Postcolonial Animalities 9780367236298, 9780429280894

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Postcolonial Animalities

Postcolonial Animalities, coedited 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 chapters 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, historicize and understand multispecies, interspecies, and trans-species encounters, affiliations, and connections in and through their localized dimensions, and study 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. 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. Amit R. Baishya is an assistant professor in the Department of E ­ nglish at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Contemporary ­Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018) and the coeditor (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.

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. 65 Caring for Community Marijke Denger 66 A Century of Encounters Writing the Other in Arab North Africa Tanja Stampfl 67 Rethinking the Victim Gendered Violence in Australian Women’s Literature Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew 68 Politicising World Literature Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public May Hawas 69 Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature Edited by David Attwell, Annalisa Pes and Susanna Zinato 70 Postcolonial Animalities Edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya Related Title: Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation by Bart Moore-Gilbert

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Postcolonial Animalities

Edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-23629-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28089-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Preface—Alexander G. Weheliye Acknowledgments

vii ix xi

1 Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities

1

S U VA D I P S I N H A A N D A M I T R . B A I S H YA

SECTION I

Theoretical Considerations on Postcolonial Animalities

27

2 “A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”: The Animal as Surplus in Postcolonial Literature

29

G AU TA M B A S U T H A K U R

3 Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Animalities

48

A M I T R . B A I S H YA

SECTION II

Dogs

71

4 The Turk That Therefore I Follow

73

E F E K H AY YAT

5 Who Let the Mad Dogs Out? Trauma and Colonialism in the Hebrew Canon

89

O M R I G R I N B E RG A N D Y I F TAC H A S H K E N A Z I

6 Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation S U VA D I P S I N H A

108

vi Contents SECTION III

Megafauna

125

7 No Place for Waltzing Matilda: Uncanny Australian Swamps and Crocodiles in Rogue, Black Water, and Dark Age

127

I S A AC RO O K S

8 Plotting the Elephant Graveyard: Anthropomorphism and Interspecies Conflict in Tania James’s The Tusk That Did the Damage

147

JASON SA N DH A R

SECTION IV

Human–Animal Interzones

163

9 Beyond Bare Life: Revitalizing the Animal in Dany Laferrière’s American Autobiography

165

REBECCA KRASNER

10 Breaking Down Borders: Animal Bodies in Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City

183

M A DELEI N E W I L SON

11 Wilder Powers: Magical Animality in Tales of War and Terror

201

J EA N M. L A NGFOR D

Notes on Contributors Index

221 223

Figures

5.1 Screen Grab from WwB Opening Scene: Final Sequence, Dogs Outside Window 89 5.2 Screen Grab from WwB Opening Scene: Mid-Sequence, Dogs Running Through Streets 103 7.1 In Black Water, tourists watch crocodiles at a farm being coaxed to jump for food 132 7.2 Later, in the swamp, the wild crocodile replicates this behavior as it leaps from the water to snap at our protagonists 132 7.3 In Black Water, the tourists begin their journey on an open river that facilitates safe transport and offers clear sightlines 134 7.4 T he tourists’ boat ends up overturned in a dense and shallow mangrove swamp, forcing them to huddle awkwardly in a tree 134 7.5 In Rogue, an aerial shot situates the film’s wetland setting within an iconic vision of the Australian outback 136 7.6 In Rogue, a tourist spies a cave painting of a crocodile through his camera’s viewfinder as the group enters the sacred Aboriginal land. After a few moments of apparent reverence, he takes a snapshot 140

Preface Alexander Ghedi Weheliye

The bringing-into-relation of “postcolonial” and “animalities” in the title of this volume engenders a certain amount of hesitance given the fraught histories of these terms within academic discourse and beyond. Animal studies, just as posthumanism, new materialism, ecocriticism, studies of the Anthropocene, and a host of other recent scholarly subfields concerned with the “nonhuman” sphere, have systematically disregarded questions of race and coloniality, and thus frequently reproduced the very structures they aim to dismantle, in particular the hierarchical arrangement of the “human” and the “nonhuman.” Like these other fields, animal studies sets off its conceptual probes from the disavowed supposition that all Homo sapiens have uniform access to the category of humanity by discounting the violent conflation of non-white subjects with the “savagery” of animals during colonialism, the de jure chattel status of Black folks throughout enslavement, and the continuation of these conscriptions via countless other means in the aftermath of racial slavery and colonialism. While recent work by scholars such as Neel Ahuja, Joshua Bennett, Mel Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Claire Jean Kim, Akira Lippit, and Kalpana Seshadri, among others, has infused questions of Blackness, racial difference, and post/coloniality into the critical study of human/ animal divides and relationalities, the majority of the field still treats the after/lives of racial slavery and colonialism as well as their effects on both the material and conceptual provenances of the human/animal boundary as adjuvant concerns, if they are considered at all. The fundamental predicament of studying the “nonhuman” universe, however, is that it must pass through the human-as-Man (what the editors of this volume term “monohumanism”), which rests on the elevation of white, bourgeois, European, cisheterosexual masculinity as the only way to being human in Western modernity and was instantiated through slavery and colonialism and continues to shape every facet of being and life in the world we inhabit. The Middle Passage, transatlantic racial slavery, European colonialism, the plantation system, and the gendered racial terror erected on them were not one-time events; they spanned five hundred years, from the early fifteenth century to well into twentieth century, and their reverberations

x Preface can still be felt around us not only in the Americas but in many places around the globe, including continental Africa. Although the “proper” colonization of continental Africa did not extend over the same period, it must be seen as part of this continuum if we consider that the “scramble for Africa” took place almost contemporaneously with the abolition of slavery in Brazil, thus extending this form racial terror to the 1970s when Portugal “relinquished” its colonies on the African continent. The rape, expropriation, subjugation, enslavement, and killing of black life continue now in different shapes in, among other places, the prison industrial complex in the United States and the economic recolonization of many African nations by the West. This is all just to highlight the many ways coloniality and slavery sustain modernity, often through the brutal conduit of rendering non-white peoples around the globe as nonhuman. Theorist, Sylvia Wynter, refers to this as the coloniality of being in Western modernity. Yet, too often animal studies and related fields of inquiry rush to embrace the “nonhuman” in order to escape the messy persistence of racial slavery’s and colonialism’s afterlives. Rather than wielding the “nonhuman” so as to ignore slavery and colonialism, or deny their significance for contemporary life worlds, the editors of and contributors to this volume mobilize the breach between “animalities” and “postcolonial,” transforming it into a usable interface for conceptualizing both the violence and the possibilities engendered by the putting-into-relation of these two fraught domains. And, it is significant that the central idea that structures this volume is not “animals” as ontologically discrete entities that can be easily cordoned off from humanity but “animalities” as a series of shifting relational terrains that move in and out of the human and nonhuman as they are traversed and interrupted by varying vectors of difference, as well as unevenly distributed materialities/structures and forms of agency. As a result, this volume bridges necessary gaps and creates new exciting passageways, surveying the representational and material presence of animalities in a wide variety of postcolonial literary texts. Traversing the globe via the different spatiotemporal nodes located in Algeria, South Africa, Israel/ Palestine, India, Turkey, Cambodia, Laos, Australia, and Haiti/Canada, the essays collected in Postcolonial Animalities forcefully show that imagining and critically engaging with animalities—and the “nonhuman” world more broadly—need not proceed from the faulty premise that we live in a world that is not wholly structured by the still very real remnant materialities of racial slavery and European colonialism.

Acknowledgments

Amit Baishya would like to begin by thanking Suvadip Sinha, his compañero for this volume. A long, long time ago in a university far far away, Suvadip and Amit used to talk theory as MA students over glasses of cheap Lady Di Vodka. Little did they know then that they would collaborate on a book together many many years later. He thanks the participants in the panel titled “Postcolonial Animality” at the 2016 MLA Conference in Austin, Texas. He also thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments, and Michelle Salyga and Jennifer Abbott at Routledge for their support and encouragement. He expresses his special thanks to the graduate students in the class titled “Humans and Animals in Postcolonial Literature and Theory” that he taught at the University of Oklahoma in Spring 2018. Thanks are not enough for Andreea Marculescu’s presence and her help in traversing Fanon in French. Amit dedicates this book to his father, who is battling cancer, and to his furry canine companions, Sushi and Roxy. He is grateful for their presence and companionship, without which many of the ideas in this book would never have taken form. Suvadip Sinha would like to thank his longtime co-conspirator Amit Baishya. Working on this book did bring back memories of their past lives. He too thanks editors and reviewers at Routledge for their support, encouragement, and helpful comments. He is grateful to colleagues and students at the University of Minnesota.

1 Introduction Postcolonial Animalities Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya

In an essay on the “animist fictions” of noted Libyan writer, Ibrahim AlKoni, well-known animal studies theorist Susan McHugh distinguishes an animal studies approach from postcolonial criticism. She writes: Like many contemporary writers who draw from animist traditions to emphasize local perspectives, he (Al-Koni) has been embraced as a ‘magical realist’ by postcolonial literary critics…But I find this ‘magical realist’ reading problematic because it reduces the animal aspects to symbols of exploitation among humans, and in a way that avoids reading these stories on their own terms… The interdisciplinary strategies of animal studies may prove more useful in this respect. Within the discipline of literary studies, the interpretive categorization of ‘magical realist’ effectively elevates Al-Koni’s regionally rooted body of work to the global category of postcolonial literature by attributing a clean, hierarchical divide between magical/transcendent and realist/natural elements. While not overtly patronizing, this trend toward interpreting animist figures and events strictly in terms of metaphors for the human nonetheless betrays a curiously studied ignorance of what not so long ago were readily dismissed as the simplistic hallmarks of primitive forms like legends and folktales. (“Hybrid Species and Literatures”, 287–88) While we aren’t sure what reading stories “on their own terms” imply (isn’t criticism and interpretation always relational, heteroglossic, and co-­ constitutive?), McHugh points out a few lacunae in postcolonial readings of animals that are germane for Postcolonial Animalities. First, we find the refusal of the blanket term “magic realism” useful. McHugh’s point about reading animals as mere “symbols of exploitation among humans” is a salutary one and aligns with recent critiques of postcolonial criticism and theory from the perspective of disability studies (Barker; Flaugh).1 Postcolonial literature and criticism are guilty of treating animals and disability as metaphors and narrative prostheses for the “human” without contending with the material dimensions of animal existence or experiences of disability.2 Second, the hierarchical divide between

2  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya magical/transcendent and realist/natural tends to reroute anything non-realist in a postcolonial text into an allegorical/symbolic direction. Animal representations are often read as examples of magic realism at work. Given the hegemonic hold that magic realism as a genre has had primarily on Anglophone postcolonial criticism (the publication and reception of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is the key moment here), these critiques are salutary. While trying to frame distinctive hermeneutics for postcolonial literature, such trends in criticism and theory may be boxing diverse works of literature into a narrow corner, thereby negating the specificity of various colonial/postcolonial cultural traditions. However, there are other and very valid reasons for which postcolonial theory and criticism has been wary of circulating versions of animal studies. The pioneering postcolonial zoocritics, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin outline four reasons for this reluctance to consider actual animals in postcolonial theory: first, anxieties about questioning the species boundary, despite a grudging recognition of the fact that such demarcations are “temporally and politically contingent … policed by the processes of representation itself”; second, the either/or situations that arise when “humans are pitted against animals in a competition over decreasing resources”; third, the differential value of particular animals in various cultures; and, finally, the “first-things-first” approach which prioritizes and values certain forms of life over others (135–38). To be sure, uncritical adoptions of such premises often lead to simplistic conclusions about species hierarchy and speciesism such as readings of the differential value of the lives of the human and the tiger in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide or popular discourses about the relative value of human versus animal life in the well-discussed cases like those of Cecil the Lion. Before we get to postcolonial animalities though, it would be useful to clarify whether “animalities” is the correct categorical term to study the presence of animals in literary and cinematic texts.3 We deploy it because of our abiding concerns in this volume with both the retroactive construction of “humanness,” and the material presence and signifying capacities of animals in postcolonial cultural texts. However, this term needs to be specified and discussed alongside other circulating labels like “animal studies” and “human–animal studies” before we get to the distinctiveness of “postcolonial animalities.” Animal studies, as originally defined by the natural sciences, focuses on the animal by separating it from the realm of human worlds (Marvin and McHugh 3). In terms of cultural critique, animal studies emerged from the espousal of the commitment “to animal liberation and veganism, with activist links to other social justice movements” (Pick and Naraway 3). But the wide welter of approaches in this multidisciplinary and heteroglossic field cannot be encompassed by these originary impulses alone. There has been robust discussion about the terminology and descriptive appellations applicable to

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  3 the knowledge field. In his introduction to Animalities, Michael ­Lundblad marks a distinction between human–animal studies (McHugh’s work is an exemplar), what he calls animality studies, and posthumanism (epitomized especially by the works of Cary Wolfe).4 In their introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh deploy the term human–animal studies, emphasizing the hyphen between human and animal to signal “a linking, the ‘together in one’ … which is to study animals with humans, and humans with animals, never forgetting that we are both animals in general and humans in particular” (2). This insistence on the “together in one” comes close to our deployment of Haraway’s notion of living with animals in varying states of entanglement and co-constitution that we will espouse later. Human–animal studies though, according to Lundblad, risks reinstating the subject of humanism and also seems closer to animal studies’ emphasis on advocacy and “better treatment of nonhuman animals” (4). While “better treatment” of animals is a desirable goal, our volume, influenced by multispecies ethnography, studies a range of affective states that signify quotidian relationalities in postcolonial cultural texts on animals ranging from love and cohabitation to disgust and indifference. Human– animal relationships can only be studied in its complexities, we believe, if we consider the vertiginous range of affective states instead of focusing exclusively on narratives of care and relatedness that give off a “warm, fuzzy glow rather than a cold shiver” (Carsten 246). In contrast, Lundblad advocates for an end to “animal studies” and instead proposes “animality studies” as a different field of study. Eschewing the focusing on advocacy and also of “liking animals,” animality studies focuses on discursive “constructions of humans as animals or discourses of animality in relationship to human cultural politics” (Animalities 3). In literary and cultural studies, the focus of animality studies would be on “texts and discourses with humans likened to animals, or humans with animal characteristics, or humans oppressed like animals, or animals signifying humans” (3). Lundblad also connects this approach with the trajectories of “species critique” emerging from postcolonial and ethnic studies, although he cautions that we should not elevate “species” (and speciesism as its aftereffect) to yet another identity category. He further elaborates “the emphasis in animality studies remains more on discursive constructions of animalities in relation to human and nonhuman animals” (11). While the trajectories of many of the essays in this volume converge with what Lundblad says about animality, we differ somewhat from his approach in retaining a focus on the material aspects of the representation of animals in texts and with the domain of animal agency and alterity, especially as it has been emphasized by ethologists and biosemioticians.5 At the same time, we also think that animalities (we use the plural as we want to emphasize the multiplicity of conceptualizations of animality) as a concept does not

4  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya ask for prioritizing, as Lundblad claims in The Birth of Jungle, politics over philosophy. There is no philosophy without politics, or vice versa. For us, the philosophical and political category “animalities,” in its both materialist and representational renditions, is a call for a radical erasure of the bar between humans and nonhuman animals. Postcolonial animalities, as a methodology or a conceptual framework, promises to provoke an ontological and political miscegenation that constantly alerts us about the need of a multivalent reading of violence and precarity. Posthumanist trends in animal studies are often associated with the works of Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, although Haraway has often rejected the label.6 Taking a specifically deconstructionist and systems theory inflection, the wide-ranging works of Cary Wolfe connects animal studies with the larger problematic of posthumanism, not in the sense of some fantasy of transcending human embodiment … but rather in the sense of returning us precisely to the thickness and finitude of human embodiment and to human evolution as itself a specific form of animality, one that is unique and different from other forms but no more different, perhaps, than an orangutan is from a starfish. (“Human, All Too Human” 572) While he acknowledges that animal studies (mark the plural) can be both humanist and posthumanist in orientation, he advocates for a specific use of the latter term because far from surpassing or rejecting the human—(posthumanism) actually enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social signification, and affective investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on. It forces us to rethink our takenfor-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo Sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of “bringing forth a world”—ways that are, since we see ourselves as human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself. But it also insists that we attend to the specificity of the human—its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing and describing—by (paradoxically for humanism) acknowledging that it is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically “not human” and yet nevertheless made the human what it is. (What Is Posthumanism? xxv)

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  5 Three key points can be distilled from this passage. The first one is the critique of the knowing, centered human subject. Second, Wolfe’s posthumanism differs from that of a scholar like N. Katherine Hayles’ because it does not seek to transcend embodiment; rather, it seeks to transcend particular modes of humanist thinking, while simultaneously “engaging directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and speciesism and how practices of thinking and reading must change in light of their critique” (xix). Finally, the double bind in “It forces us…” and “But it also insists…” above enjoins us to both decenter standard “human” ways of knowing and being, while also acknowledging the specificity of the human as a coevolved prosthetic creature. To reframe Kwame Anthony Appiah’s famous question slightly for our current conjuncture, is the “post” in the postcolonial the “post” in the posthuman?7 Thinkers like Appiah often use the term “human suffering” in a self-evident fashion using it to distinguish the ethico-political charge of postcolonialism from postmodernism. Conversely, many postcolonial theorists (like the example we provided from Mbembe’s On the Postcolony in our first footnote) often resort to the “grammar of animality” (Mbembe 236) in relatively unselfconscious ways.8 This is not entirely surprising because, as Nicole Shukin observes, biopolitics often bleeds into zoopolitics (9)—a point especially applicable to conditions in the colony and the post-colony. What needs to be maintained though is that in conditions of colonization and racialization, the evocation of the grammar of animality should not be viewed only as a production of bare animalized life, as if the image of the “human” preexists with the reduction to animality being a “fall” from it. As Claire Jean Kim argues, the proposition that humans are demoted to animals … assumes an a priori state in which racialized groups were accepted as fully human … racialized groups were never fully seen as human to begin with, so they did not have this status to lose. They were always already animal or animal-like. Animality and nature have been integral not incidental to the production of racial difference. (24) Colonized and racialized others are located “… in a borderlands between human and animal, a fraught zone of ambiguity, menace, and transgression” (24). If we think of this liminal existence from the standpoint of the colonizer–colonized dichotomy, for the former, the colonized appears as human-but-not-quite. From the standpoint of the colonized though, the human is never present as an ontological given; instead, it must be struggled for, forged in the colonial smithy through praxis. What seems prehuman from the colonizer’s standpoint is already post/human from the vantage point of the colonized.9 A very different notion of the post/human—where the human is created and recreated via praxis—has had a parallel existence in anticolonial,

