Animal Alterity Cover Photo by David Lindbjerg, Courtesy of the Artist
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ISSN 1904-6022 www.otherness.dk/journal September 2016 Edited by Sune Borkfelt Special Issue: Animal Alterity Cover photo by David Lindbjerg, courtesy of the artist. Animal Alterity Volume 5 · Number 2 · September 2016 Welcoming the interdisciplinary study of otherness and alterity, Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, full-text, and peer-reviewed e-journal under the auspices of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. The journal publishes new scholarship primarily within the humanities and social sciences. GUEST ISSUE EDITOR Sune Borkfelt Aarhus University, Denmark GENERAL EDITOR Dr. Maria Beville Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland ASSOCIATE EDITORS Susan Yi Sencindiver, PhD Aarhus University, Denmark Matthias Stephan, PhD Aarhus University, Denmark © 2016 Otherness: Essays and Studies ISSN 1904-6022 Further information: www.otherness.dk/journal/ Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, non-profit journal. All work associated with the journal by its editors, editorial assistants, editorial board, and referees is voluntary and without salary. The journal does not require any author fees nor payment for its publications. Cover photo by David Lindbjerg, courtesy of the artist. Volume 5 · Number 2 · September 2016 CONTENTS Notes on Contributors iv Introduction: Thinking through Animal Alterities 1 Sune Borkfelt 1 From Over the Horizon: 13 Animal Alterity and Liminal Intimacy beyond the Anthropomorphic Embrace Richie Nimmo 2 Other(ed) Rabbits: 47 Using Otherness as a Frame to Teach Critical Approaches to Human-Animal Relations in Japan Dylan Hallingstad O’Brien 3 The Lungfishes from a Historical Perspective: 79 How Humans See the Other Audrey Appudurai 4 Going to the Dogs: 111 The Foreign and Religious Other in German Renaissance Prints Dana Rehn 5 American Bully: 151 Fear, Paradox, and the New Family Dog Rachel Levine and Justyna Poray-Wybranowska 6 “I ona byla chelovekom” (For the Dog was Once a Human Being): 201 The Moral Obligation in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog Andrea McDowell 7 Crossing the Threshold: 231 Domestic Territory and Nonhuman Otherness in Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth Laura Jean McKay 8 Divine Wings: 255 Literary Flights between the Cyclic Avian in Emily Brontë’s Poems and Oblivia’s Swan Song in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book Susan Pyke iii Volume 5 · Number 2 · September 2016 CONTRIBUTORS Audrey Appudurai is an Australian artist and biologist interested in the scientific, artistic, and cultural pursuit of non-human animal experiences. Audrey has a BSc (Hons), and a PhD through SymbioticA and The Neuroecology Group at The University of Western Australia (UWA). Audrey’s PhD research focused on the scientific, artistic and cultural exploration of lungfishes and their visual perception. She simultaneously conducted scientific and artistic experiments to uncover, represent and interpret the visual experience of these animals, and discussed the general anthropocentric and discipline- specific limitations that inhibit a deeper understanding. As an artist, Audrey has exhibited her work in many Western Australian galleries including the Perth Centre for Photography (2015), Kidogo Art Institute (2015) and UWA. Dylan Hallingstad O’Brien is an independent scholar with a B.A. from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. His honors thesis and much prior work have focused on formulizations of nonhuman subjectivity in animal theory. His current research interests include the senses and embodiment, human-animal intersubjective relationships, and the place of the visual in theory. Rachel Levine is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Rachel’s major research is a long-term ethnographic study of human-pet relationships in circumstances of urban vulnerability: social isolation, chronic poverty, homelessness, and public service reliance. Rachel’s larger interest is in identifying the quotidian ways in which social inequality intervenes on human bonds with non-human animals and the natural world. Andrea McDowell teaches Business Communication for the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University, where she has also taught Russian and Soviet Literature and Film for the Department of English, as well as graduate courses for the SU College of Education. Andrea received her undergraduate degrees in Russian Studies and Journalism from the University of Missouri–Columbia, and her MA and PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Indiana University–Bloomington. She also holds an MS in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration from IUB. In addition to teaching, she is the Administrator of the Seattle