enable writers of color to (re)claim animality, resisting and/or recuperating damaging histories. In many cases, the transgressive qualities of such texts have been overlooked because the animal tale is often classified as children’s literature. Countee Cullen’s The Lost Zoo: A Rhyme for the Young, But Not Too Young is an early example of this phenomenon. Originally published in 1940—but republished in 1968 and 1990 with new illustrators and art—The Lost Zoo advertises itself as a co-written book from Cullen and his pet cat named Christopher. Having revealed his capacity for speech, the cat revises the story of Noah’s ark to include those animals that have since disappeared because they did not reach the ship before the flood. Here, it is the nonhuman animal who claims control of the narrative, pushing the normative definitions of traditional animal tales. In more contemporary instances of folkloric reimagining, ethnic writers engage with tales that depict shifting and incorporeal animals. This chapter examines two such texts: Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand and Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Shadow Hero. These works indicate that oppressive human-animal relations are not isolated to the lore of any one context. Whereas Lai reworks the fox spirit (huli jing) stories of Chinese mythology, Yang and Liew take up what is arguably the most prominent form of American folklore, the superhero comic. In addition to race and animality, these texts complementarily address issues of gender, sexuality, and nation. While the idea of treating spirit animals may be concerning to animal studies scholars, this chapter asks if even these symbolic animals are ever truly divested from their material form by complicating simplistic representational or “stand-in” readings of such texts.

Chapter 3: Multispecies Thinking

The second half of this study deals more explicitly with the blurring of generic boundaries and the transformative potential of human-animal relations in ethnic literature. The third chapter focuses on literary representations of non-human epistemologies. I trace how animal thinking is represented in contemporary ethnic texts that oscillate—in terms of tone, style, and technique— between the realism of chapter one and the fantasy emblematic of chapter two. Each of the three novels I treat in this chapter suggest that transformation and confluence are dual processes by which humans and animals are mutually reconstructed. Benyamin’s Goat Days is based on the true story of Malyali migrant Najeed Muhammad who is abducted and forced to become a goat shepherd in a Saudi Arabian desert. The reader follows the despondent narrator as he struggles to escape enslavement, but not before developing an intimate kinship with goats he cares for. Tania James’s multi-perspectival novel The Tusk that did the Damage delivers chapters in the third- person point of view of an elephant called Gravedigger by local Keralite villagers. Andre Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs begins with the Greek Gods Hermes and Apollo allowing fifteen dogs human intelligence to settle a wager. Each novel suggests that transformation and confluence are dual processes by which both humans and animals can be reconstructed. Here, I am drawing from feminist animal studies scholar Donna Haraway who, unlike Sylvia Wynter, argues that storytelling is not unique to human nature: “…animals are experienced/constructed as active, non-unitary subjects in complex relation to each other and to writers and observers” (Primate Visions 375). Haraway has elsewhere argued for an alternative to the oppressive world systems of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, one that does not take humans as the only important actors that all other beings imply react to but is “made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with” (Staying with the Trouble 55). Ultimately, by remaining attuned to how these authors write human-animal encounters, this chapter demonstrates the limits to and possibilities for a “multispecies coflourishing” through caring, learning, and imagining that rejects human exceptionalism en route to dismantling the prevailing racial hierarchy (When Species Meet 105). Whether realist or fantastical, each of these works suggests that neither human nor animal can remain unaltered from the exchanges necessitated by our co-constituted systems of oppression.

Chapter 4: Collapsing the Human/Animal Distinction

The final chapter emphasizes literary works that fundamentally confuse the lines between human and animal, particularly through experimentation with genre and form. Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal produces a zone of human/animal indistinction immanent in contemporary systems of oppression. In Thinking Through Animals, Matthew Calarco overviews three critical frameworks and positions in critical animal studies: identity, difference, and indistinction. This chapter draws on the latter because it is expressly shown to deemphasize the “importance of human uniqueness and the human/animal distinction” (5). For Calarco, indistinction “creates a space for us to think about the field of human beings and animals in new ways…creating the conditions for other modes of thought—different ontologies and different practices—to emerge” (56). Kapil’s “antidevelopmental prose poetry” puts the central claims of this study into practice. Kapil takes up an early-20th century case of two feral girls ‘rescued’ from their wolf mother in India and dying soon after their ‘reintegration’ into human civilization. Kapil oscillates between the story of both children and her own autobiographical account of events as they occur on site in 2004, as she accompanies a documentary film crew in India. In many ways, Humanimal encapsulates the primary arguments of the previous three chapters: through the snatching of feral children, their subsequent inability (rejection?) of properly ‘human’ life, the speculation that follows their story, and the multivalent generic and formal methods Kapil regularly employs.5 What results is an intimate relation between speaker and subject, researcher and archive, immigrant and wolf girl. At stake in this reading is not only a deconstruction of generic categorization itself but is more importantly the revelation of what is left behind—or rather, what is left between. Here, liberatory possibilities for the racialized human or the nonhuman animal

5 Kapil produces narrative incertitude not only by confusing the voice(s) of speaker and subject, but also by intermingling prose and poetry, text and image, numbered and alphabetized fragments. The multimodal and multi- generic form of her work produces the real and imagined hybrid space from which intra-action can occur. necessitates or entails indistinction.6 Exposing the artificiality of categorical dichotomies does not elicit a breakdown or total abstraction of meaning, but instead makes visible subjects, spaces, and stories that are habitually unaccounted and overwritten. The intimacies opened between temporally, geographically, and categorically distanced subjects in Humanimal are not dismissive of a pre-existing animate hierarchy, but rather seek to enliven hybridity(s) from beyond normative classificatory systems. This study then concludes with a consideration of what might exist after the collapse of the human/animal distinction. Calarco asks: “Does not allowing the human/animal distinction to collapse ultimately transform this field of beings into an undifferentiated mass beyond conceptual understanding? In other words, it would seem that if we are unable to draw a line or lines of difference between human beings and animals, then we might end up finding ourselves reduced to utter silence when referring to this group” (55). In response, I briefly turn to Jillian Tamaki’s graphic novel Boundless to claim that the artistic practices of prying open the middle space between the not-quite-human and the nonhuman animal envision not a static “undifferentiated mass” but a dynamic, constantly shifting set of entangled beings.

Project Timeline

Fall 2018: Submit prospectus. Work on and finish Chapter 1

Spring 2019: Work on and finish Chapter 2 * Apply for 2019 CALS Summer Graduate Fellowship & HI Graduate Student Summer Residency

Summer 2019: Work on and finish Chapter 3

Fall 2019: Write and finish Chapter 4 *Apply for Spring 2020 HI Graduate Student Residency & RGSO Dissertation Support Competition *Begin Producing and organizing job search materials

Spring 2020: Write introduction.

6 This notion is not entertained by Calarco who, as an animal philosopher, seems preoccupied solely with “pro- animal alternatives” (67). For this purpose, Calarco readily proposes to look to “a wide variety of indigenous and nondominant cultures, both past and present, across the globe” (68). Revise, edit, and defend dissertation.

Preliminary Bibliography

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