6  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya postcolonial, and decolonial modes of thought. In such conceptualizations, varied though their intellectual genealogies may be, the “human being” is not thought of as a noun, rather being human is a praxis (Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe” 23).10 Cesaire’s critiques of humanism in Discourse on Colonialism, Fanon’s considerations of “skins” and “masks” in Black Skins, White Masks, and his later call to forget Europe and to construct a “new man” at the end of The Wretched of the Earth are obvious signposts here.11 For a more contemporary and powerfully suggestive example of the post/human in postcolonial theory, consider the extension of Cesaire and Fanon’s work in the writings of the Caribbean decolonial theorist, Sylvia Wynter, especially in her musings on the “genres of the human.”12 We spend some time with Wynter here because her work is rife with implications for both contemporary theorizations of the Anthropocene and for animal studies. Moreover, her work also provides the epistemological basis for a critique of animal studies from a postcolonial/critical race standpoint, exemplified especially by Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus. While a detailed discussion of Wynter’s multifaceted works goes beyond the scope of this introduction, here are some of her basic points in a few broad strokes relevant for our purposes. First, Wynter talks about the historical shift from theocentrism to biocentrism in the post-­Copernican era, tracing the move from a conceptualization of homo as homo religiosus to homo politicus to its contemporary incarnation as homo oeconomicus. This is a specifically Eurocentric “genre” of being and becoming human—one which, she adds, is a “secular liberal monohumanist conception of our being human, its overrepresentation as the being of being human itself” (“Unparalleled Catastrophe” 31). Second, since the nineteenth century, the notion of the human has been defined “on the natural scientific model of a natural organism … a model that supposedly preexists—rather than coexists with—all the models of other human societies and their religions/ cultures” (21). This monohumanist concept has a uniquely “secular liberal” conception—the homo oeconomicus.13 Third, building on Fanon’s conjunction of ontogeny, phylogeny, and sociogeny, and on the works of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Wynter discusses her concept of the “autopoiesis of being hybridly human” (28). If eusocial systems like the beehive are purely biological systems, human eusociality differs in being “hybrid languaging cum storytelling (if biologically implemented) living systems” (29). The implications of this shift for cultural critique are quite significant. If the human is reconceptualized as a conglomerate of both bios and mythoi, the conceptualization of homo oeconomicus shifts to the “genre-specific” narrativization of a particular culture’s autopoietic field. As Wynter says: We shall therefore need … if my wager is right, to relativize the West’s hitherto secular liberal monohumanist conception of our

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  7 being human, its overrepresentation as the being of being human itself. We need to speak instead of our genres of being human. Once you redefine being human in hybrid mythoi and bios terms, and therefore in terms that draw attention to the relativity and original multiplicity of our genres of being human, all of a sudden what you begin to recognize is the central role that our discursive formations, aesthetic fields, and systems of knowledge must play in the performative enactment of all such genres of being hybridly human. You will begin to understand … that the role of all such knowledge-making practices with respect to each such genre is not to elaborate truth-ingeneral. Instead, the role of such knowledge-making practices is to elaborate the genre-specific (and/or culture-specific) orders of truth through which we know reality, from the perspective of the no less genre-specific who that we already are. (31–32) The continuous critique of this monohumanist narrative becomes very urgent for both theorizations of the Anthropocene and animal studies, as terms like species, human, and animal themselves emerge from different “genre-specific” orders of truth. Moreover, narratives of speciation in theorizations of the Anthropocene and animal studies often occlude the discursive constructions and linkages between race and species. The biocentric idea of the “human species” is often taken as a universal placeholder bringing back Eurocentric ideas of being human through a theoretical sleight of hand. Yusoff writes pertinently, Becoming post-racial through Anthropocenic speciation is the foil of the humanist trickster … one that places an injunction on the recognition on the recognition of historic modes of geopolitical mattering while maintaining unequal relations of power through continued environmental exposures. (3) To be sure, it isn’t our intention to call an avowed posthumanist like Wolfe a “humanist trickster.” Yet, his theorizations also emerge from a monohumanist standpoint. A particular line of considerations of animals in critical race and postcolonial theory, most notably Alexander Weheliye, Bénédicte Boisseron, and Neel Ahuja, have taken critics like Wolfe, Peter Singer, and Marjorie Spiegel to task for their monohumanism which leads to the unfortunate result of not considering “cultural and political formations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative versions of humanity” (Weheliye 10).14 Ahuja’s critique in Bioinsecurities is also relevant here: despite the avowed critique of the human, they may take for granted the apparent universality of the human lifeworld from which they flee, foreclosing attention to the processes that anthropomorphize

8  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya the human in order to characterize the human’s sovereign domination of the nonhuman. This move allows some posthumanist critics to project upon an outside, the nonhuman (in the form of environment, animal, machine, or other object), the possibility of resistance to anthropocentrism. Such thinking might be seen as a ruse of ­transcendence—an assumption that turning attention from the human to the nonhuman could bypass Marxist, feminist, critical race, and postcolonial critiques of imperial systems that proliferate inequality under the guise of universal human freedom. (viii) Such ruses of transcendence, as both Weheliye and Ahuja argue, often operate on two faulty epistemological premises: i) they rarely consider alternative politico-cultural formations outside the orbit of a Eurocentric narrative of humanity, and ii) they assume that black subjects or denizens of the post-colony have already entered the orbit of the monohumanist narrative through an expansive framework of human rights. The human “species” is conceptualized as a form of identity without difference, while the “animal” occupies the position of what Gossett calls “the new black.” The logical corollary of the second premise is that since the frontier of rights has already been delimited and specified as a privilege extended to all “humans,” animal rights becomes the next horizon of struggle. The provincial Eurocentric narrative of the rights-bearing person defined by law once again appears through the backdoor via a theoretical sleight of hand. Ahuja’s early call in “Postcolonial Critique” for “taking minority discourse as a site of species theorizing, thus decentering the privileged geographic sites of analysis” and “articulating examples of multispecies relations that shape cultures of imperialism” are important critical gestures that we take inspiration from (557). In fact, these theses can be taken as a guiding thread for postcolonial animalities, along with Phillip Armstrong’s observation that the most promising collaborations between postcolonial and animal studies lie in the production of sharp, politicized, culturally sensitive, and up-to-the-minute local histories of the roles that animals and their representations have played—or been made to play—in colonial and postcolonial transactions. (416) The last few years have seen a steady, varied, and impressive trickle of works within this trajectory.15 Yet these variations are rarely accounted for in discussions of the treatment of animals or animalities in postcolonial theory. For instance, in her essay on Al-Koni, McHugh is on the mark in stating that the interdisciplinary strategies of animal studies offer promise in reading the presence of animals in literary and cultural texts, although at times, both in this essay and beyond, she simplifies

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  9 the developments in recent trajectories in postcolonial animal studies to a singular vector alone. For instance, paying tribute to Huggan and ­Tiffin’s pioneering work, Woodward and McHugh argue that their model of human–animal studies offers a “different model based on intersectionality” that distinguishes this approach from postcolonial animal studies. They write that they want to “stay with the struggles in all their complexities, rather than to prioritize” (5). However, considering ­Huggan and Tiffin’s work as the foundational work of postcolonial animal studies erases the developments in this field subsequent to the publication of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, many of which offer multiple lines of intersectionality between species, race, queerness, and gender without prioritizing human over animal. Indeed, this emphasis on intersectionality is evident in the first of the two broad trajectories that we identify in the nascent treatment of animals and animalities in postcolonial theory. The first trajectory, epitomized by the works of Neel Ahuja, Claire Jean Kim, and Mel Chen, consider the imbrications of race, species, gender, and queerness from a specifically biopolitical standpoint. The three key concepts by these intersectional scholars that circumnavigate numerous essays in this book are “species critique” (Ahuja), “multioptic vision” (Kim), and “animacy hierarchy” (Chen). Ahuja describes his project of species critique as new tools for rethinking transnational circuits of power and identity. By tracing the circulation of nonhuman species as both figures and materialized bodies within the circuits of imperial biopower, species critique helps scholars reevaluate ‘minority’ discourses and enrich histories of imperial encounters. (“Postcolonial Critique” 556–57) One of the best examples of “species critique” is the chapter titled “Domesticated Immunity” in Bioinsecurities. In this chapter, Ahuja traces the public fears about polio in the US and how this impact “neoliberal geographies of the biomedical primate trade” (20). As he shows, fears about race (the xenophobic assumption that foreign matter would infect the settler nation from the outside, somewhat similar to Chen’s discussion of Chinese lead in Animacies), species (rhesus macaques were imported from India, housed at a research colony in Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico—what Ahuja calls a “colonial extraction of animal ­capital”—and indirectly influenced visual representations of primate invasions in American popular culture), and contagion intersect and get entangled in this transnational capitalist narrative. Ahuja also reverses the perspective in an earlier essay-length version of the chapter (“Postcolonial Critique”) when he writes about a wellknown 1939 Time Magazine cover picture of a rhesus by Hansel Mieth (also reproduced on the cover of Bioinsecurities): “Figuring the animal as viewer instead of viewed, as responsive swimmer instead of stranded

10  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya island dweller, we can begin to trace how monkeys rewrite agricultural and cultural landscapes in Puerto Rico” (560). This shift towards animal agency and interspecies connection is an important point that we value in our volume. Consider here, for instance, views about domestication. Usually domestication is thought of as an example of human mastery and sovereignty over nonhuman others. But, if we follow thinkers like Anna Tsing, could we not reconceptualize “human nature” as a coevolved interspecies relationship? Maybe, as she writes, the “domestication of humans is one place to begin” plotting such narratives (“Unruly Edges” 145). Such perspectival shifts, as evident in the works of Ahuja and Tsing, become very important for narrating entangled, co-­ constitutive narratives of “humans” and companion species. Both Kim and Chen consider the imbrications of race, species, culture, and sexuality in racialized cultures of the US, with Chen taking a more manifestly biopolitical approach. Kim’s “multi-optic” approach is the best critical rejoinder to the claim that postcolonial animal studies prioritizes humans over animals. For Kim, “multi-optic vision is a way of seeing that takes disparate justice claims seriously without privileging any one presumptively” (19). Kim says that such lenses reorient us towards an “ethics of mutual avowal, or open and active acknowledgement of connection with other struggles” (20). Categories like race and species impose taxonomical hierarchies, but multi-optic vision reveals both a “dense web of relationships” and multiple positionalities that undercut Manichean binaries. Of special interest here is Kim’s very nuanced explication of the debates and struggles surrounding live animal slaughter in San Francisco’s Chinatown.16 Chen’s multifaceted work—­simultaneously an intervention into queer theory, gender studies, disability theory, postcolonial theory, affect studies and animal studies—borrows the term “animacy” from linguistics and deploys it to interrogate “how the fragile distinction between animate and inanimate—that is, beyond human and animal—is relentlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinction” (2). Of particular interest is her exploration of “animacy hierarchy”—the conceptual arrangement of “human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (13). While this exploration of animacy hierarchy goes beyond animal studies per se (for instance, in her explication of lead’s racial matters), it also opens up nuanced analyses of the intersections of animality, race, and queerness. A good instance of this is her discussion of the representations of Fu Manchu, whose otherness is solidified through his “queer animality.”17 While the study of the imbrications of race and species through a bio/necropolitical lens is the first major trajectory we identify in studies of animals and animality in postcolonial theory, the second trajectory emerges from multispecies ethnography (Baruah, “Circulating Elephants” and “Volatile Ecologies”; Dave; Govindarajan; Jalais;

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  11 Khan; Kohn; Parrenas; Tsing, Mushroom; van Dooren).18 One of the major points of references for multispecies ethnography was Kirksey and Helmreich’s 2010 manifesto where they called for the consideration of nonhuman beings as ethnographic subjects with legible political lives and narrative biographies (545). Subsequent to the publication of their essay, a few major themes are noticeable in the burgeoning production by multispecies ethnographers. First, multispecies ethnographers study a wide range of affective states when they focus on interfaces between human and animal. As Govindarajan writes, such explorations are decidedly “uninnocent.” To be related to another, she continues, “is to be imbricated in their making even when one is indifferent to, disgusted by or hostile to them” (4). Indeed, multispecies relationality may reveal a variety of “moods” and “modes,” both salubrious and insalubrious (Dave and Singh 233). Second, multispecies ethnography also has a decolonizing impulse. Here decolonization has to be understood in an expansive sense—as a politics that “grows from attention to another way of being, one … that involves other kinds of living beings” (Kohn 14); and also offering “potential recognition that colonialism has brutal impacts for many of Earth’s inhabitants many of whom are not human” (Parrenas 24). Third, as Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird, and Matthew Chrulew have developed over a series of suggestive works (“Storied Places”; Extinction Studies), multispecies narratives reveal the “storied experiences” of both humans and nonhumans, showing multiple scales and temporalities of entanglement between different beings. Finally, contiguous to Derrida’s term l’animot, multispecies ethnography grounds analysis not in some generalized abstraction called “animal” but in the lives of actual, concrete animals.19 Such insights from multispecies ethnography resonate strongly with our considerations of animal figures in cultural production. Consider, for instance, the figuration of stray dogs in cultural theory and literary works. We zoom in on this figure here because it is a subject in four essays in this volume. In most cases where dogs are considered in animal studies, the figure that usually comes into the equation is the domesticated companion animal.20 This may have something to do, as Boitani writes, with the fact that many Western cultures see dogs only as faithful companions and helpers in a large number of human activities… We tend to see dogs as a product of the human capacity to bend nature to our needs and, as such, we like to think that dogs are acceptable only as far as they are under our full control. (v–vi) Moreover, the notion of breed dog itself, as Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton argue, is a distinctively modern “invention.” No wonder then that Western cultural constructs such as “English identity” are

12  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya founded on an “idealized vision of the home”—a vision solidified by both the nineteenth-century realist novel and the concomitantly growing practice of animal or pet keeping (Kreilkamp 1). While stray dogs aren’t absent in European and American cities, their traditional “animal geographies” are usually considered to be the city’s “back regions” (Philo 59). 21 Biopolitical regulations and concerns about zoonotic diseases, the visibility of animal feces and urine in public spaces, and noise have generally invisibilized the stray dog in many Western cities. 22 Moreover, the “invention” of the modern breed dog and the “imagined linkage of non-breed dogs with strays” by the end of the nineteenth century meant that being stray was gradually equated with “worthlessness” (McHugh, Dogs 139). This hesitation about stray dogs in Euroamerican animal theory pops up in some of the most unexpected places. Haraway’s When Species Meet and The Companion Species Manifesto, even when talking about “companion species” (a different concept from “companion animal”), consider largely domesticated dogs. Stray dogs are largely absent from her consideration, although she briefly talks about her “despair” when faced with the dog populations in Puerto Rico (Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto 91). Fortuny says pertinently: “Although Haraway exposes her struggle with the problem of the foreign street dog, she nevertheless does not engage … when place is a feral space rather than a human home, an animal shelter, or the wild” (Fortuny 288–89). The situation is very different in former colonial or postcolonial locales where strays are a ubiquitous part of the urban landscapes. This is not to say that biopolitical regulations about strays do not exist in colonial/postcolonial locales (see Mikhail 88–116). But in such locales, such as South Asia, rural and urban spaces can be thought of as “trans-­ species” environments (Narayanan 3). In these environments, human populations relate in complex, ambivalent ways to the presence of stray dogs. While a multiplicity of modes of interspecies cohabitation exist (strays can ambivalently oscillate between feral beings or as neighborhood/community pets), many people shy away from strays which are constructed in the popular imagination as feral, vicious animals. Moreover, strays are also associated with filth and impurity because of their proximity to garbage dumps as sources of food. Religious, class, and caste prohibitions, based on constructs of purity and pollution, exist with relation to dogs. Slum dwellers in Indian cities, for instance, are constructed as less than human because of their proximity with canines (13). The stray dog exists in a wide continuum of possible relationships in-between nature and culture. 23 Exploration of these interzones is one of the central aims of this volume. While we have talked about the philosophical and political erasure of the bar between humans and nonhuman animals earlier, we would

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  13 like to conclude this introduction by summarizing some of key approaches that, we believe, a project of postcolonial animalities must undertake: 1 A critique of monohumanist conceptions of the human and considerations of the co-constitutiveness of imaginaries of the human with grammars of animality in the realm of biosocial life. 2 To decolonize existing conceptualizations of the human–animal relationship. 24 3 To consider the material representation of animals within the realm of colonial/postcolonial cultural production from the perspective of ethical alterity and alternative narratives of anti/postcolonial politics. 4 To continue exploring the 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. 5 To historicize and understand multi/inter/transspecies encounters, affiliations and connections in and through their localized dimensions 6 To study human–animal encounters in their varied affective relationalities (both “positive” and “negative”). 7 To consider how modes of representing animals, including located forms of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, help us think/be/ live with animals. 25 One final caveat before we turn to brief descriptions of the essays. Our volume calls for a greater engagement with the representation of multispecies encounters and relationships in cultural texts beyond a narrow Europhone archive of animal representations in postcolonial studies. Over the past decade, texts like Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace, Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller, Witi ­ nimal’s People recur in Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider, and Indra Sinha’s A most discussions of postcolonial animal studies. Contiguously, very few non-Europhone texts, with the exception of Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha,” have been discussed by scholars of postcolonial studies who focus on animality. Although we have an essay on The Hungry Tide and “Pterodactyl,” the bulk of the essays selected for this volume consciously try to highlight lesser known texts and relatively understudied regions (post-Ottoman Turkey, ­Cambodia, Haiti) within the domain of postcolonial theory.26 Here we echo Lazarus’s critique of postcolonial studies that to read across postcolonial studies is to find, to an extraordinary degree, the same questions being asked, the same methods, techniques and conventions being used, the same methods, techniques,

14  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya and conventions being used, the same concepts mobilized, the same conclusions drawn, about a remarkably small number of literary works… (22) While this critique isn’t entirely applicable to a nascent, hybrid field like postcolonial animalities, and while some amount of “canonization” is bound to take place in any knowledge field, we believe that this approach can yield fresh insights if we are willing to look at new texts, read older, “classic” texts in defamiliarizing ways, and consider literary traditions that are non-Europhone as well. This has been a guiding principle for the selection of essays for this volume.

Plan of the Work We have grouped the ten essays in this collection under four major heads: “Theoretical Considerations on Postcolonial Animalities,” “Dogs,” “Megafauna,” and “Human–Animal Interzones.” The first section has two essays that cover issues and debates pertaining to postcolonial biopolitics/zoopolitics. The second section has three articles that consider, historicize, and interrogate the appearance of a commonly humanized animal—the dog. The third section has two essays on “charismatic” ­animals—crocodiles and elephants. The last section reduces the scale and looks at smaller animals—snakes, birds, bees, and mice—and considers postcolonial fictions representing human–animal mutations. The texts discussed, in keeping with our transnational ambitions, range across a variety of geographical locations: dystopian novels from South Africa, a novel about elephants set in South India, texts about dogs from Israel/Palestine, South Asia, and post-Ottoman Turkey, snake mythologies from Cambodia and Laos, crocodile horror films from Australia, and animal fictions based in Haiti. The essays do not always speak in the same voice or utilize the same theoretical frameworks; however, their broad concerns circle around the issues we discussed above. We begin “Theoretical Considerations on Postcolonial Animalities” with Gautam Basu Thakur’s article.27 Strongly informed by the Lacanian psychoanalytic trajectory, Basu Thakur suggests that even with the “animal question” dominating our twenty-first-century critical mindscapes, it can be argued that we have merely replaced the positive form of Enlightenment anthropocentrism—“I am the master of animals”— with a more self-consciously negative albeit feel-good form of neoliberal anthropocentrism: “I am guilty for mistreating/misrepresenting animals but by admitting this guilt I still am.” Basu Thakur’s essay presents a case for jettisoning this logic by expanding the focus of postcolonial zoocriticism via inclusion of animals unmarked by the signifier, that is, animals which function as the excluded-included of the socius and, therefore, are responsible for simultaneously disrupting and reconstituting the social.