University Institutional Review Board, which oversees and approves all research involving human subjects. She became vegetarian as a result of her dissertation on animals in Russian and Soviet literature, and she seeks every opportunity to combine her personal and scholarly interests on human–animal relations and animal rights. iv Introduction Sune Borkfelt Laura Jean McKay writes about humans and other animals. She is the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc. 2013), a story collection that explores the electric zone where local and foreign lives meet – shortlisted for three national book awards in Australia. Her work has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and The North American Review. Laura is also the winner of the Alan Marshall short story award, an Asialink and Martin Bequest Scholarship recipient and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Australia. www.laurajeanmckay.com. Richie Nimmo is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, where he teaches human-animal relations and environmental sociology. His research interests are interdisciplinary in nature and tend to cluster around the intersections of human-animal studies, posthumanism, materialism and science studies. Richie is the author of Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human (2010), and editor of Actor-Network Theory Research (2016). He has contributed numerous book chapters and published articles in journals including Distinktion, Society and Animals, and Humanimalia. Justyna Poray-Wybranowska is a doctoral student in the English Department of York University in Toronto, Canada. Her background is in postcolonial literature and animal studies. Her doctoral research project examines how representations of the environment in contemporary literature, film, and digital culture affect people’s perceptions of vulnerability to climate change and the eco-social instability that it entails. Susan Pyke teaches at the University of Melbourne with the School of Culture and Communications and the Office for Environmental Programs. She writes in the shared fields of creative writing, literary criticism and ecocriticism. Her most recent critical essays can be found in Being-in-Creation: Human Responsibility in an Endangered World (2015, Fordham University Press), Southerly (2013) and the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (2013). Her most recent creative work is a short story, “Meltemi”, found in Australian Love Stories (2014). She is a regular reviewer for Plumwood Mountain. For more details on publications see https://unimelb.academia.edu/SusanPyke. Susan’s blog is found at http://suehallpyke.com. Dana Rehn is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She specialises in the social and cultural history of early modern European esoteric art. A comprehensive study on the canine-human motif in German Renaissance society and visual culture is the focus of her forthcoming doctoral thesis. v Introduction: Thinking through Animal Alterities Sune Borkfelt “No! You silly savage!” said Josephine. “No, you wild beast. … I might as well have a baboon, or a bear. You are Tarzan of the Apes; … I can assure you that if mankind thinks of you, it thinks you are the missing link. You ought to be shut up and exhibited here in the Zoo … with the gorilla on one side and the chimpanzee on the other. Science would gain a lot”. Such are the words with which John Cromartie, the protagonist of David Garnett’s short novel A Man in the Zoo (1924, 6-7), is answered when he asks his beloved Josephine to marry him. As the two have been strolling from cage to cage through the London Zoo, she has found his reasoning about both interhuman and human- nonhuman relations increasingly difficult to understand, creating a distance between them until she finally explodes in a cascade of slurs suggesting he is unfit for human society and should be locked up like the animals in the zoo. It is no coincidence that in emphasizing the distance she perceives between John and herself, Josephine turns to ideas of beastliness. As she calls John a ‘wild beast’ and opposes him to ‘mankind’, she draws on a long tradition of phrasing Otherness along a binary where the ‘animal’ stands in opposition to the supposedly ‘human’, and suggests that – like savages or the very animals in the zoo have been Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 5 · Number 2 · September 2016 © The Author 2016. All rights reserved Otherness: Essays and Studies 5.2 subdued, exhibited, studied – so should John, since his behaviour and thinking mark him as an outsider to the common British social norms she lives by. And yet, even her insults reveal a certain ambiguity; for as John is painted as an Other in animal terms, he is also conceptualized as, perhaps uncomfortably, close to the self. As much as the animal insults are derogatory, the descriptions