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  15 If Basu Thakur explores nonrelational forms of animality, Amit Baishya’s article changes direction slightly and considers questions of relationality and similitude between humans and animals. Baishya considers three anticolonial/postcolonial texts—Manto’s “The Dog of ­Tetwal,” Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Pontecorvo’s The ­Battle of Algiers—from the standpoint of animalities. Focusing on a dog’s tail’s capacity to signify in Manto’s text, Baishya argues that the establishment of ethical relations between human and animal is predicated on the ways through which humans anthropocentrically attribute meaning/meaninglessness to the signing bodies of animals. Focusing then on the “polyvalent-reversible” use of insect metaphors in Fanon and Pontecorvo, he argues that anticolonial politics can also be read affirmatively through an “animal” dimension. These texts show how animality is not just a reductive metaphor for dehumanization in anticolonial humanist works but a potential herald for alternative imaginaries of biopolitical collectivity. “Dogs” begins with Efe Khayyat’s essay. Taking its lead from Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I am, the article addresses two accounts of the dog massacre of Istanbul in 1910: Catherine Pinguet’s Les Chiens d’Istanbul and Serge Avedikian’s award-winning short film The Barking Island (Chienne d’histoire, while addressing perspectives of several witnesses and critics, including Kurdish philosopher and Young Turk Abdullah Cevdet, caricaturist SEM, Mark Twain, and Sir Mark Sykes. Khayyat argues that at the heart of The Barking Island (Chienne d’histoire) is an impossible comparison: the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the massacre of Istanbul’s stray dogs in 1910. The deportation of Istanbul’s stray dogs, with European guidance and due to hygienic requirements of a modernizing city, to a small island off the coast, where the animals starved to death in 1910, seems to prefigure the Armenian genocide according to Chienne d’histoire. The massacre of dogs of ­Istanbul was hardly recognized as worthy of history, despite more than thirty thousand deaths. Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi’s essay offers a comparative reading of two texts: Only Yesterday, the 1945 novel by Nobel Prize laureate SY Agnon, and the 2008 Oscar nominated animated documentary Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman. In each of these texts, dogs have a dual presence, as both real presences and a haunting syllepsis. To contextualize the significance of these representations, they survey appearances of dogs in other post/colonial representations and claim that in Israeli culture, the dog has a recurring role as an intersection between Jewish and Zionist histories, the holocaust and colonialism, and private and collective traumas. Suvadip Sinha’s chapter presents readings of Waryam Singh Sandhu’s “I am Feeling Fine Now” and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Lubdhak, originally written in Punjabi and Bangla, respectively. Set against periods of

16  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya political violence, these stories of canine characters provoke us to think how an ethical recognition of animal pain can enable an intersubjective and trans-species engagement with precarity and vulnerability. In Sandhu’s story, which has the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement as its backdrop, humans need to kill their cohabitant dog in order to survive in the climate of terror. Bhattacharya’s novella presents terrified dogs and other animals that will soon be eradicated from the city of Kolkata. Notwithstanding certain humanist and anthropomorphizing gestures, the aural-scape of these narratives, Sinha argues, urge us to listen to the dogs’ barking not as the other of human language; rather, only an ethico-­ political aural attunement to these dying and suffering dogs’ barking can potentially pave a way out of dehumanized anthropocentrism. “Megafauna” begins with Isaac Rooks’ article. He analyzes how Australian films about killer crocodiles use horror conventions to engage anxieties about identity and belonging in a settler colonial society. These texts contribute to the nationalist project of constructing a mythic image of Australia as an unpeopled land where individuals must battle indigenous beasts. Through discussion of these films’ presentations of predatory animals and formidable landscapes, this chapter assesses how these texts allegorically engage the relationship of Anglo-Australians to the continent’s Aboriginal population. It also examines the ecological fantasies offered by these films, as they upend and reaffirm Western humanist orthodoxies justifying environmental and colonial violence. Jason Sandhar’s article explores the question of how power circulates between conservationists, rural communities, and animals. He suggests that Tania James’ foray into the mind of a traumatized elephant in her 2015 novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, imagines the animal’s lived experience as that which is unknowable yet understandable to her reader. The essay explores how this strategy complicates both the human/animal divide and the class inequities embedded in Indian wildlife conservation. He then argues that the texts’ refusal to resolve the issues it raises nuances the political and social entanglements that structure local communities as spaces that thwart resolutions to human–animal conflicts prescribed by First World conservationists. We begin “Human–Animal Interzones” with Rebecca Krasner’s article. Krasner examines the role of the animal in the works of contemporary Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière; while animals and animal imagery are omnipresent in Laferrière’s texts, this question has not been addressed in previous scholarship. The article brings together theoretical strands from posthumanism and animal studies in order to rearticulate the status of bare life. Throughout Laferrière’s quasi-­ autobiographical novel cycle, she argues, the human’s proximity to animals serves to break down not only the hierarchical binary between the two but also the distinction between zoe and bios, between “mere life” and “more life.” For Laferrière, bodily or even bare life existence is not

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  17 antithetical to meaningful living; rather, it represents the essential part of human experience that has been occulted by Western traditions of rationality. In taking animals seriously, Laferrière’s work ultimately allows us to make a claim for the validity of the bodily and the arational— contesting the reductive logic of Agambenian bare life and reimagining sheer material aliveness as a potential site of (political) power. Despite a recent focus on animal lives in postcolonial ecocriticism, Madeleine Wilson argues, the animal body remains a potential site of anxiety in relation to the postcolonial thanks to histories of placing colonial life on the animal spectrum. South African writer Lauren ­Beukes uses human, monstrous, and animal bodies to explore the legacy of the state’s dehumanizing language and policies of the twentieth century in her postapartheid dystopias Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010). Wilson’s paper considers Beukes’s consistent effacement of the border between human and nonhuman worlds, and argues that the continuing legacies of human rights violations by violating the structural integrity of the human subject in her fiction. We end with Jean Langford’s article. She argues that figures of animality evoked in narratives of war or state terror include violent, predatorial brutes and abject creatures who are subjected to c­ aptivity, forced labor, or slaughter. A third figure of animality appears in the tales of those who survived war and terror in Southeast Asia: the wild animal as transmigrated ancestor or capriciously sympathetic spirit. What do such animals offer to those who are threatened with a ­violence unrestrained by law or “humanitarian” ethics? The magical powers of these beasts have the potential to rewrite the biopolitical story of humanity and animality that prevails in much contemporary social analysis.

Notes 1 Postcolonial theorists often deploy states of animality as metaphors as well. A good example is Achille Mbembe’s chapter “Out of this World” in On the Postcolony. The first aspect emerges in the following passage: “…flesh is not transformed into meat only when it comes from an animal. Where power has a carnivorous aspect killing an animal and killing a human being proceed from the same logic” (200). There is an equivalence here between the human and the animal; a logic of undifferentiation unites the two categories. However, in his description of forests in Africa in the same chapter, Mbembe also provides a hallucinatory tableau of a horrifying colonial bestiary. He talks about “pythons twenty or thirty feet long,” gorillas—“hybrid animals…half-human, half-beast, with enormous hands, powerful canine teeth…,” hippopotamuses with “wide and ugly mouths,” crocodiles, “disgusting monsters with thick hide,” and legions of “ferocious, voracious ants” (184–5). The profusion of details of the luxurious flora and the forbidding forms of megafauna and insect life, allied with the hallucinatory power of Mbembe’s shimmering prose, conjures an impression of Africa as a topos of horror for the colonizing gaze. But actual animals exist only as a backdrop and are read in terms of their forbidding alterity. Their singularity

18  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya is not contended with. Although Mbembe talks frequently about the conflation of the “primitive” with the “meta-text of the animal or the discourse on the ‘beast’”(2), the comparisons remain at the analogical level and serve to reemphasize the devaluation of human forms of life. 2 Recently, there has been a move towards “claiming animal” by scholar-­ activists of disability and debility. Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden is a good example (Taylor was born with arthrogryposis and uses a wheelchair). In a chapter titled “Claiming Animal,” Taylor writes: I feel animal in my embodiment, and this feeling is one of connection, not shame. Recognizing my animality has been…a way of claiming the dignity in the way my body and other non-normative and vulnerable bodies move, look and experience the world around them. It is a claiming of my animalized parts and movements, an assertion that my animality is integral to my humanity. (115) Taylor emphasizes that the analogy between animality and humanity shouldn’t be read metaphorically; instead, this sense of rehabilitated animality represents encounters with alternative ways of being in the world. Thus, when Taylor rummages through her purse for her phone with her face, she is reminded of “pigs who root with their noses, birds who build nests with their beaks, and Bailey, my dog…who likes to make his bed” (116). Since Taylor’s dog doesn’t have hands—hands being one of the metaphysical shibboleths about the distinctiveness of the “human”—he uses his mouth to create his sleeping pile. This helps Taylor recognize that despite their “sensorial species differences,” there is a shared kinship between “human” and “animal.” 3 The corpus of animal studies texts that read literary and cultural texts is huge, and it is impossible to provide a comprehensive list here. Besides the pathbreaking works of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Donna Haraway, we list only a few notable signposts that have influenced different essays in this volume: Lippit; Lacapra; Calarco; Wolfe, Animal Rites and Before the Law; Pick; McHugh, Animal Stories; Oliver; Seshadri; Lundblad, The Birth of the Jungle and Animalities; Benjamin; Lemm; Massumi; Weil; Heise; Shukin; Rohman; Grusin; ­Wadiwel; Chrulew and Wadiwel; and Timofeeva. 4 For another attempt at mapping the field in terms of critical animal studies, human–animal studies, and posthumanism, see Wright (11–14). 5 For biosemiotic approaches, see Kohn and Hoffmeyer. Drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, biosemiotics focuses on the communicative potentials of all forms of life. For a philosophical consideration of ethology, see Despret. 6 As she resonantly writes in Making Kin: “We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities.” (97) 7 Govindarajan writes pertinently: “…the promise of posthumanism must engage the lessons of postcolonialism and vice versa” (179). 8 See Gossett for an explication of this term. 9 We maintain the slash here because we do not want to read posthuman as a temporal category, but rather as a potential condition immanent to colonized humanities. 10 Wynter draws this distinction from Judith Butler’s “illuminating redefinition of gender as praxis rather than noun” (33). 11 See Ahuja’s reading of skins and masks in “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World”

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  19 12 Also see Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.” 13 Wynter’s linkage of homo oeconomicus with the neocolonial order of things can also be an important intervention in debates on the Anthropocene. In “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” she discusses a 2007 report in Time magazine on global warming. This report reveals two things—“that global warming is a result of human activities; and, second, that this problem began in about 1750 but accelerated from about 1950 onward…the date 1750 points to the Industrial Revolution. But the article, which builds on the expertise of a U.N. climate panel, fails to explain why global warming accelerated in 1950. What happened by 1950?… The majority of the world’s peoples who had been colonial subjects … had now become politically independent. At that time, we who, after our respective anticolonial uprisings, were almost all now subjects of postcolonial nations, nevertheless fell into the mimetic trap of what Jean Price-Mars calls…“collective Bovaryism”—because the West is now going to reincorporate us neocolonially, and thereby mimetically, by telling us that the problem with us wasn’t that we’d been imperially subordinated, wasn’t that we’d been both socioculturally dominated and economically exploited, but that we were underdeveloped. The West said: “Oh, well, no longer be a native but come and be Man like us! Become homo oeconomicus!”” (20). Later, discussing the symbolic death of the global poor, she says: “If we take the report put forth by the climate panel in Time seriously, what we find is this: the authors of the report…logically assume that the referent-we— whose normal behaviors are destroying the habitability of our planet—is that of the human population as a whole. The ‘we’ who are destroying the planet in these findings are not understood as the referent-we of homo oeconomicus…Therefore, the proposals that they’re going to give for change are going to be devastating! And most devastating of all for the global poor, who have already begun to pay the greatest price. Devastating, because the proposals made, if nonconsciously so, are made from the perspective of homo oeconomicus and its attendant master discipline of economics, whose behavior-regulatory metaphysical telos of mastering Malthusian natural scarcity is precisely the cause of the problem itself.” (24). For a recent extension of her insights to debates on the Anthropocene, see Yusoff. 14 “Man” (note the capitalization) is Wynter’s term for the monohumanist Eurocentric narrative of the human. 15 See, for instance, Gandhi, “Meat: A Short Cultural History of Animal Welfare at the Fin-de-Siècle” in Affective Communities; Wenzel; Kim, Steinwand; Boisseron; Farrier; Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, “Abu Zubaydah”; DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures”; Woodward; Mahvunga; Puar and L ­ ivingston; Price; Moolla; Van Sittert and Swart; Saliha; Iheka; Mwangi, and Nixon, “Slow Violence, Neoliberalism and the Environmental Picaresque” in Slow Violence. 16 For contiguous arguments, also see Boisseron (xiii–iv). 17 For Chen’s discussion of animal theory, see Animacies (98–102). 18 Haraway’s works on “companion species” in When Species Meet and “making kin” in Staying with the Trouble are key reference points for a range of multispecies ethnographers. 19 The l’animot lets “the plural animals (les animaux) (be) heard in the singular.” Thus, the term “l’animot” does not represent a reductive “single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity,” but rather references within “itself the heterogeneity and difference that exists among animals” (47).

20  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya 20 For example, see Kuzniar and Morey. Ahuja’s critique in “Abu Zubaydah” resonates here: “It is no surprise that companion animals, farmed animals, and charismatic ‘wildlife’ species — physiologically close enough to humans for us to imagine certain interests—appear most often in animal studies” (144). 21 See also the discussion on curs and mongrels in Worboys et al. (50–52). 22 For a classic study of stray dogs in Baltimore, see Beck. 23 An example of such ambivalent oscillations in the interzone between nature and culture can be seen in Malik Sajad’s graphic novel about militarized occupation in Indian-occupied Kashmir, Munnu (see Baishya). 24 Our call here shares affinities with critiques of human–animal studies emerging from critical indigenous frameworks. For instance, Geroux writes: For those of us engaged in various projects under the horizon of critical indigeneity the “encounter” with non-humanity should not provoke articulations of the so-called animal question: in this space, there’s no Heideggerian poverty-in-world to elaborate on, no Derridean human/­ animal abyss to deconstruct…As settler colonialism marches forward both conceptually and territorially, it places indigeneity on one side of a culture/nature binary; the binary is of course harmful and toxic, and is itself a distinctively Occidental artifact, but (at least) at the heart of its ideological artifice is an acknowledgment and recognition of an unbroken humanimal bond. An important aspect of decolonizing work is in seizing or really taking back the conceptualization of that bond, in reoccupying and deploying it in terms that continue to reject all settler binaries (for example in avoiding a discussion of something like the “re-­ enchantment” of a world that was never made instrumental and essentially empty in the first place). (1) 25 For being and living with animals, see Haraway, Companion Species, 5; and Das. Like Daston and Mitman, we are interested more in the morphos rather than the anthropos in anthropomorphism. 26 For all its transnational ambitions, the bio/necropolitical trajectory in postcolonial animal studies has by and large dealt with discourses of race and species in the context of American empire. 27 This essay is a condensed version of a longer chapter that will appear in Basu Thakur’s forthcoming Postcolonial Lack.

Works Cited Ahuja, Neel. “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar.” Social Text 29.1(106), Spring 2011, pp. 127–49. ———. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire and the Government of Species. Duke UP, 2016. ———. “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.” PMLA 124.2, 2009, pp. 556–63. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the ‘Post-in Postcolonial the ‘Post’ in Postmodern?” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Edited Padmini Mongia. Arnold, 1996, pp. 55–71. Armstrong, Phillip. “The Postcolonial Animal.” Society and Animals 10.4, 2002, pp. 413–19. Baishya, Amit R. “Endangered (and Endangering) Species: Exploring the ­A nimacy Hierarchy in Malik Sajad’s Munnu.” South Asian Review 39.2, 2018, pp. 50–69.

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  21 Barker, Clare. Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, ­Metaphor and Materiality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Baruah, Maan. “Circulating Elephants: Unpacking the Geographies of a ­Cosmopolitan Animal.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39.4, 2014, pp. 559–73. ———. “Volatile Ecologies: Towards a Material Politics of Human-Animal ­Relations.” Environment and Planning A 46.6, 2014, pp. 1462–78. Basu Thakur, Gautam. Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus. SUNY Press (forthcoming 2020). Beck, Alan M. The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free Ranging Urban Animals. Purdue UP, 1973. Benjamin, Andrew. Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh UP, 2011. Boisseron, Bénédicte. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. ­Columbia UP, 2018. Boitani, Luigi. “Foreword.” Free Ranging Dogs and Wildlife Conservation. ­E dited Matthew Gomper. Oxford UP, 2014, pp. v–vi. Calarco, Matthew. Thinking through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford UP, 2015. Carsten, Janet. “What Kinship Does—and How.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8.2, 2013, pp. 254–51. Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated Joan Pinkham. Monthly Review Press, 2000. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Duke UP, 2012. Chrulew, Matthew and Dinesh Wadiwel. Editors. Foucault and Animals. Brill, 2016. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace: A Novel. Penguin, 2000. ———. The Lives of Animals. Princeton UP, 2016. Das, Veena. “Being-Together with Animals: Death, Violence and Non-cruelty in Hindu Imagination.” Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements. Edited Penny Dransart. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 17–31. Daston, Lorraine and Greg Mitman. Editors. Thinking with Animals: New ­Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Columbia UP, 2005. Dave, Naisargi. “Witness: Humans, Animals and the Politics of Becoming.” Cultural Anthropology 29.3, 2014, pp. 443–56. Dave, Naisargi and Bhrigupati Singh. “On the Killing and Killability of ­A nimals: Nonmoral Thoughts for the Anthropology of Ethics.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35.2, April 2015, pp. 232–45. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worlding in the ­A nthropocene.” Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. Edited E. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and ­A nthony Carrigan. Routledge, 2016, pp. 352–72. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated Marie-Louise Mallet. Fordham UP, 2008. Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Translated Brett Buchanan. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Devi, Mahasweta. “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” Imaginary Maps. Translated Gayatri C. Spivak. Routledge, 1994, pp. 95–196.

22  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2008. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2004. Farrier, David. “Disaster’s Gift: Anthropocene and Capitalocene Temporalities in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha.” Interventions 18.3, 2016, pp. 450–66. Flaugh, Christian. Operation Freak: Narrative, Identity, and the Spectrum of Bodily Abilities. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012. Fortuny, Kim. “Islam, Westernization and Posthumanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.2, Spring 2014, pp. 271–97. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship. Duke UP, 2006. Geroux, Henry. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Decolonizing Animal Studies.” Humanimalia, 10.2. Accessed 23 February 2019. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide: A Novel. Mariner Books, 2006. Gossett, Che. “Blackness, Animality and the Unsovereign.” versobooks.com. Accessed 20 January 2018. Govindarajan, Radhika. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. U of Chicago P, 2018. Grusin, Richard. Editor. After Extinction. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. ———. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. U of Chicago P, 2016. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Science of Life and the Life of Signs. Translated Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favreau. Edited Donald Favreau. U of Chicago P, 2009. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, ­Animals, Environment Routledge, 2010. Iheka, Cajetan. Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge UP, 2017. Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider. Heinemann, 2005. Jalais, Annu. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sunderbans. Routledge, 2011. Khan, Naveeda. “Dogs and Humans and What Earth Can Be: Filaments of Muslim Ecological Thought.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.3, 2014, pp. 245–64. Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural World. Cambridge UP, 2015. Kirksey, S. Eben and Stefan Helmreich. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25.4, 2010, pp. 545–76. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human. U of California P, 2013.

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  23 Kreilkamp, Ivan. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals and the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2018. Kuzniar, Alice. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. U of Chicago P, 2006. Lacapra, Dominick. History at Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Cornell UP, 2009. Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge UP, 2011. Lemm, Vanessa. Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the ­Animality of the Human Being. Fordham UP, 2009. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Towards a Rhetoric of Wildlife. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Lundblad, Michael. The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford UP, 2013. ———. “Introduction: The End of the Animal—Literary and Cultural Animalities.” Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies beyond the Human. Edited Michael Lundblad. Edinburgh UP, 2018, pp. 1–21. Mahvunga, Clapperton C. “Vermin Being: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game.” Social Text 29.1, 2011, pp. 151–76. Marvin, Garry and Susan McHugh. “In it Together: An Introduction to Human-­ Animal Studies.” Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. Edited Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh, Routledge, 2014, pp. 1–9. Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Duke UP, 2014. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. U of California P, 2001. McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. U of ­M innesota P, 2011. ———. Dog. Reaktion Books, 2004. ———. “Hybrid Species and Literatures: Ibrahim Al-Koni’s ‘Composite Apparition’.” Comparative Critical Studies 9.3, 2012, pp. 285–302. Mda, Zakes. The Whale Caller: A Novel. Picador, 2006. Mikhail, Alan. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. Oxford UP, 2016. Moolla, Fiona. Editored. Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms. Wits UP, 2016. Morey, Anne-Janine. Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves. Penn State UP, 2014. Mwangi, Evan. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics. University of Michigan P, 2019. Narayanan, Yamini. “Street Dogs at the Intersection of Colonialism and ­I nformality: ‘Subaltern Animism’ as a Posthuman Critique of Indian Cities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35.3, 2017, pp. 475–94. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2013. Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. Columbia UP, 2009. Parrenas, Juno. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Duke UP, 2018. Philo, Chris. “Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions.” Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the ­Nature-Culture Borderlands. Edited Jody Emel and Jennifer Wolch. Verso, 1998, pp. 51–71.

24  Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. Columbia UP, 2011. Pick, Anat and Guinevere Narraway. “Introduction: Intersecting Ecology and Film.” Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human. Edited Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway. Berghahn, 2013, pp. 1–18. Price, Jason. Animals and Desire in South African Fiction: Biopolitics and the Resistance to Colonization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Puar, Jasbir and Julie Livingston. “Interspecies.” Social Text 29.1, 2011, pp. 3–14. Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. Columbia UP, 2009. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Random House, 2006. Sajad, Malik. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. Fourth Estate, 2015. Saliha, Sara. “The Animal You See: Why Look at Animals in Gaza?” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16.3, 2014, pp. 299–324. Seshadri, Kalpana R. HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. U of Minnesota P, 2012. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. U of Minnesota P, 2009. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People: A Novel. Simon and Schuster, 2009. Steinwand, Jonathan. “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Zakes Mda and Amitav Ghosh.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Edited Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 182–99. Taylor, Sunaura. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. The New Press, 2017. Timofeeva, Oxana. The History of Animals: A Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2018. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2017. ———. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities 1, 2012, pp. 141–54. Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. ­Columbia UP, 2014. Van Dooren, Thom and Deborah Bird Rose. “Storied-Places in a Multispecies City.” Humanimalia 3.2, 2012, pp. 1–27. Accessed 23 February 2019. Van Dooren, Thom, Deborah Bird, Rose and Matthew Chrulew. Editors. Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations. Columbia UP, 2017. Van Sittert, Lance and Sandra Swart. Editors. Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of Southern Africa. Brill, 2008. Wadiwel, Dinesh. The War against Animals. Brill, 2015. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014. Weil, Kari. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? Columbia UP, 2012. Wenzel, Jennifer. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South ­Africa and Beyond. U of Chicago P, 2009. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. U of Chicago P, 2003.

Introduction: Postcolonial Animalities  25 ———. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. U of Chicago P, 2013. ———. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities.” PMLA 124.2, 2009, pp. 564–75. ———. What Is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota P, 2009. Woodward, Wendy. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern ­African Narratives. Wits UP, 2008. Woodward, Wendy and Susan McHugh. “Introduction.” Indigenous ­C reatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts. Edited Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 1–12. Worboys, Michael, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton. The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian England. Johns Hopkins UP, 2018. Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals and Gender in the Age of Terror. U of Georgia P, 2015. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Edited Katherine McCittrick. Duke UP, 2015, pp. 9–89. ———. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3, Fall 2003, pp. 257–337. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. U of Minnesota P, 2018.

Section I

Theoretical Considerations on Postcolonial Animalities

2 “A Strangeness beyond Reckoning” The Animal as Surplus in Postcolonial Literature Gautam Basu Thakur Introduction: The Postcolonial Animal In their 2010 book Postcolonial Ecocriticism, widely recognized as a ­founding contribution in the subfield of postcolonial zoocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin posit: “if the wrongs of colonialism—its legacies of continuing human inequalities, for instance—are to be ­addressed, still less to be redressed, then the very category of the human, in relation to ­animals and environment, must also be brought under scrutiny” (18). At the center of their analysis is the figure of the Enlightenment Man whose subject constitution is predicated on identifying the animal as the self-­ consolidating negative other. In other words, the animal is the symbolic armature of ­Enlightenment Man-making and central to the z­ oological foundations of modernity. To paraphrase Huggan and Tiffin, the last four hundred odd years of this history can be schematically summarized as ­follows: during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the animal helped trace the ­margins of a normatized Enlightenment European identity. Thereafter, during Europe’s colonial expansions, animals mediated ­metropolitan relationship with the far-flung colonies by representing the colonized as ­dehumanized and/or by nominating entire cultures as bestial (Sotadic or otherwise). Beginning the end of the nineteenth century, however, the animal was repurposed into self-reflexive discourses about the hidden/ repressed animality of (European) Man himself. The white, able-bodied, European Enlightenment Man is the “master of beasts” exacting unconditional sovereignty over the animal within and outside in order to claim the normative (as himself) against racial, gendered, and malformed animalistic human others. The animal is the dialectical other vis-à-vis whom human identity is formed, and communitarian values grounded. Looking back from the late twentieth century, Postcolonial Ecocriticism puts this normalizing discourse under scrutiny. While the Enlightenment trajectory of humanist essentialism ­demanded the repression of the animal and animalistic in all its latent and recrudescent forms, it is not until our own century, in the urgent contexts of eco-catastrophe and the extinction of many non-human species, that a radical re-drawing of this foundational relationship has occurred. (134)

30  Gautam Basu Thakur Enlightenment’s treatment of the animal was therefore not simple epistemic exercises, but, rather, as Huggan and Tiffin show, it was responsible for violently destroying or marginalizing “other human societies,” in order to assert the “‘natural’ supremacy” of men over women, and colonizers over the colonized (135, 138, 158). Since the publication of Huggan and Tiffin’s book, postcolonial ­criticism has identified the habitual use of the animal as a “ ­ transparent metaphor” for sustaining unequal power relations, and therefore moved the animal to the forefront of its disciplinary concerns with difference and Othering (Heise 640). Broadly speaking, postcolonial ­zoocriticism examines representations of animals within colonialism, including ­imperial use of animals for dehumanizing the colonized and the ­latter’s use of animals to question imperial power and reconvene alternative imaginaries of nationalist or nativist sovereignties (Huggan and T ­ iffin 158). In the words of another critic duo, DeLoughrey and Handley, ­postcolonial zoocriticism routinely underlines the role played by the ­animal in unraveling the Empire’s structural exclusions of gendered, ethnic, sexual, and racial minorities and examines the “ethics of resistance” arranged through animal figures against the colonial politics of apartheid and exclusion (32). Along with the Third World subaltern, the animal today has become central to postcolonial interrogations of representational politics and a clarion cause for “political advocacy” (DeKoven 367).1 For me, the question remains: what animal are we talking about? That is, are animals in discourse real, imagined, or symbolic? Inscribed under the sign of the human, the latter either as its name-giver and/or as its ­deliverer, the animal cannot exist other than as symbolic prop ­facilitating subject-composition or as the imaginary other in whom I  first see my image. If there is a real animal, it is neither in the text nor in the readings of critics because the (real) animal cannot exist in l­anguage. I am not saying that the signifier/word murders the animal-in-itself or the signifier fails to cohesively grasp the signified, but, rather, that the real animal can only exist as a rupture in the symbolic—its fearful symmetry ­ nbearable beyond the possibility of human symbolization and its excess u to human sight. I concur with Rosi Braidotti: the real animal is always an anomaly, unavailable in language, and apprehended only as disruption in speech or as a tear in cognition. In other words, the animal in language is a presence or semblance underlining the absence or impossibility of the (real) animal. The real animal eludes, evades, and resists human nomenclature; it exists only as a missed encounter. Insofar as the real animal is not in relation to the logic of the signifier, commanded to speech or desire via castration complex, it exists in non-relation to the human. This gap between humans and animals has nothing to do with the privilege of humans as subjects capable of speech, rather paradoxically because of human subjection in language. Our alienation in language is the fundamental reason why the real animal remains elusive.

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  31 This theoretical perspective is however absent from Huggan and Tiffin’s analysis, and this absence is peculiar because Huggan and Tiffin are curious about the real animal in contrast to the symbolic. The duo notes this when stating subject-making in contrast to the animal is never complete and never secure, rather the idea of the human is persistently “haunted” or “dogged” by “the wild, savage and [the] animalistic” (134). Soon after, in their soulful reading of J.M. Cotezee’s Elizabeth Costello and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, Huggan and Tiffin observe the idea of the animal handed down to the general public by Caretsian dualism, science and Christian theology actually obfuscate “animals as animals” (160). They emphasize instead the necessity of liberating animals from their “metonymic, metaphorical or fabular enclosure[s]” (154). But it is in referencing Steve Baker’s Postmodern Animal that they come closest to articulating the impossibility of the real animal in the symbolic. Sadly, though, they never quite manage to hit this point. Far worse, they misrecognize Baker’s complaint as an issue of verisimilitude. They suggest apropos their misreading of Baker the need for sincerity in representing animals in cultural texts. In my opinion, however, Baker does not ask that we make our representations of animals more real by loosening our anthropocentric perspectives, but, rather, his singular claim is that real animals are impossible or unavailable to man. In Baker’s words, the animal points “to the unavailability rather than the inescapability of an anthropocentric perspective” (83). The “real” animals Baker speaks of exist only in absentia or when present in confrontational (non-)relation to humans. It is good that the real animal does not exist because its presence can only result in our ex-sistence. Our anthropocentric cocoon is a defense against such traumatic confrontations with the real animal. Postcolonial zoocriticism, and to a large extent the broader field of animal studies, has failed to understand this and have remained reticent about this (real) animal. Their animal consciousness serves their desire for rescuing animal victims and rewriting a new narrative of our anthropo(s)cene history of (colonial) modernity. However without discounting discussions about the discursive appro­ priations of animals for dominating racial, gendered, and deformed others, I wish to inaugurate in this chapter a parallel discussion about the real animal as substantive of the charnel reality of (postcolonial) planetary ecology. Taking cue from Timothy Morton’s suggestion that we recognize the volatile character of the ecological above our habitual celebrations of Nature as harmonious or restorative (“They are Here” 188; also The Ecological Thought), and Gayatri Spivak’s notion of planetarity (see Death), which, as I understand it, calls attention to the ­irrevocable subject-destabilizing unhomeliness (unheimlich) of the planet, I propose below a necessary counterpoint to habitual postcolonial readings of animals. Specifically, I propose moving beyond studying animals as neglected and/or marginalized, an exercise that reinscribes the animal back within human-oriented analytics or displaces them

32  Gautam Basu Thakur further via romanticization of their irreducible naturality (something object-oriented ontology does routinely), in preference of animals that are unassimilable by human imagination. Animals that interest me most are ones that shock the imaginary of the human by appearing suddenly and debilitating the symbolic ­order. I am ­ nowledge—a not thinking of creatures about which we have no scientific k hitherto undiscovered species of spider or some extraterrestrial biological organism. No doubt these prospects are terrifying for humans, as Hollywood has made a point of repeatedly reminding us. The animals I have in mind instead are known or scientifically classified animals, but which either appear outside the laws of Nature and/or by rendering our known universe uncanny puts the human and the human imaginary under duress. Let me be more specific on this point. First, by speaking of the animal, as they exist outside of human knowledge, I am not hinting that there is a secret or inner life of animals which remains unavailable to us. Second, I am also not speaking of the animal in itself—the noumenon that is the true reality of what only appears as the phenomena to humans. Both these propositions suggest that the real is hidden or repressed under the false cover of language when I prefer to think of the real as the irreducible kernel of reality that resists symbolization (Žižek, The Sublime Object 7). Therefore, when speaking about the real or uncanny animal, I am speaking about human encounters with animals that escape the grid of symbolization, challenge human knowledge, and expose us to the traumatic truth of living on this planet without the possibility of ever adequately knowing our relation to this planet. In experiencing the real animal, we experience this world as gashed; unsymbolizable fissures which unravel the fragility of our symbolic ­universe and our incompleteness within. The real animal eviscerates our imaginary of being human. Confronted with the uncanny animal, ­humans feel stripped of the minimum idealization necessary for surviving as desiring subjects. In the animal’s radical alterity, the subject ­witnesses its absence; the animal’s (dis-)appearance manifesting a vanishing point at which reality folds into the real and the subject is left alone to fend the agape with nothing but its body. In the next two sections, I focus on explicating this argument ­f urther through discussions of Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran S­ ahay, and Pirtha” and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Parting from postcolonial discussions of animals that enjoy privileged positions in ­European and non-European literary traditions (the large mammals, the ­domestic and farm animals, and the anxiety-provoking reptiles) or animals that function as props enabling the human amidst the uncertainties of ­imperial, postcolonial, global politics (environmental crises, terrorism; shifting gender roles; power struggles; economic collapses; etc.), I turn in this chapter towards animals whose excessive otherness disrupts the human as the subject-supposed-to-know. Lurking on the limits of postcolonial écriture, these animals open up the fundamental

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  33 deadlock at the heart of the social and push readers to r­ ecognize the ­antagonism inherent to all social relations. I look ­specifically at ­creatures ­ ritings—annelids, lurking on the limits of Mahasweta and Ghosh’s w cryptids, and crustaceans, or demonic chthulucenes (as Haraway might ­identify these)—which evade symbolization, vex human agency, and threat erasing the human. The anomalous ­Tithonian flying reptile in Devi’s ­novella and the ordinary multitude of crustaceans in Ghosh’s novel are the real animals of this study; animals that disclose the ­impossibility of our ­establishing a positive relationship with the planet. These animals (dis)appear in the texts as unplumbable holes, detranscendentalizing or trans/dis-forming the world into a planet and, subsequently, the planet into an unsettling, to wit obscene, experience of planetarity. ­E xperience of planetarity is the experience of irreducible margins inhabiting the center and of awakening to the rude fact that life on this planet is borrowed, shared, and nonhierarchical (Spivak, Death 71–102; Thacker 6–7).

The Postcolonial Animal 1: The Empirical Impossibility of the Pterodactyl In “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” a real live pterodactyl flies over a drought ravaged landscape. Its first inscription is discovered in a tribal village located in the heart of this parched land. Puran Sahay, a city journalist sent to report on the famine at Pirtha, learns about “this unearthly terror” from a photograph in possession of the SDO. Withheld from the press, its negative confiscated, the photograph is of a painting made by a tribal boy, Bhikia. But how could an uneducated tribal boy paint a creature that has been extinct for millions of years? (95). A boy painted this on the stone wall of his room. The picture was taken by Surajpratap, but no, this photo is not for a newspaper, not for publicity. He did not print a photo. No, we took away the negative. He cannot print this, he doesn’t have a copy. What is it? Bird? Webbed wings like a bat and a body like a giant iguana. And four legs? A toothless gaping horrible mouth. But this is … Don’t say it. I won’t hear it. How did he paint this? I don’t know. The boy’s shut up. Where? Where is the picture he painted? In Pirtha. Now the SDO begins to speak in bursts. As if a badly wounded person is making a last-ditch effort to make a deposition to hospital or police, to the killers or to friends. (101–02, italics in the original)2

34  Gautam Basu Thakur The SDO’s struggle with speech symptomatizes a deep “communication gap,” a “mental and linguistic suspension of contact” between him, an educated state official, and the illiterate tribal child (102). This failure of speech marks the empirically impossible, for there are no words to describe something that cannot be, yet is. Is it a ghost, a demon, a relic species, or something else altogether? All that is, is a trace—the child’s drawing on a wall—but it is a trace apropos nothing. It is apropos nothing because the creature cannot possibly exist. Dinosaurs went extinct 65-million years ago. Yet if the child drew this picture, he must have seen it. Problematically, the child has since gone silent. Therefore there is no knowing why he drew this picture: Did he see it alive, is it a demon from a nightmare, or just his accidental imagination? Flickering between myth and reality, cognition and misrecognition, nature and the supernatural, the mystery of the cryptid is a meta-­commentary on the impossibility of representing the subaltern caught in the proverbial jaws of the animal (99). The tribals who inhabit this neglected, exploited stretch of the subcontinent “have no resource” and “they will never.” Hundreds of years of neglect have made these people inured to “perennial starvation.” “They don’t [even] know how to ask” for redress anymore. They “don’t ask” but “take if given.” They are themselves an empirical impossibility ungraspable by our “urban mentality” (104). Even the map of the district resembles the extinct creature that now supposedly soars over it as if an omen of extinction that is the future of these tribals. The creature has haunted postcolonial critics since Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta’s novella hit the English-speaking world in 1995. The mystery over the creature has only deepened with conflicting accounts from the author and the translator. For while Mahasweta categorically earmarks the pterodactyl as a symbol for the suffering of tribal peoples worldwide, Spivak and postcolonial critics have often understood the animal as a metaphor for the impossibility of representing subaltern speech. For Jennifer Wenzel, accordingly, Mahasweta’s work enunciates the problem of ethical narration. As we have seen, speech fails the SDO—the government official narrating the plight of the tribals and the ­incredible absence/presence of the pterodactyl. Puran too struggles deciding which of the many stories he has discovered should make it into his paper— the disastrous famine, the government’s complete apathy towards the tribals, corporate exploitation of the tribals, or the existence of a living ­fossil? At the end, he decides not to report on what would have made him and Pirtha famous—the creature. He chooses to remain silent about the pterodactyl because news of a surviving pterosaur would have further displaced Pirtha’s tribals. But it is the literary critic whom Wenzel specifically has in mind when she comments on the problem of e­ thical ­narration. “[C]aught between [Puran’s] urgency of making a story heard” and the “difficulty of distinguishing between mediated layers of Puran’s experience of the pterodactyl, Mahasweta’s explanation of it,

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  35 and Spivak’s evolving interpretations,” the literary critic ponders “who tells stories of subaltern life and which of their many stories should be told” (236, 239–40). This mode of reading retains the pterodactyl as a symbol, a myth, or a metaphor, representing the suffering of the indigenous. And that is vital according to Mahasweta. In conversation with Spivak, she states: Pterodactyl is an abstract of my entire tribal experience […] If read carefully Pterodactyl will communicate the agony of the tribals, of marginalized people all over the world. […] Pterodactyl wants to show what has been done to the entire tribal world of India […] Modern man, the journalist, does not know anything about it. There is no point of communication with the pterodactyl. The pterodactyl cannot say what message it has brought. (Imaginary Maps xiv–xv) Spivak however refuses to identify the pterodactyl as a symbol. In the Appendix to Imaginary Maps, she notes: For the modern Indian the pterodactyl is an empirical impossibility. For the modern tribal Indian the pterodactyl is the soul of the ancestors. The fiction does not judge between the registers of truth and exactitude, simply stages them in separate spaces. This is not science fiction. And the pterodactyl is not a symbol. (209) Following Spivak, if we strip away the symbolic thrust and claim the creature is neither a visitation by the ancestral soul of the Nagesia ­tribals nor a metaphor for the silenced Fourth World subaltern, then, we can arrive at an obvious question: is the pterodactyl real? As I see it, Spivak allows for reading the pterodactyl literally (Imaginary Maps 143).3 By categorically dismissing the idea of it being a symbol, Spivak opens up the possibility of accommodating the radical question of the real. Not real in the sense of a surviving relic but real because it exists as ­“alterity  […] underived from” the human (Spivak, Death 73). Put ­differently, ­human encounters with this animal result in an experience that is “subtracted from” or unassimilable to “the ‘natural’ totality” of ­experiencing the animal (Žižek, Disparities 12). “Real” here qualifies this excess of ­experience—excess that by remaining insoluble, as alterity underived from the human, manifests the radical antagonism constitutive of ­human (non)relation to the animal (see Zupančič). This theory is not entirely lost on postcolonial critics. Sangeeta Ray considers, for instance, the dilemma of “impossible inhabiting,” that is, of extinct and current species coexisting or the modern India and the ­abject poverty-ridden tribal India existing together (44). In another reading of the story, Ben Conisbee Baer refers to the creature as “the blank or dark spot” in the text or something that throws our habitual modes of

36  Gautam Basu Thakur thinking awry (178). Though both critics are primarily concerned with problems of reading, I find their identifications of the creature as limit (to soul-making and Enlightenment critique) especially relevant for my argument here. In particular, Baer’s argument that the pterodactyl as void both interrupts and sustains the enterprise of Enlightenment connects to my point regarding the pterodactyl as real. And as real it is both constitutive of and disruptive of subjectivity. “[S]ubjectivity emerges when substance cannot achieve full identity with itself, when substance is in itself ‘barred,’ traversed by an immanent impossibility or antagonism” (Žižek, Disparities 10). In the context of the story, this means ­Puran’s encounter with the pterodactyl strips bare as well as reconstitutes him as subject. At one level, the pterodactyl is a stain on or a traumatic excess within ordinary reality. In this role, it ravages the imaginary of the human as subject-supposed-to-know. Puran specifically finds himself stretched ­between what he knows and the non-knowledge presented by the creature’s (non-)being. He does not know if what he witnesses is matter—its body made of “liquid darkness”—or if the creature has a message for him—he sees “no communication between [its] eyes” (“Pterodactyl” 157). With its mute presence, the pterodactyl reduces all life on this planet as irrevocably “endangered” (163). There is no communication-point between us and the pterodactyl. We belong to two worlds and there is no communication point. There was a message in the pterodactyl, whether it was fact or not, and we couldn’t grasp it. We missed it. We suffered a great loss, yet we couldn’t know it. The pterodactyl was myth and message from the start. We trembled with the terror of discovering a real ­pterodactyl. (196 [italics in the original]) Experienced as a presence and loss, possibly bearing a message yet that which seems to have slipped through our fingers, the pterodactyl unmakes the subject-supposed-to-know. I borrow from Lee Edelman when I claim the animal as death drive. The pterodactyl undoes “the ­structuring fantasy undergirding and sustaining the subject’s desire, and with it the subject’s reality” (73). Consequently, and following such an encounter, Puran can no longer remain satisfied with the human present with which he identifies. He therefore questions science, history, and technologically: “how can a computer possibly process […] time and give birth to a data-sheet” (156). Eviscerated in the tired gaze of this out-of-place and out-of-time flying reptile, Puran stands bereft of all symbolic politics of difference distinguishing human from the animal. Even as he contemplates on deep time or the analogous situation of the Nagesia tribals, he is left facing the creature with nothing except one connecting point: an extinct species being witnessed by another (soon-to-be extinct) species.

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  37 Anxiety over the collapse of the human stems from the anxiety over the evaporation of the symbolic big Other guaranteeing meaning. Unless Puran embraces the truth of human abjection qua the absence of the big Other, his only way out of this nightmare is through transforming his anxiety about human nothingness into a subjective trauma over something appropriately symbolizable. Encountering the creature as death drive—outside time and depositing both historical and chronological time under stress—the only way Puran can recuperate the imaginary ­security of linear time, that is, the time of desire against the circuitous time of the drive, is by symbolizing his “being outside time” as trauma (après-coup). Après-coup designates a nonlinear form of temporality in contrast to linear developmental time. Lacan highlights this time ­(après-coup) by drawing attention to Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, which is commonly translated as “deferred action.” Laplanche and Pontalis underline at least three different possible meanings of the word in Freud. My use here derives from what they identify as the third, a more philosophical “conception of temporality”: something is perceived in the present, an irreducible kernel of real, but is resignified retroactively and aligned with linear developmental time and the fantasy of the human supported by it (Laplanche and Pontalis 111–14). It is via the logic of the après-coup that the existence of the cryptid interlocks with the political problems of government injustice and the politics of symbolic difference. While Puran and the animal remain deadlocked—“each aporetic to the other”—, the limits encountered by Puran in Pirtha (the superstitious tribals, Bhikia’s muteness and the mystery of the pterodactyl) impact the “rest of his life” (“Pterodactyl” 162). The enigma of this radically other space—“Pirtha Block is like some extinct animal […] fallen on its face”—will remain a mystery, a void, and a code thoroughly irreducible to human logic (98). Yet, through all this, Puran is able to reclaim his subjectivity by repurposing his desire. The end of the novella replaces the unresolvable mystery of the pterodactyl with a “tremendous, excruciating, explosive love.” We read: “Puran’s amazed heart discovers what love for Pirtha is” and that “perhaps he cannot remain a distant spectator anywhere in life” (197). Interestingly, the use of “perhaps” in this sentence folds love into ­desire, as readers slide from a direct expression of love for Pirtha to its displacement or metaphorization in Puran’s future. This displacement is not a temporal move from Puran’s present to Puran’s future. It is not a simple exposition of a change working through inside of Puran as a ­result of his encounter with the cryptid. This is a move from love to ­desire and must be understood as such. Love constitutes a response to the unknowable alterity of the other. By contrast, desire sustains itself by not knowing the Other’s desire. Desire, as such, does not engage with the radical alterity of the other, preferring to symbolically reduce the other into object traits. Love, by contrast, is directed straight towards the heart of the other’s traumatic nothingness.

38  Gautam Basu Thakur As Adrian Johnston explains, love is “linked to an indeterminate je ne sais quoi in the beloved,” that is, “to the void of an un-specifiable ‘x’ that eludes being captured in a catalogue of determinate empirical attributes, characteristics, qualities, and so on” (67). The void (x) here is not simply what eludes symbolization but what is also substantive of the asubjective ontology of the human. The pterodactyl is real only insofar as it substantiates the humanly impossible task of comprehending the planet. Questions about the creature’s existence (is it a relic of an extinct species?), its unplumbable gaze (what do the Pterodactyl’s eyes say?), and the difficulty of synchronically situating the creature in the secular scientific history of the planet (are dinosaurs still alive?) force readers towards that impossibility. In this sense, the pterodactyl is a radical tear in the (human) symbolic universe. Love for this unbearable otherness, therefore, can only effectively lead Puran to recognize human existence as trash, thus bringing out the most ethical response to a monstrous other. But that does not happen in this novella. Instead, Puran’s explosive love is reframed by a desire framed by moral alternatives. The conclusion of the novella presents an exasperating parade of two diagonal positions: if Mahasweta enunciates a framework for determining the unheimlich other, Puran professes an unbearable love for that other. However, authorial intent sweeps in as Puran’s response is encased into a synchronic human history. Love is first translated into labor (work) and then into a future that exists as human (or an Enlightenment humanist) responsibility: Only love, a tremendous, excruciating, explosive love can dedicate us to this work when the century’s sun is in the Western sky, otherwise this aggressive civilization will have to pay a terrible price, look at history, the aggressive civilization has destroyed itself in the name of progress, each time […] we are destroying the primordial forest, water, living beings, the human. (197) Couching love in civilizational history and transforming the animal into a “myth” are creative ways for returning the human to the safety of desire, and thus away from the other’s excessive alterity. To make matters worse, the future is also made conditional to human action against social inequities. Primal forests and their cryptid secrets become metonyms for humans ostracized, exploited, rendered sterile, and/or, like in the case of Puran, a catalyst for reawakening modern humans from their privileged stupors. I agree with Susan Abrams: the pterodactyl is the radicalization of a detranscendentalized planet (83). Yet her subsequent argument about the animal’s role in helping humans recognize “the complex interdependent living that comes from sharing a home with many and neglected

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  39 others” fails to impress me insofar it reduces the creature to a metonym for human suffering (94). In final analysis, Abrams puts the animal in the role of begetting or restoring a (lost) natural totality on this planet in line with the novella’s conclusion that imagines another totality, a future without human inequalities, and sublimates Puran’s violent love into desire as a means to achieve social good. The pterodactyl’s catastrophic presence, by contrast, I contend, functions to distress human thought, collective activism, and sexual futures. The pterodactyl intimates Man that his “normal” existence “is a condition of persistent [and inescapable] crisis” (Baer 180). How, then, are we to read the pterodactyl? I submit three options without necessarily striving after closure: 1 The pterodactyl is real. It substantiates the constitutive alienation of the human from the 4.5-billion-year-old planet. As real, it is the impossible—the unreal—and the unsymbolizable. 2 The pterodactyl substantiates the fundamental ontological condition of all humans: speech does not exist. It does not exist for the subalterns, just as it does not for anyone else. Speech must always be mediated by desire, so what we hear is displaced from the other’s message. But, insofar as the pterodactyl substantiates the crisis of human ontology, it functions to symbolically situate the human against a Nature that is deemed whole, even in the face of its mysteries. 3 The trauma of inhabiting an uncanny world must be recuperated through the image of the other’s alterity. The pterodactyl’s radical alterity and uninterpretable message must be employed to anoint the human desire as the way to final unravelment.

Postcolonial Animal 2: “A Strangeness beyond Reckoning” Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide presents readers with an ethical conundrum: should they side with refugees seeking resettlement in the deltaic islands of the Sunderbans or should they oppose human settlement in an area declared a national preserve for the fast-depleting population of Bengal tigers? The novel appears to ask what is of greater value: the last preserve of the Bengal Tiger, an animal, or humans displaced by the partitioning of the subcontinent and the Bangladesh Liberation War?4 Unfortunately, there exists no simple solution to this problem, and the novel concurs to an extent. In fact, the choice offered between a near-­ extinct animal and the lives of human refugees fleeing a genocidal war is a “forced choice.” Siding with refugees imply overlooking Sunderbans’ fragile ecosystem—the settlement of the refugees on an island earmarked for Bengal tigers threatens these big cats and portends an eventual, and

40  Gautam Basu Thakur far greater, destruction of the entire archipelago’s ecology. But, then, one also cannot simply forego the human refugees without being complicit in and responsible for the conditions of their suffering. Supporting one will always mean acting against the (survival of the) other; a choice made in this situation can therefore be always partial, brutal, and immoral. Predictably postcolonial critics focus on this interesting braiding of postcolonial history with the now pressing issue of environmental crisis, most specifically the novel’s implicit demand that readers seriously audit their roles in the depredation of colonial and postcolonial ecologies. I do not have the space for a detailed discussion of existing criticisms, but briefly: these tend to applaud the novel’s sensitive portrayal of human–animal “symbiotic codependency” (Kaur 128); its insistence on understanding refugee crises in its “historically differentiated ways” (Mukherjee 156–57); and, relatedly, for underscoring “culture-specific, location-based environmentalism” (Sen 367). Taken together, these readings champion the novel for recomposing the anthropo(s)cene via ­local contexts, animal rights, and developmental issues based on subaltern politics. However, they mostly overlook that in the same text there are animals which are is irreducible to matters of symbolic politics and knowledge constitution. In the context of my argument so far: I find these existing criticisms of Ghosh’s novel as failing to transcend the symbolic sphere of human–nonhuman relations and enter the realm of the planetary through considerations of the animal as catastrophic. There indeed is a case to be made about postcolonial criticism teaching us the ethics of “being human” in a troubled (unequal) world. But the “art of living on a damaged planet” cannot simply consist of making ­humans more human(e). Today we have merely replaced the positive form of Enlightenment anthropocentrism (“I am the master of animals”) with a more self-conscious, negative albeit feel-good form of anthropocentrism (“I admit guilt of violently mistreating/misrepresenting ­animals”). Twenty-first-century neoliberal humanism admits the privilege of the human as the subject who concedes mistreating, misrepresenting, and mystifying animals for her own pleasures. Consequently, this subject willingly vacates the scene in order to give animals center stage but only so far as these animals fulfill her deepest fantasies of becoming human again. From subjects-who-know their superiority over animals, we have today become subjects-who-know their culpability in the systematic ­exclusions of animals. This does not mean we have relinquished ­control over representation or surrendered our moral privileges. The subject enunciated by the non-anthropocentric turn is still the subject of speech, capable of representation and knowledge but fully charged on imagined moral privilege.5 Badiou consequently identifies the recent turn towards the nonhuman, ecology, and abiotic matter or what he calls the messianic environmentalism of the present as nothing more than a “new age” response to class

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  41 antagonism. If anything, the current environmental crisis should help us reflect further about the fiction of human sovereignty in a planet impossible to symbolize (Žižek, Disparities 30) and lead to a realization of “the real peril that humanity is today exposed to: that is to say, the impasse that globalised capitalism is leading us into” (Badiou n.p.). Only an acknowledgment of subjectless-ness can help us fully grasp the import of living on a dying planet. By inhabiting the condition of non-being—­ unpropped by symbolic supports, uncoupled from an imaginary ego, and unmediated by fantasies of our humanness—can we fully comprehend the inconsequentiality of our existence on a 4.2-billion-year-old planet. In contrast to existing criticisms of Ghosh’s novel, I wish to consider here therefore the implications of the question: What if the human–­ animal/settler–tiger/Man–Nature conflict in the novel is a false ideology? That is, what if this conflict serves to detract attention from something else in the narrative, something that exists under the surface of the text, in the murky depths of the deltaic ecology? Something that is indifferent to the political and moral tensions over refugee resettlement and protection of endangered mammals. This is not a new point: Huggan and Tiffin charge Ghosh with displacing the Man–tiger conflict onto the relatively easy-to-resolve ­human– dolphin issue (188). However, neither of these issues comes close to considering the Sunderbans crabs. In ignoring the crustaceans, we overlook that which is not mammalian, not large enough to invoke moral ­debate in the event of their exclusion or death, and not political enough to deserve place in the animal question. The novel’s focus on mammalian conflicts forecloses these ecological minutiae simply because they are too insignificant to matter to our current anthropocene concerns. Nonetheless, as readers it is difficult to ignore these ubiquitous inhabitants of the Sunderbans’ deltaic ecology. Ghosh’s focus on mammals notwithstanding, the crabs scrawl all over the narrative. Commonly overshadowed by “gargantuan crocodiles” and the iconic Bengal tigers, these miniscule crabs are, ironically, some of the first creatures to greet human visitors to the Sunderbans (Ghosh, Hungry 105). Seething to the surface from their subterranean lairs, these crabs routinely invade the shores at dawn and at dusk “to salvage the rich haul of leaves and other debris left behind by the retreating tide” (96). Alongside being a rich source of nutrients for the poor humans who inhabit the tidal islands, the crabs are also the custodians and architects of the archipelago. Constituting a “fantastically large proportion of the system’s biomass,” they are “the keystone species of the entire ecosystem.” They keep “the mangroves alive by removing their leaves and litter,” thus helping the cycle of life to continue unabated in the harsh deltaic ecology (119). Then there is the other side to these critters. Metonymic of a brutal nature—fickle and ambivalent, “always mutating [and] always unpredictable” (7)—the crabs aggressively challenge human imaginaries of belonging

42  Gautam Basu Thakur and dismiss human efforts to mold their natural surroundings. The novel tells us that when the crab-covered tidal beaches caught Daniel’s attention and he resolved to build a new community on these lands, he was quickly reminded by well-wishers that no human settlement has managed to survive against the wild tempests, floods, tigers, and wasps, of the mangrove forests. Nature here was different—“the realities of the tide country were of a strangeness beyond reckoning” (66); it was not the reality of rural ­India, categorized into simple boxes as either picturesque or impoverished. In fact, nature here “erase(s) history,” making writing the history of this land and its peoples and its creatures impossible (43). The tide country vanishes everything, digests shipwrecks, levels villages, and devours entire islands—­ everything vanishes without trace (186). The crabs are the metonym of this nature. For instance, when Piya first sees these crabs in the hold of Fokir’s boat, the critters are described as “crawling about in a jumble of mangrove branches and decaying sea grass” and, if not for the putrid seagrass offering them nutrients and moisture, the crabs would have been “tearing each other apart” (59). We see nature and the animal in a different light here. It is indifferent, asocial, and brutal. But, at the same time, they are the pulverizing life force occupying the heart of this nature where the only drive is the drive to remain alive, even if that means tearing off the limbs of another member of the same species. The crabs thus introduce another reality, an-other scene. Lurking adjacent to yet unseen by humans, they force us to encounter an irrecuperable otherness as a sense of absolute human alienation from nature gradually seeps into our reality by way of their musty presences. And similar to Mahasweta’s cryptid, these crabs rupture the text, challenge its protagonists, and vex meaning-making. Occupying the lowest rungs of the archipelago’s environment, these critters unravel Man’s irredeemable experience of the animal as real. The brutality of these crabs finds the most robust illustration at a particularly reflective moment in the novel. Nirmal, recounting about the 1737 Calcutta tsunami that leveled “Englishmen’s palaces” alongside ­native huts and tenements, insists that these intermittent “big” cataclysms are not the real ends or beginnings of History; rather, it is the small crabs who, with their constant burrowing of the dykes, make History. It is they who really tear down human civilizations (170). ­Nirmal instructs a young Fokir to listen carefully to the sound of the crabs burrowing the dykes; the grating noise coming from deep inside the mud banks is the sound of these crabs, in free coalition with the surging and ebbing tides, untiringly chipping away at the man-made dykes (badhs) constructed to keep the saline tidewater away from the cultivable fields. Without these dykes, human life is impossible in this environment, and this makes the relentless burrowing of the crabs a situation of palpable danger for human life and human History. It is not that they are attempting to bring down the dykes to put an end to human settlement. In fact, there’s really no telling what their intentions are. Like the pterodactyl,

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  43 there is no knowing them. They could be burrowing for food or for shelter or for fun. Or, they might be even burrowing for nothing. But their action means that sooner than later the dykes will collapse. Unless continually inspected and constantly patched up, the dykes cannot withstand the onslaught of this alliance. The crabs and the tidewater capture the human in their time. I read the crabs as the unstoppable life force (the lamella) which exists outside human authority. Their uncontrollable, mindless appetite poses a direct threat to everything we know as human. Like the “white noise” that lingers through the universe bearing proof of the Big Bang, the rough grating of crabs coming from inside the dykes is the sound of an irrepressible, uncontrollable nature. Humans have no space in this nature; they have no agency to govern, control, or secure this planet. And, when human civilizations collapse, neither “angels [nor] animals” come to their aid for they know already that, as humans, “we’re not comfortably at home in our translated world” (171–72). Lacan describes the lamella as an immortal amoeba that survives death and regeneration (197). The lamella is the “incorporeal [,] indestructible life substance that persists beyond the circuit of generation and corruption” (Žižek, “The Lamella” 205). Its intrusion in the world only makes us uncomfortable—it is “not very reassuring” (Lacan 197). The lamella brings with it a damp, unwholesome experience of decay, putrefaction, and death mixed with a disgusting lusting after the sexual (Žižek, “The Lamella” 206, 216). In other words, the lamella is the real. Its unceasing flitting in and out of our lives qualify it as an “extreme [and] visible manifestation” of the death drive (Evans n.p.). This is why Žižek writes of the lamella as the undead, the Thing, or the alien within: A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal—more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the “living dead” which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void […]. (How to Read Lacan 62) As lamella or real, the crabs are of the “unwarped primal world” (Žižek, “Psychoanalysis” 209). They are impossible to contain and impossible to battle. Swarming under the currents, too numerous to count, they appear as dark shadows in the water, and, when on land, as blankets of red, they shroud miles upon miles of tidal breaches. These indestructible, flexible, floating masses transform entire landscapes, leaving nothing to destiny, as nothing appears to be able to keep their invasive population in check. Immortal, they tirelessly engineer the tidal country by simply

44  Gautam Basu Thakur going about their routine animal business—feeding, procreating, and hiding from predators: their impossible alterity holding up the truth about our ontological scandal. The animal-lamella is the non-being. Distinct from the self-consolidating other, or the negated other as correlate of the Self, this non-being marks the animal’s nothingness—a nothingness that makes the animal difficult to manage in thought or through action. We encounter these critters suddenly and in suddenly appearing these animals draw into relief non-human, nontemporal sites of existence. But while their (re)appearance in human reality is catastrophic—they inaugurate the world-in-itself as Eugene Thacker puts it—the animal’s absent-presence also gives consistency to our reality. As I see it, the problem with (real) animals is not that they force us to recognize lingering signatures of our bestiality (Agamben 16) nor that they express multiple points of view rendering grand narratives hollow (Derrida, The Beast 125). Instead the problem with animals has to do with our incapacity to witness the traumatic otherness of the animal. Real, unsymbolizable, and non-­relational, the animal is the radical instantiation of Man’s alienation from the world and from her being. Humans inhabit a translated world. A radical gap separating the world we inhabit from the world we imagine we inhabit. I find the ­exchange between Nirmal and Fokir, therefore, as extremely critical because it functions in the narrative to shift focus from the catastrophic to normalizing the catastrophic as habitual. Unless humans tend after the dykes they will collapse. In other words, the narrative focus shifts to the human as the caretaker. But as I have been arguing so far, a slightly different focus, one which takes the crabs as metonym of a nature beyond human control, offers a radical new reading of human–animal relations. In this reading, the crabs substantiate the radical gap between a world we claim for ourselves and the planet that refuses human occupation. The crabs decouple the planet we inhabit from the world we pretend to oversee. The human–animal ideological deadlock addressed in the novel by contrast seeks to restore human privilege. It renders possible the politics of accommodating multitude of singularities within a democratic habitus. Occupying the farthest position from this imaginary center and bereft of any privileged ontology, the crabs transform the novel from being a text about conflictual symbolic boundaries to a text about ­unceasing becoming(s). As unremarkable figures of insistent violence, the crabs join the chorus of the “chthonic ones”—the tentacled monsters of Haraway—whose monstrosity stem from their total indifference to our world. Haraway understands the dangers posed by critters, writing: these are “not safe” because they have “no truck with ideologies,” that is, with “the sky-gazing Homo” and their worldly imaginaries. Worse still, critters commonly escape the grid of symbolization—being made and unmade in the muck of the planet while they, themselves, “make

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  45 and unmake” that muck at will, “they [actually] belong to no one.” ­I nstead, they compose “a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital” (Haraway 2). Metaphysics is problematized by these crabs as they metonymize the volatile ebb and flow of the rivers, the islands birthed and devoured by tidal waves, and dictate the interconnected lives and movements of all animals, humans and tigers included, across the bedraggled archipelago. Simply put, the crabs are irreducible to and the cause of the onto-phenomenological. The need to constantly secure the human against the animal is a symptom of our ontological lack, i.e., our need to avoid confrontations with others who might substantiate this lack, return it back to us as the irrevocable condition of our being. The real dilemma of The Hungry Tide is not therefore what the author identifies—“the dilemma of how to balance human needs with nature” (quoted in Pulugurtha 82). Rather, it is the impossibility of achieving balance with nature while being human. Being human means recognizing the impossibility of connecting to the animal, to the natural world, to others, except either by symbolizing or through fantasy. Mahasweta’s cryptid and Ghosh’s crabs force us away from considering the animal-as-difference towards the disturbing possibility of the animal as non-relation. And this realization is must if we are to rethink today the ethics of living in a translated world.

Notes 1 For recent scholarship in animal studies, see Wolfe and Armstrong. For the theoretical bases of these studies, see Derrida (The Animal and The Beast) and Agamben. For a sampling of recent postcolonial zoocriticism, see Iveson, Ahuja, Benjamin, Saliha, and Wright. 2 SDO or Sub-divisional Officer is a junior district magistrate in charge of a subdivision. 3 Buell too insists on reading the creature as symbolic (231). 4 For history of the incident, see Mallick and Jalais. 5 For the relationship between neoliberal culture and self-culpabalization, see Žižek Incontinence (especially 12–14). This paragraph also draws from ­Oxana Timofeeva’s “The Non-Human as Such” and The History of Animals.

Works Cited Abrams, Susan. “The Pterodactyl in the Margins: Detranscendentalizing ­Postcolonial Theology.” Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology. Editors Stephen Moore and Mayra Rivera. Fordham, 2011, pp. 79–101. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated Kevin Attell. ­S tanford UP, 2004. Ahuja, Neel. “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, March 2009, pp. 556–63. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. ­Routledge, 2008.

46  Gautam Basu Thakur Badiou, Alain. “The Neolithic, Capitalism, and Communism.” verso.com. ­Accessed 30 July 2018. Baer, Ben Conisbee. “Terodacktyl Apocalypse: Writing Catastrophe in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics. Editors Nick Heffernan and David A. Wragg. Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 177–99. Baker, Steve. The Postmodern Animal. Reaktion Books, 2000. Benjamin, Andrew. Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, March 2009, pp. 526–32. Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2001. Coetzee, John Maxwell. Elizabeth Costello: Fiction. Penguin Books, 2003. DeKoven, Marianne. “Guest Column: Why Animals Now?” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, March 2009, pp. 361–69. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley. Edited. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford UP, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated David Wills. Fordham UP, 2008. ———. The Beast and the Sovereign. Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques ­Derrida). Translated Geoffrey Bennington. U of Chicago P, 2011. Devi, Mahasweta. “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” Imaginary Maps. Three Stories. Edited Gayatri Spivak. Routledge, 1995, pp. 95–198. Edelman, Lee. No Future. Duke UP, 2004. Evans, Christine. “M. Hommelette’s Wild Ride: Lamella as a Category of Shame.” International Journal of Žižek Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2008. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide: A Novel. Harper Collins, 2005. ———. “Interview.” The Frontline, 21(August 28–September 10, 2004), 18. Cited in Nishi Pulugurtha (2010): 82. Gowdy, Barbara. The White Bone. Picador, 2000. Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Heise, Ursula. “Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 3, May 2013, pp. 636–43. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010. Iveson, Richard. Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animal. Pavement Books, 2014. Jalais, Annu. “Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became ‘Citizens,’ ­Refugees ‘Tiger-Food.’” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 17, April 23–29 2005, pp. 1757–62. Johnston, Adrian. “Nothing Is Not Always No-One: (a)Voiding Love.” ­Filozosfski Vestnik, vol. xxvi, no. 2, 2005, pp. 67–81. Kaur, Rajender. “‘Home Is Where the Oracella Are’: Toward a New Paradigm of Transcultural Ecocritical Engagement in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 14, no. 1, Summer 2007, pp. 125–41. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Seminar Book XI (1973), Translated A. Sheridan. Routledge, 1981.

“A Strangeness beyond Reckoning”  47 Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated Donald Nicholson-Smith. Norton, 1973. Mallick, Ross. “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, February 1999, pp. 104–25. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2012. ———. “They Are Here.” The Nonhuman Turn. Edited by Richard Grusin. U of Minnesota P, 2015, pp. 167–92. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. “Surfing the Second Waves: Amitav Ghosh’s Tide Country.” New Formations, vol. 59, 2006, pp. 144–57. Ray, Sangeeta. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Words. John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Saliha, Sara. “The Animal You See: Why Look at Animals in Gaza?” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2014, pp. 299–324. Sen, Malcolm. “Spatial Justice: The Ecological Imperative and Postcolonial ­Development.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 45, no. 4, December 2009, pp. 365–77. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia UP, 2003. ———. Imaginary Maps. Three Stories. Routledge, 1995. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy. Volume 1. Zero Books, 2011. Timofeeva, Oxana. “The Non-Human as Such: On Men, Animals, and B ­ arbers.” On Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, no. 2, 2016. ———. The History of Animals: A Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2018. Wenzel, Jennifer. “Grim Fairy Tales: Taking a Risk, Reading Imaginary Maps.” Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women ­Writers. Edited Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj. Garland Publishing, 2000, pp. 229–51. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago UP, 2003. Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. U of Georgia P, 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. Disparities. Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. How to Read Lacan. Norton, 2006. ———. Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels. MIT P, 2017. ———. “The Lamella of David Lynch.” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Editors Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. SUNY P, 1995, pp. 205–20. ———. “Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: “Strange Shapes of the ­Unwarped Primal World.” Adventures in Realism. Edited Matthew Beaumont. John ­Wiley & Sons, 2007, pp. 207–23. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989. ———. “The Varieties of Surplus.” Problemi International, vol. 1, no. 1 2017, pp. 7–32. Zupančič, Alenka. “Sexual is Political.” Jacques Lacan between P ­ sychoanalysis and Politics. Edited Samo Tomsic and Andreja Zernik. Routledge, 2016, pp. 86–100.

3 Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Animalities Amit R. Baishya

In this chapter, I ask what a postcolonial animalities approach can offer if we consider questions of relationality and similitude between humans and animals? Can this approach enable alternative readings of ethical relationality and interspecies affiliation in texts that are considered exemplars of postcolonial humanism? Furthermore, can this approach towards polyvalent and reversible aspects of animal figuration facilitate the unearthing of alternative figurations of political organization in classical or relatively well-discussed texts in the postcolonial canon about colonial bio/necropower, where human collectivities share unexpected affinities with animal collectivity through the representation of states of animality? To this end, I focus on three well-known postcolonial texts: the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “The Dog of Tetwal,” Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. I focus on these three exemplary texts because they are often interpreted on anthropocentric (in the sense of reading animals only as symbolic substitutes for human predicaments) or on humanist lines; my readings, however, zoom in on either the oftentimes effaced corporeality of the animal figures that populate such works or unearth immanent potentialities in “material-semiotic” figurations of animality.1 The dog in Manto’s short story is interpreted as a symbolic substitute for humans who are reduced to the level of “bare life” (­Agamben). Flemming writes: “… in the obvious symbol in the dog of all those caught in the crossfire of conflicting loyalties, the story makes a chilling assertion of the fate of those unable to commit themselves to one side or the other…” (104–05). In such readings, the dog functions as a cipher of symbolic insight as the human drama between (newly) national, religious, and linguistic differences takes centerstage. In contrast, I unmoor the dog from its symbolic anchoring and read its corporeality differently, focusing especially on the communicative potentials of its tail. As David Clark writes in his essay on Emmanuel Levinas’s Bobby: “What is ‘language’ if it is not the wagging of a tail, and ‘ethics’ if it is not the ability to greet one another and to dwell together as others?” (190–91). It is precisely this aspect of dwelling together as others (and its obliteration by hypernationalist masculinity) that concerns me here.

Ethics and Politics  49 Animal metaphors and similitudes appear in profusion in The Wretched of the Earth and the film text influenced by it: The Battle of Algiers. Animal similitudes in Fanon are often read as a form of haunting where the specter of the animal is figured as a shadow of the human. However, a different line of thinking has emerged in recent times that pushes for new ways of contending with the use of “animal masks” (Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique”) in Fanon. Ahuja focuses on the ironic use of animal metaphors in Fanon to describe the conditions of dehumanization in the colonial necroworld: Fanon’s account of the response to animalization … recognizes the contradictions of anticolonial subjectivity when colonial discourse assumes the untamable animality of the colonized … an ironic stance provisionally embracing animality is … a common strategy for disentangling race and species… I call this strategy, which appropriates the rhetoric of animalization to reveal its ongoing racial, neocolonial, or ecological legacies, the animal mask. By ironically appropriating an animal guise, the performer unveils a historical logic of animalization inherent in processes of racial subjection. (“Postcolonial Critique” 558) While I align with Ahuja about the conjunctions between social difference and species discourse, a close reading of Fanon can push this observation about “ironic stance(s) provisionally embracing animality” further. Careful perusal of The Wretched shows that affirmative political forms of alter-humanity—forms that do not repress animality but use them as signifiers for political action and potential collectivization— lie immanent in the animal masks that proliferate in Fanon’s oeuvre. Ahuja writes in “Abu Zubaydah” that “Posthumanist discourses that celebrate the alterity of animal bodies as a signpost for an affirmative biopolitics have too often idealized transspecies connectivities without sustained attention to the emergent posthumanism of capitalism and the state” (129). Ahuja’s critique of the tendency to idealize “transspecies connectivities” in a celebratory manner in new formulations of affirmative biopolitics at the expense of existing materialist and historical relationships is salutary. Yet, a different case can be made that Fanon’s polyvalent-reversible use of animal masks in The Wretched does not idealize transspecies connectivities, but shows how forms and modes that dehumanize the colonized flip around in a polyvalent fashion to reveal alternative modulations of political agency.2 The new modulations enable the colonized to reconstruct a different sense of becoming human that passes through and incorporates the circuit of animality. The wager I make is that closer attention to these polyvalent-reversible use of animal masks reveals that Fanon is not just a progenitor of thought about necropolitics but also anticipates contemporary theorizations of

50  Amit R. Baishya affirmative “biopolitics from below.” In “Affective Labor,” Hardt posits an affirmative “biopolitics from below”—forms of “cooperative relationship(s), against the assault of biopolitical technologies, to produce and reproduce life” (99). He contrasts this to a “biopolitics from above”: When Foucault discusses biopower, he only sees it from above. It is patria potestas, the right of the father over the life of his death and children and servants … biopower is the power of the emerging forces of governmentality to create, manage and control populations—­the power to manage life. (98) I will suggest that a reconsideration of polyvalent-reversible elements of the Fanonian “animal” frame anticipates these immanent affirmative biopolitical forms. I will flesh out these claims by focusing on the metaphor of “swarming” in The Wretched and the mutable significations of “tapeworms,” “headlessness,” and “voice” in The Battle of Algiers.

Wag the Dog: Ethical Relationality and the Animal Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “The Dog of Tetwal” is, at one level, a powerful political allegory about the deleterious costs of borders, border ma(r)king, and hypermasculine nationalism. At its center is the nameless figure of a free-range dog that lends itself to a reading in an allegorical/symbolic mode. The final image—the dog’s corpse lying unclaimed in the zone lying between the two nation-states of India and Pakistan—reinforces the animal’s allegorical status as a homines sacri, an entity that can be killed but not sacrificed. The valueless status of the animal is emblematic of the predicaments of human beings left adrift of home, community, and nation. The allegorical/symbolic mode of representation operates almost by default in representations of animality and disability in postcolonial cultural production. Such allegorical/symbolic representations are predicated on an “animacy hierarchy”—the conceptual arrangement of “human … disabled … animal … plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (Chen 13).3 Such representations theorize “anxieties around the production of humanness … particularly regarding humanity’s partners in definitional crime: animality …, nationality, race, security, environment and sexuality” (Chen 3). The representation of animality, as in the case of Manto’s abjected dog, is dependent on an implicit anthropocentrism. The virtually “mute” figure of the dog stands as an allegorical substitute of the “homines sacri” (Agamben), its singularity hardly contended with. This is captured by the last lines of the story, richly imbued with typical Mantoesque irony, that conflate the categories of the human, the animal, and the thing. “Tch tch … the poor thing became a martyr (shahid)!” says the Pakistani Himmat Khan. “He died a dog’s death (kutte ki maut),” quips the Indian Harnam Singh (87).

Ethics and Politics  51 While I acknowledge that the allegorical/symbolic mode remains a common representational mode in postcolonial cultural productions, we need to broaden the domain to consider other ways of representing animals. A different interpretation emerges if we consider the representation of canine corporeality. For this, we need to reconsider (i) the anthropocentric attribution of “muteness” (figured here as the inability to communicate via the symbolic medium of speech) to animals, (ii) the representation of the communicative potentials of the animal’s corporeality, and (iii) the representation of reciprocal versus congealed forms of communication in the text. While Manto registers the dog’s terror as it is being shot at by both Indian and Pakistani soldiers—its cry as it is shot in the leg, the ­narrator says, “pierced the sky”—closer attention to the text reveals that birds, both literal and figurative, also populate the mise-en-scene. While the figurative avian figures in “The Dog of Tetwal”—the falcon, crane, and crow—will play a role in the story later, I begin by highlighting the ­appearance of the unspecified birds at the beginning of the story: The two sides had not budged from their positions for several days now. Occasional bursts of fire … were to be heard, but never the sound of human shrieks. The weather was pleasant; the wind wafted across, spreading the scent of wildflowers. Oblivious to the battle on the peaks and slopes, nature was immersed in its necessary work—the birds chirped as before… Each time a shot echoed in the hills, the chirping birds would cry out in alarm and fly up, as though someone had struck a wrong note on an instrument and shocked their hearing. (80) While “human shrieks” are absent, the chirping of birds is a ubiquitous feature of the soundscape of this locale. But this soundscape is interrupted frequently by the irruptions of the war machine. These irruptions shock and alarm the birds. The alarmed cries of the animals show how phenomena like colonialism, predatory nationalism, or war result “in the murder, displacement and impoverishment of people, animals and their environments” (Huggan and Tiffin 136–37). There is a nonhuman and “extralethal” (Miller) dimension to such devastation that is hardly accounted for in studies focusing exclusively on human suffering. The occasional and alarmed animal cries are signs of these displacements, just like the dog’s piercing cry is at the end. However, merely registering the “shock” experienced by the dog and the birds, expressed primarily through the phonic and vocal registers, and concluding that human and animal are equally impacted by the extralethal impacts of necropolitics relegate the animal merely to the level of the reactive. I ask whether we can take Derrida’s question—what if

52  Amit R. Baishya the animal responded?—seriously (The Animal That Therefore I am and The Beast and the Sovereign (Vol. 1))? Does the dog respond in the story? Is its response not responded to by the human figures, thus leading to the annihilation of a fragile possibility of hospitality? Reading the performative aspects of the animal otherwise necessitates a more capacious understanding of the question of signs and representation. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn draws on Piercian biosemiotics to outline an “anthropology beyond the human.”4 Of interest is his call to “provincialize language”—to delink semiotic processes from the narrow symbolic limits of human language: We need to provincialize language because we conflate r­ epresentation with language… We universalize this distinctive human propensity by first assuming that all representation is something human and then by supposing that all representation has languagelike properties. That which ought to be delimited as something unique becomes instead the bedrock for our theories of representation. (39) Kohn argues that one of the biggest contributions Pierce made to semiotics is a move away from the “classical dyadic understanding of signs as something that stands for something else.” Rather, Piercian biosemiotics asks us to think about a crucial “third variable”—the fact that signs “stand for something in relation to a ‘somebody’” (75). Kohn provides the example of the adaptation of an anteater’s snout and tongue to its environment as an example of this expansive conception of semiosis that is not reducible to the symbolic or of subjectivity (74–75). Contiguously, consider here the expressive instrument that is the dog’s tail. We can read acts of wagging the tail as a communicative mode of establishing relatedness, especially given that animal psychologists, neurobiologists, and ethologists argue that tail-wagging is not a purely instinctual but socialized behavior through which a dog interacts with its environment (see Coppinger and Coppinger; Berns). Moreover, in the Kohnian sense, the wagging tail is a “living sign” that exudes and communicates affect and shows how dogs navigate and negotiate with their world. Besides the significations of the wagging tail, it is important to remember that the dog of Tetwal is a stray and not a domesticated one. 5 Narayanan writes: The free-ranging Indian (stray) dog is usually a mongrel mix-breed of the indigenous Indian pariah dog, and other pedigree and mixed breeds… Indian street dogs are widely noted to be friendly and alert, usually submissive in their relations to humans, and highly ­independent. (10) Rural and urban spaces in South Asia can be thought of as “transspecies” environments (Narayanan 3). In these environments, populations relate

Ethics and Politics  53 in complex, ambivalent ways with the ubiquitous presence of stray dogs. Many shy away from strays which are in any case constructed in the popular imagination as feral, vicious animals.6 Moreover, strays are also associated with filth and impurity because of their proximity to garbage dumps as sources of food. Religious, class, and caste prohibitions also exist with relation to dogs. Slum dwellers in Indian cities, for instance, are constructed as less than human because of their proximity with canines (Narayanan 13). The stray dog, thus, exists in the South Asian context in a wide continuum of possible relationships between nature and culture, between the domesticated and the wild, and between attributions of personhood and depersonalization. This is evident in “The Dog of Tetwal” where the treatment of the stray oscillates between domestication, forms of amorous identification and sheer cruelty, and objectification. The chilling aspect in the story is that hospitality towards a bin bulaye mehman (“uninvited guest”) shifts suddenly to brutality. The erasure of the wagging tail in the visual field of the story plays an important role in this sudden shift. The stray dog enters the diegetic space through the sonic register—the Indian soldiers are startled by barking that initially cannot be traced back to a source. Here’s our first view of the animal—“Banta Singh rose and moved towards the bushes. When he returned, he had with him a stray dog, its tail wagging” (82). From its first appearance, it is marked as an other without history that comes from an unidentified elsewhere. When the Indian soldiers ask the dog jokingly to show its “identification,” it responds by wagging its tail. The act of wagging the tail oscillates between the realms of communication and meaninglessness. This is evident in the scene that with chilling irony combines the question of animal response while prefiguring its eventual futility and broaches the question of the proper relationship to the other which is constantly shadowed by the finite dimensions of conditional hospitality: Harnam Singh laughed heartily. “This is no identification… All dogs wag their tails.” Banta Singh caught the dog by its trembling tail. “The poor thing is a refugee!”… Harnam Singh threw down the biscuit, and the dog immediately pounced on it. … one of the soldiers said, “Now, even dogs will have to be either Hindustani or Pakistani!” The Jamadar took out another biscuit … and threw it towards the dog. “Like the Pakistanis, Pakistani dogs will be shot.” “Hindustan Zindabad!” Another soldier loudly raised the slogan. The dog, which had just begun to move forward to pick up the biscuit, suddenly grew frightened and backed off with its tail between its legs. (82–83) This scene is marked by a series of displacements and ironic juxtapositions between the particular and the general, and human and canine. First, the encounter with a particular dog is displaced to the level of

54  Amit R. Baishya generality (“All dogs…”). Through this displacement, the act of meaningful communication between human and animal is stymied—the act of wagging the tail is pushed towards the realm of meaninglessness supposedly proper to the “animal.” This shift from the particular to the general “animal” also symbolically prefaces the contrast between two figurations of the human: refugees and the nationalist injunction to be “either Hindustani or Pakistani.” Finally, the either/or dichotomy leads to the conflation of the categories of human and animal via simile—“Like the Pakistanis, Pakistani dogs will be shot.” All this while, analogical language notwithstanding, the responses of the dog are visible through its tail. Its fear of the unpredictable behavior of the soldiers is signified by its “trembling” tail or its act of backing off “with its tail between its legs.” The tail is visible again when the story begins to take a turn towards the tragic. This time the dog is on the Pakistani side. Immediately after this scene, quoted below, the Pakistani soldiers notice the Indian sign strung on the neck of the dog. An explicit link is made to the question of hospitality when the dog is described as an “uninvited guest”: The same stray dog, which … had come to their camp like an uninvited guest (bin bulaye mehman) and stayed on, was back, sitting a little distance away. Bashir smiled and, turning to the dog, began: “Where did you spend the night, my love? Where did you…” The dog began wagging its tail vigorously, sweeping the rocky ground around him. Subedar Himmat Khan picked up a pebble and threw it at the dog. “Saala knows nothing except how to wag his tail.” (84) A possible ethical relationship across the species divide is stymied here through an explicit invocation of the wagging tail’s meaningless status. This turn becomes the prelude for the hypermasculine war games indulged in by the hunter-agents of the two “cynegetic” (Chamayou) sovereign nation-states with the body of the dog as the target.7 In the passage with the Indian soldiers, the “uninvited guest” is welcomed by the hosts. However, the threat of inhospitality always lies latent epitomized by the chilling statement “Like the Pakistanis, Pakistani dogs will be shot.” A contiguous shift is also noticeable in the segment with the Pakistani soldiers, which shifts the onus from the pairing of the gustatory and the visual to that of the aural and visual. A notable element of “The Dog” is the insertion of nostalgic, romantic Punjabi lyrics, especially the rendition of “Heer” by the eighteenth-century Sufi lyricist, Waris Shah. A pattern is evident when we consider the first pair of instances when lyrics are inserted into the narrative. In both these instances, the songs are sung by two Indian soldiers, Harnam Singh and Banta Singh. The songs are staged as a call and response between a lover

Ethics and Politics  55 and his beloved and figure birds in contrasting roles. The female figure in Harnam Singh’s folk song demands a gift of love from her beloved at the expense of his buffalo, a demand the male figure reluctantly and melancholically agrees to. This song is contrasted with Banta Singh’s rendition of “Heer” where once again the female (Heer) issues a call with an attendant’s response by the male beloved (Ranjha). Heer asks the following question: “A falcon has lost the crane to the crow—see, does it remain silent or weep?” which is responded to by Ranjha in the following manner: The falcon that lost the crane to the crow has, thank God, been annihilated. His condition is like the fakir who gave away his all, and was left with nothing. Be contented, feel the pain less and God will be your witness. Renouncing the world and donning the garb of sorrow, Saiyed Waris has become Waris Shah. (82) Commenting on this passage, the translators, Ravikant and Tarun Saint, write: The allusion to the one who has left, never to return, is an emphasis on inward attainment, the intimacy of the self’s encounter with truth. Ranjha is the divine beloved, and Heer the lover who seeks him. The quest is for a final unity of the self and the Ultimate, the seeker and the sought, the lover and the beloved… (99–100) This quest for unity is figuratively shown through a variation on the triangulated avian relationship of the falcon (Ranjha), the crane (Heer), and the crow (the man Heer is forcibly married to). Crucially, the final turn towards the absolute thingification of the dog, its slow slide into an unvalued figure of “one who has left, never to return,” begins when a call is issued in lyric form, but the response is stymied suddenly by a violent action by an agent of the cynegetic state. Bashir issues the unfinished lyrical call—“Where did you spend the night, my love? Where did you…” (83–84)—to which the dog responds by wagging its tail vigorously. This corporeal response by the “signing body” of the animal to a perceived offer of human hospitality and interspecies intimacy is instead read as a meaningless gesture by Himmat Khan.8 Ravikant and Saint hint at something contiguous in their reading of this segment: The elliptical quality of the allegorical exchange between Heer and Ranjha, at a time when there is little hope of union, and the gentle melancholy and acceptance of the need for renunciation, puts into sharp relief the grim reality of staccato commands being issued and obeyed in the military hierarchy. (100)

56  Amit R. Baishya Two modes of linguistic exchange are contrasted here. First, there is the life-affirming dimension of the exchange between Heer and Ranjha, predicated on reciprocity and response. This depiction of language is contrasted with the “grim reality of staccato commands” issued by the military hierarchy. A command presupposes obedience, not a mutually affirmative mode of response and reciprocity. The dialogic character of everyday speech is foreclosed. Language becomes a dead, congealed, objectified form that forecloses any encounter with alterity. What is also important are the specific names and colloquial epithets imposed on the supposedly reactive body of the dog. The deadly language “game” begins with acts of naming the dog: the Indians tag him as “Chapad Jhunjhun! This is a Hindustani dog” and the Pakistanis as “Sapad Sunsun! This is a Pakistani dog” (84–85). Names like “Chapad Jhunjhun” mean nothing. However, in trying to claim ownership over the “mute” body of the dog, these possessive acts of naming reveal how a mode of relationality, however fleeting, between companion species mutates into a deadly, predatory game.9 Besides, this endowment of (national) identity to the stranger by the soldiers simultaneously accentuates its status as a piece of movable property. Moreover, Himmat Khan uses the swear word sala in an irritated manner when referring to the dog. Sala is a popular term of abuse (or intimacy)—its contextual meaning depends on its inflexion. Daniyal writes in “Why Dogs and Puppies” that sala “literally means one’s wife’s brother. By calling someone a sala you are in short proclaiming that you dominate him because you have had sex with his sister.” Instead of a reciprocal byplay of hospitality and relatedness between the “uninvited” animal guests, a deadly, predatory game of hypermasculine domination and violence with the dog’s supposedly “mute” body as target ensues between the agents of the hunter-states. At this point, the dog “runs with its tail between its legs” and, as a bullet whizzes past its head, flaps “its ears violently” (86). This is the last time its tail appears in the visual field. From that point onward, the dog teeters back and forth in a no-man’s zone. The stray dog arrived from an undefined elsewhere; eventually, it is killed and lies unmourned in a space which is a literal nowhere (the no-man’s zones between nation-states). Its demise constitutes a “noncriminal putting to death”—a fate that, Derrida says, often afflicts “the animal” (“Eating Well” 280). “The animal” here could, of course, refer to humans that are animalized (like the homines sacri). But, in a more literal sense, and this is fundamental for my reading, it afflicts actual animal forms like the dog, which, like other animals, exist always already in a “‘state of exception’ of species sovereignty” (Pick 15). The dog’s descent into an ungrievable, thinglike form—one where “power operates with the fewest of obstacles” (15)— coincides with the gradual erasure and eventual disappearance of its tail’s signifying capacities.

Ethics and Politics  57 The linguistic dimension to this criterion of ungrievability is ironically emphasized in the last lines of the story: Wahi maut maraa jo kutte ki hoti hai (He died a dog’s death). These lines reference the everyday Urdu/Hindi phrase kutte ki maut (a dog’s death), used to signify a cruel and lonely death. Earlier, Harnam Singh also takes recourse to a popular proverb: Kutte ko ghee hazam nahin hui (“The ghee did not go down well with the dog” 86). Kutta is used commonly as a term of abuse in Hindi/Urdu. Ghee (clarified butter) is usually associated with rich, opulent food—something a “lowly” life form like a dog that eats scraps cannot digest. This lowly status of dog, of course, is embedded in cultural grammars of disgust in South Asia.10 For instance, discussing Yudhisthira’s encounter with the dog in the Mahabharata, Doniger suggests one reason for this lowly status of dogs: “The moral law, dharma, absolutely forbids Hindus to have any contact with dogs, who are considered unclean scavengers, the parasites of Untouchables” (26). Dogs, thus, get constructed as parasites, as beings that are vectors of disease, filth, and pollution, and “sponger(s) who cadges meals and drains resources from others while giving nothing in return” (Samyn). Similarly, Islam often considers the dogs as haram—one of the major reasons why kutta (dog) functions as a swear word in Hindi and Urdu.11 Naveeda Khan, drawing from her ethnographic work in chars in Bangladesh, writes: I heard people either marvel or express disgust at the fact that a dog of their acquaintance would attack even its own mother should she come close to the house to which the dog was associated. And these feelings of ambivalence, of both appreciating dogs’ loyalty to humans and judging them for turning against their own kind, qualified the loyalty of dogs. Given that it had betrayed once, it was in its nature to betray. (252) These persisting cultural associations of the dog’s lowly, ambivalent status and the verbal assaults on patriarchal kinship structures using the pejorative term kutta in colloquial speech forms reveal an animacy hierarchy in operation. The comment on ghee associated with the lowliness of the kutta inaugurates the always-present possibility of the dog lying “outside the concerns of civil life” (Dayan 214). The slow erasure of its tail’s signifying capacities accentuates its figuration as bare life—not, as I insist, only the symbolic reference to refugees or stateless persons as bare life but the actual production of an animal body as bare life. This paves the way for a noncriminal putting to death of the free-range dog. Finally, the “game” played at the end with its “mute” corporeality, leading to its inert body lying in a no-man’s zone is an indicator of the “active making of an object” (Chen 13). Furthermore, the combination of the attribution of meaninglessness to the dog’s signing body and the pejorative associations that are attached

58  Amit R. Baishya to the animal emerging from the thick vocabularies of everyday speech means that for the hunters of the cynegetic state, there is no “problematic of sacrifice…” as far as the dog’s body is concerned (Chamayou 14–15). The use of word “martyr” (shahid) by Himmat Khan is thus ironic. To be shahid is to endow sacrificial value to death.12 The dog’s death, like the homines sacri, is life that can be killed but not sacrificed. Kutte ki maut, Harnam Singh’s statement, signifies a particularly degraded and anonymous form of “bad” death, one commensurate with the lowly status of canines. The dog’s ungrievable demise signifies the obliteration of a fragile possibility of hospitality. Derrida’s questions posed in Of Hospitality function as a poignant epitaph to the bin bulaye mehman: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language … before being able … to welcome him…? If he was already speaking our language, with all that it implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum and hospitality in regard to him? (15–17)

Does the Tapeworm have a Head?: The Case for Political Animality This portion, to modify Massumi’s question slightly, asks what do (post)colonial animals teach us about politics? Close attention to classic postcolonial theoretical texts or representations reveals that complex political figurations of states of animality exist simultaneously with invocations of the human and expressions of human agency. We can revisit this well-known passage from Fanon’s The Wretched13: Sometimes this Manicheanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonial subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms. Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the “native” quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming (pullulement), the seething (grouillement), and the gesticulations. In his endeavors at description and finding the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary… This explosive population growth, those hysterical masses, those blank faces, those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort, these children who seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence sprawling under the sun, this vegetating existence, all this is part of the colonial vocabulary. (7) As is typical with Fanon’s rhetoric, he first inhabits the colonizer’s racist-­ speciesist discourse that describes the colonized as bestial objects. We can

Ethics and Politics  59 say that this is the phase of the “clinic of the subject” (Mbembe, Critique 163) as Fanon makes us inhabit the discourse that alienates the colonized subject from a sense of her own human worth. Of particular interest are the nouns “swarming” (pullulement) and “seething” (grouillement). Both terms are related to the world of insects. As Kellert reminds us, “the extraordinary ‘multiplicity’ of the invertebrate world seems to threaten the human concern for individual identity and selfhood” (quoted in Brown 7).14 This sense of the radical otherness of the non-­individualized swarm is exacerbated when Fanon describes the teeming, seething colonized as “those hysterical masses, those blank faces, those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort….” Viewed through the ­objectifying lens of the colonizer, the zombie-like and animalized colonized seem to exist and survive in spaces where time seems to either have slowed down or frozen to a halt (“vegetal existence”). However, Fanon often uses this objectifying language to ironically overturn it and reinsert the colonized as subject and agent. The “clinic of the subject” intersects with the “politics of the patient.” The “shock” is provided by revolutionary violence (Mbembe, Critique 163). An example of inversion comes slightly before the passage I quoted above: The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm (s’engouffrer) into the forbidden cities. (6) The reflexive verb s’engouffrer means either to swallow up or to rush into. Farrington translates it as “surges” (39), while Philcox translates it as “swarm.” The swarm metaphor is now increasingly used in biopolitical formulations and post-humanist theory to describe both strategies of attack and modalities of intelligence. What media theorist Jussi Parrikka says about swarming assists us in connecting some key concerns in these two Fanonian segments: Swarming was early on described as a peculiar group behavior that … represented a weird kind of organization that seemed to reside between instinct and intelligence. We can think of this as an alternative lesson on organization, taught by uncanny headless animals and multitudes, horrors of nonindividual groups … swarming originally had this double meaning of a multitude of a kind, which, since its attachments to animal contexts, came to mean something akin to an uncontrolled (by a unity) but still concerted organization. (48)

60  Amit R. Baishya Consider what Fanon says about this “headless, tailless cohort” and the colonized “swarming” into the compartmentalized colonial quarters. From the colonizer’s standpoint, this seems like an extreme nightmare of “nonindividual groups.” But if we shift the focus to the colonized, could these nonhuman metaphors not gesture towards an “alternative lesson on organization”? Gillo Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas seem to have absorbed this implicit Fanonian lesson in their anticolonial classic The Battle. While the colonizer’s gaze and voice animalize the colonized in numerous ways, the film through its polyvalent-reversible modalities shows how the animalized colonized engage in alternative modalities of politics. Three features are crucial here: the motif of the tapeworm, the motif of beheading, and the representation of the (feminized) voice in the sonic space. One of the primary motifs in the film is that of the tapeworm. The counter-insurgency specialist, Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), likens the Front de Libèration Nationale (FLN) guerrilla structure to that of the tapeworm and states that the uprising in Algiers can only be quelled if the French forces decapitate its “head”. The film shows how the French slowly dismantle the urban guerrilla network to reach the “head”—­ Jaffar (Saadi Youcef) and Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggaig). After the house in the Kasbah where Ali and his companions hold out is bombed, another French general tells Mathieu: “And so the tapeworm no longer has a head. Are you satisfied, Mathieu? In Algiers everything should be over.” Mathieu agrees somewhat, adding that Algiers is not all of Algeria. Seemingly this brutal period of counterinsurgency has ended. Beheading is a recurring gendered motif in The Battle. Significantly, only men or groups headed by men are beheaded in the film, literally or figuratively. One of the scenes at the beginning shows an FLN fighter beheaded in the prison compound, an event that probably is crucial in Ali La Pointe becoming a revolutionary. Knausgaard mentions a relevant point for an interpretation of this motif of beheading: the “chop in the neck opened the abyss between life and death, but also between head and body, reason and chaos, human and animal, in a symbolic language where the neck forms the transition between what is low, corporeal-­ animal, and what is high, spiritual….” Given that the colonized in “plain talk … is reduced to the state of an animal” and is described in “zoological terms” (The Wretched 7), the recurrence of the motif of beheading in the film exposes the colonizers’ desire to simultaneously open and maintain the heavily policed boundaries between head and body, human and animal, colonialist reason and the “chaos” of decolonization. However, this focus on the phallogocentric dimension of beheading is counterbalanced by the sonic and vocal dimensions of the film that accompany shots of the “headless, tailless cohort” of the swarming colonized. Immediately after the conversation between Mathieu and the general, the plot skips three years ahead to 1960 as the colonized begin to

Ethics and Politics  61 swarm into the compartmentalized zones inhabited by the colonists. On the one hand, this scene seems to fulfill Ben M’Hidi’s statement to Ali La Pointe towards the middle of the film: “It’s hard to start a revolution. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But, it’s only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin.” On the other hand, there is a sharp disjunct between sound and image in these documentary-like sequences that impels us to reread it from the standpoint of animality. As the camera lingers on a newsreel-like image of the swarming colonized through an overhead shot, the dominant voice in this sequence, a French voiceover, states in a bewildered way: “For some unknown reason, due to some obscure motive, after two years of relative quiet, with the war contained mainly in the mountains, disturbances broke out again without warning, and nobody knows why or how.” Interspersed with the first part of this voiceover are the ragged sounds of ululations, which reminds us of an earlier sequence when women ululate as the men are released by the French paratroopers. The French voiceover’s bewilderment emphasized by “for some unknown reason…” is an ironic expose of the colonizer’s inability to understand or recognize the dialectical process of colonial violence and counterviolence depicted in the film. At the same time, the implicit horror of the colonizers at the sight of these “swarming” masses reinforces Parrikka’s point about the “alternative lesson on organization, taught by uncanny headless animals….” Clearly, the uncanny effect of these colonized masses swarming compartmentalized colonial spaces, an effect accentuated by the preponderance of overhead shots, reveals the vacuity of colonial counterinsurgency’s search for a head. Drawing on researches in artificial intelligence, Hardt and Negri write: the term swarm intelligence … name(s) collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global mode. Part of the problem with much of the previous artificial intelligence research … is that it assumes intelligence to be based in an individual mind, whereas they assert that intelligence is fundamentally social. (91–92) The swarm imagery in Pontecorvo’s film refers less to the unified collectivity of people guided by their localization in “an individual mind” (symbolized by the head) and more by an intelligence that is “fundamentally social.” Sound accentuates the uncanny nature of this sequence. A ubiquitous element of the sonic space of this sequence are the ululations by women, a vocal category that oscillates in the realm between sound and speech. Postcolonial feminist scholars have correctly argued that women in The Battle function either as helpers of the men (Shohat) or as the “living dead” who disappear in the cuts between sequences (Khanna). Women

62  Amit R. Baishya rarely speak for extensive periods in the film. But the women manifest their vocal presence throughout, particularly through the resonating ululations. To be sure, the gendered conjunction between birth and death is underscored at the end as the women keep ululating, while a narrator concludes by saying that in 1962 “the Algerian nation is born.” Khanna underscores this tension between birth and death, present and future when she writes that the story of birth is posited in the future, but also in the reportage of the past… Birth and death come together in a temporality that at once proposes women’s reproductive labor (literally pregnancy) as hope…. (127) But could there be another way of reading the vocalic dimension of the ululations from the standpoint of politicized animality? To answer this question, let’s consider this sonic dimension from the perspective of both the colonizer and the colonized. The frightening quality of these alien sounds for the colonizer is emphasized by the voiceover in the documentary-like sequence. As the camera pans across a darkened Kasbah, we hear the ululations increase in pitch. In Battle of Algiers at Fifty, Alan O’Leary writes: “The protest sequences … feature an echoey, ‘distressed’ sound quality (as if recorded with rudimentary equipment) that is of a piece with the high contrast film stock and use of telephoto lenses” (28). The effect of the “acousmatic” (Chion) rendition of the voice has uncanny effects. As the acousmatic voices resonate collectively, the voiceover nervously narrates: “The Muslim quarters still echo with those unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries.” These “unintelligible and frightening” cries are similar to Marlow’s horror as he describes the soundscape of the colonial deathworld in the Congo. In both cases—Heart of Darkness and The Battle—we can echo Ranciere’s idea of “policing” to understand the colonizer’s anxiety at policing what he perceives as noise: “an order of bodies … that defines the allocation of ways of doing … that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (29).15 In effect, the voiceover’s representation of the “natives” as producers of mere “noise” is an act of narrative “policing”: it reduces the Algerians to an animalized level and places them outside the realm of the political by stipulating what gets understood as discourse and what is relegated to the level of noise. But this relegation of the ululations to the level of noise seems uncanny and horrifying only because the colonizer does not possess the code to understand it. Drury writes: “Located somewhere between singing and yelling, ululation occupies a unique position in the spectrum of human vocality.”16 Ululations have a communal function in many non-Western societies and are connected to rituals concerning birth, marriage, and

Ethics and Politics  63 death, although in many Western perceptions they are relegated to the “sonic exotic” (Drury). Drury’s points connect with theorists of the voice like Cavarero, who while emphasizing the voice’s “quasi-animal” dimensions also argues that it exceeds the category of speech (13). The voice encompasses much more than the act of speaking alone—infant’s babbles, the singing voice, moans, and wails are also constitutive of this category (Dolar 27). These elements—paradoxically represented as both lack (in the sense of not possessing the element of self-presence that speech provides) and excess (these elements are viewed as extraneous to the rational domain of speech)—are crucial constituents of the voice. Not surprisingly, in the history of (phal)logocentric politics, the quasi-animal element of the voice has been read as an expression of the feminine. In The Battle, the phallic “head” of the tapeworm is indeed occupied by men. However, the ululating sounds performed by women operate as a powerful sonic companion to the uncanny, headless political activity of the swarming colonized. In her reading of voice in the film, Khanna says: Voice becomes part of the soundtrack of the film in a way that demands consciousness of a language of urgency, representation, emergency and sovereignty. Somehow the hearing of the sounds of attempted sovereignty—in which the fight over who can make people die becomes key—clamorous. If the radio as the “voice of fighting Algeria” become the newly instated “voice of Algeria”— resonating superego making demands by repeating the archaisms of sovereignty … the superego’s critical agency persists with its law but simultaneously evokes another Freudian formulation of critical agency: that of melancholia, the persistent sonorous critique of what one has incorporated, manifested as self-criticism and ­disidenti­fication. (133–34) While I align with this reading of sovereignty contra melancholia to a large extent, I depart from Khanna when she says that women’s voices “become the site of a politics outside of representation and identification through desubjectivation” (132). My conclusions tend in a different direction: I argue that the triangulation of the tapeworm’s eventual headlessness, the swarming activity of the colonized, and the acousmatic ululation of the women at the end of the film gesture towards an alternative form of political subjectivity and organization, one that flips negative animalization on its head and unearths other possibilities of collectivity. Like Rimbaud’s depictions of the Communards and of insects in his poetry, the last section of The Battle takes place in “the buzzing and swarming of the flesh” (Hardt and Negri 93). It would be tempting to conclude by saying that The Battle, and by extension Fanon, starts with the objectifying language and gaze of the colonizer but flips the metaphor around to reinstate the animalized

64  Amit R. Baishya colonized as subjects and agents of history. Fanon himself encourages such a reading when he writes in The Wretched that “Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History” (2). There is a teleology at work here—the move from a nonessential state to a privileged actor. This teleology is also seen in readings of The Battle in the wake of biopolitical theory. Consider, for instance, the title of Holtmeier’s essay: “The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics.” In this essay, The Battle functions as an example of “classical political cinema” which he contrasts with the “heterogenous … networked subjectivity” represented by Rachid Bouchareb’s Outside the Law (2010). Significantly, he refers to the tapeworm metaphor in his description of the “classically” articulated anticolonial nationalist politics of Pontecorvo’s film: Perhaps the tapeworm was longer than Mathieu anticipated, but ending with this historic victory of the Algerian resistance emphasizes the singular focus, and efficacy, of the classical political cinema: a political project carried out by a unified people, involving collective action and the construction of a coherent subjectivity opposed to that of the oppressors. (313) These rhetorical moves enable Holtmeier to move from an analysis of a “political project carried out by a unified people” to the more networked and heterogeneous political subjectivities represented in Outside the Law.17 My focus on animality in Fanon’s and Pontecorvo’s texts asks us to move in a different temporal direction. Focusing on animality and rereading Fanon’s and Pontecorvo’s texts antidiachronically and intertextually in light of contemporary articulations of affirmative biopolitics, I suggest that networked, diffused “animal” subjectivities are already at play throughout in these “classical” anticolonial texts. To be a “privileged actor captured … in the spotlight of history” is not a progression from animal to human but a process of becoming hybridly humanimal. Anthropocentrism is constantly undercut by zoomorphic figurations. Isn’t Fanon’s polyvalent use of “swarms” already an example of affirmative animality? And what of the sudden temporal leap from 1957 (the decapitation of the head of the tapeworm) to 1960 (the headless, swarming activity of the colonized) in The Battle? During the midpoint of the film, Ben M’Hidi says: “Acts of violence don’t win wars. Neither wars nor revolutions. Terrorism is useful as a start. But then, the people themselves must act.” Is the action of the “unified people” at the end of the film merely a delayed but inevitable reaction to the “terrorism”

Ethics and Politics  65 that was useful as a start? Or does the film insert the last coda of collective swarming action, accentuated by ululations that pervade the sonic space, as a supplement that functions doubly as a “surplus” that “cumulates and accumulates presence” and as a replacement that “intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 144–45)? Like the voice that is simultaneously excess and lack, like headlessness that is both a horrifying loss and a “dizzyingly densified” existence, this supplemental section at the end of Pontecorvo’s film text, I suggest, functions both a surplus that accumulates the spectral projection of the people to futurity (“the ­people themselves must act”) and a replacement that fills in the void of the decapitated head of the revolutionary movement. Thus, if we foreground the polyvalent-reversible usage of animal metaphors, both the film and Fanon’s text provide anticipations of a “biopolitics from below”—forms of “cooperative relationship(s), against the assault of biopolitical technologies, to produce and reproduce life” (Hardt 99). If the bio/necropolitical technologies used by the colonizer are aimed at decapitating the head, hemming in the colonized in heavily policed spaces, and throttling their voices, the headless, swarming, vocalic activity of the colonized gesture towards other forms of “cooperative relationships” that “produce and reproduce life.” This sense of alter-politics grows not only from opposition to or critique of current systems, “but one that grows from attention to another way of being, one here that involves other kinds of living beings” (Kohn 14). If we consider this possibility, we can claim that Fanon anticipates forms of contemporary thinking about the spatializations and topographies of late modern necropolitics (Mbembe, “Necropolitics” 26–28), and also affirmative conceptualizations of a biopolitics from below. The emergence of the “human” in Fanon is linked in an embrace with the “post/ human” mediated by figurations of the animal/nonhuman.

Notes 1 I draw on Haraway’s redefinition of figures/figuration here (5). 2 I deployed this notion of “polyvalent-reversibility” in Contemporary Literature from Northeast India (35–37). My deployment of polyvalent-­ reversibility shares contiguities with Shukin’s point that “‘the animal’, arguably more than any other signifier by virtue of its singular mimetic capaciousness…functions as a hinge allowing powerful discourses to flip or vacillate between literal and figurative economies of sense” (5). 3 The term “animacy” is drawn from cognitive linguistics and refers to “the set of notions characterized by family resemblances.” It is “described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility and liveness” (Chen 1–4). 4 Biosemiotics refers to the sign processes immanent to all formations of life. See Hoffmeyer; Maran. 5 Boitani writes:

66  Amit R. Baishya Wild, stray, sylvatic, feral, village, unrestrained, are just some of the many labels used to define a huge variety of ecotypes of dogs that share a fundamental ecological feature: they are free to wander where they want and follow the occasional lure. They are free, temporarily or permanently, from the control of a human who disctates their times, movements and lifestyle. (v) 6 Bhaskaran marginalizes stray dogs in India and frames them as a “problem.” 7 Chamayou contrasts the cynegetic modality of the state’s functioning with Foucault’s formulation of the pastoral. 8 Kolb uses this term with reference to deaf subjects and their use of sign language. The crucial point I’d like to draw here is that “signing bodies”— whether the disabled subject or the animal—are oftentimes not viewed as bearers of signification. 9 Interestingly, along with naming, the language of the other is also ­animalized— Himmat Khan asks Bashir to write Sapad Sunsun in “creepy-crawly (keera-makora) Gurmukhi” (85). Ravikant and Saint write that this derogatory animalized reference goes back to nineteenth-century politics of language and identity in Punjab. 10 Also see Debroy. 11 For a discussion of the roles that dogs played in Islamicate societies, see Tlili, Mikhail, Fortuny, and Hofer. 12 Shahid is an Arabic cognate used in many Indian languages. See Daniyal, “Shaheed and Martyr.” Cook writes that “the word shahid (plural shahada) has the meaning of ‘martyr’ and is closely related in its development to the Greek martyrios in that it means both a witness and a martyr (i.e., a person who suffers or dies deliberately for the sake of affirming the truth of a belief system).” 13 I use the Philcox translation, with occasional nods to the translation by Farrington. 14 Also see Raffles (201–06). 15 See Baishya, “The Sounds of Silence.” 16 Contiguously, Kuiper writes that ululations exist “…in a kind of border zone between speech and song on the one hand, and between performers and audience on the other.” (491). 17 For a fresh take on temporality in The Battle, especially in its emphasis on the “carnivalesque” dimension of the closing scenes, see O’Leary’s monograph The Battle of Algiers (Italian Frame).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford UP, 1998. Ahuja, Neel. “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar.” Social Text 29.1(106), Spring 2011, pp. 127–49. ———. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire and the Government of Species. Duke UP, 2016. ———. “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.” PMLA 124.2, 2009, pp. 556–63. Baishya, Amit R. Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival. Routledge, 2018. ———. “The Sounds of Silence: Voice, Noise and Muteness in Heart of Darkness.” performinghumanity.wordpress.com. Accessed 19 February 2019.

Ethics and Politics  67 Berns, Gregory. What It’s Like to Be a Dog and Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience. Basic Books, 2017. Bhaskaran, S. Theodore. The Book of Indian Dogs. Aleph, 2017. Boitani, Luigi. “Foreword.” Free Ranging Dogs and Wildlife Conservation. ­E dited Matthew Gomper. Oxford UP, 2014, pp. v–vi. Brown, Eric C. Editor. Insect Poetics. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated Paul Kottman. Stanford UP, 2005. Chamayou, Gregoire. Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Translated Steven Rendall. Princeton UP, 2012. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Duke UP, 2012. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated Claudia Gorbman. Columbia UP, 1999. Clark, David. “On Being ‘the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Reflections on Animals after Levinas.” Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. Edited Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior. Routledge, 1999, pp. 165–98. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (4th Edition). Edited Paul Armstrong. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. Cook, David. “Martyrdom (Shahada).” oxfordbibliographies.com. Accessed 10 March 2019. Coppinger, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger. Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution. U of Chicago P, 2001. Daniyal, Shoaib. “Shaheed and Martyr Are Religious Terms: Should They Be Used for Indian Soldiers Killed in Battle?” scroll.in. Accessed 10 March 2019. ———. “Why Dogs and Puppies Are Swear Words in India: A Short Guide to Hindi Profanity for the BJP.” scroll.in. Accessed 15 February 2019. Dayan, Colin. The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton UP, 2011. Debroy, Bibek. Sarama and Her Children: The Dog in Indian Myth. Penguin Books, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated Marie-Louise Mallet. Fordham UP, 2008. ———. The Beast and the Sovereign (Vol. 1): The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Translated Geoffrey Bennington. U of Chicago P, 2009. ———. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Translated Peter Connor and Avital Ronnell. Points…Interviews 1974–94. Edited Elizabeth ­Weber. Stanford UP, 1995, pp. 255–87. ———. Of Grammatology. Translated Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated Rachel Bowlby. Stanford UP, 2000. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT P, 2006. Doniger, Wendy. “Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial than Beasts.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Edited Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. Columbia UP, 2005, pp. 17–36. Drury, Meghan. “An Ear-Splitting Cry: Gender, Performance, and Representations of Zaghareet in the US.” soundstudiesblog.com. Accessed 19 February 2019.

68  Amit R. Baishya Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated Constance Farrington. Grove Weidenfeld, 1968. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated Richard Philcox. Grove P, 2004. Flemming, Leslie. “Riots and Refugees: The Post-Partition Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.” Journal of South Asian Literature 13.1–4, 1978, pp. 99–109. Fortuny, Kim. “Islam, Westernization and Posthumanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.2, Spring 2014, pp. 271–97. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” boundary2 26:2, 1999, pp. 89–100. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin, 2005. Hofer, Nathan. “Dogs in Medieval Egyptian Sufi Literature.” Our Dogs, Our Selves: Dogs in Medieval and Early Modern Art, Literature and Society. Edited Laura D. Gelfand. Brill, 2016, pp. 78–96. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Science of Life and the Life of Signs. Translated Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favreau. Edited Donald Favreau. U of Chicago P, 2009. Holtmeier, Matthew. “The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics.” Film Philosophy 20, 2016, pp. 303–23. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (1st Edition). Routledge, 2010. Khan, Naveeda. “Dogs and Humans and What Earth Can Be: Filaments of Muslim Ecological Thought.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.3, 2014, pp. 245–64. Khanna, Ranjana. Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830-Present. Stanford UP, 2007. Knausgaard, Karl-Ove. “The Other Side of the Face.” theparisreview.org. ­Accessed 09 January 2018. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human. U of California P, 2013. Kolb, Rachel. “The Deaf Body in Public Space.” nytimes.com. 28 September 2016. Accessed 20 October 2017. Kuipers, Joel C. “Ululations from the Weyewa Highlands (Sumba): Simultaneity, Audience Response, and Models of Cooperation.” Ethnomusicology 43.3, Autumn 1999, pp. 490–507. Manto, Saadat Hasan. “The Dog of Tetwal.” Translated Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint. Manoa 19.1, 2007, pp. 80–87. Maran, Timo. “Biosemiotic Criticism.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Edited Greg Garrard. Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 260–75. Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Duke UP, 2014. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated Laurent Dubois. Duke UP, 2017. ———. “Necropolitics.” Translated Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1, 2003, pp. 11–40. Mikhail, Alan. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. Oxford UP, 2016. Miller, Steven. War after Death: On Violence and Its Limits. Fordham UP, 2014.

Ethics and Politics  69 Narayanan, Yamini. “Street Dogs at the Intersection of Colonialism and Informality: ‘Subaltern Animism’ as a Posthuman Critique of Indian Cities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35.3, 2017, pp. 475–94. O’Leary, Alan. The Battle of Algiers (Italian Frame). Mimesis International, 2018. ———. “The Battle of Algiers at Fifty: End of Empire Cinema and the First Banlieue Film.” Film Quarterly 70.2, Winter 2016. fq.ucpress.edu. Accessed 19 February 2019. Outside the Law. Dir. Rachid Bouchareb, 2010. Film. Parrikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. U of Minnesota P, 2010. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. Columbia UP, 2011. Raffles, Hugh. Insectopedia. Vintage Books, 2010. Ranciere, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated Julie Rose. U of Minnesota P, 2004. Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint. “‘The Dog of Tetwal’ in Context: The Nation and its Victims.” Translating Partition. Edited Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint. Katha, 2001, pp. 94–103. Samyn, Jeanette. “Anti-Anti-Parasitism.” thenewinquiry.com. Accessed 5 June 2018. Shohat, Ella H. “Post Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation and the Cinema.” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Edited ­Chandra T. Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander. Routledge, 1996, pp. 183–211. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. U of Minnesota P, 2009. Tlili, Sarra. Animals in the Qu’Ran. Cambridge UP, 2012. The Battle of Algiers. Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Perf.: Brahim Haggaig, Saadi Yacef, Jean Martin. Casbah Films, 1966.

Section II

Dogs

4 The Turk That Therefore I Follow Efe Khayyat

“For about two centuries,” explains Jacques Derrida, something has been happening to us “who call ourselves men or humans, we who recognize ourselves in that name”—something that is clearly visible in our relation to other living beings. It is so radically new that it does not even seem to happen “within what we continue to call the world, history, life, and so on,” and in that “it should oblige us to worry all those concepts, more than just problematize them” (25). For what we do to animals, what they have had to endure at least for about two centuries now, make it impossible for us to recognize ourselves in this relationship. There is no precedent to it in the human past. After Derrida, one would have to say that all this bloodshed and perversity, all this violence just does not follow. It makes no sense that we find ourselves where we are as we speak vis-à-vis animals. It is as if we are at the edge of human world and human history, if not already beyond. That is why one must try worrying “the world, history, life, and so on” like a dog. For it is not sensible anymore to simply problematize these concepts—that would be a little too shameless, as if we were mindless beasts incapable of speaking up for ourselves and against the destruction of our world. Alternatively, it would be a little too shameful, come out as all-too-human or too refined to be true, as if all the humanities could do were to shed crocodile tears. Derrida gnaws on all those concepts in his posthumous L’animal que donc je suis—“the world, history, life, and so on”—but especially history. If the pursuit of the human in history seems to hail an end point vis-à-vis our contemporary relation to animals and with the judgment that where we are now just does not follow, that we do not seem to follow ourselves and our ideals anymore (as “humans” and “humanists”), then perhaps that which needs to be called into question is (“our”) history itself, this confessional and autobiographical enterprise of sighting and situating ourselves on earth. On the one hand, gnawing on history, Derrida diligently sucks out confession and autobiography from its core—and insofar as these are themes and issues that he seems to have always followed, as he admits, there are no surprises here (24–25). On the other hand, in this final, bestial autobiography, he also finds himself obliged to pursue a new, strange angle to view and account for himself—an angle that is not

74  Efe Khayyat merely historical nor chronological, not immediately literary either nor just autobiographical or philosophical. He ends up offering us a different way of critiquing literature, history, and religion, completing yet another, perhaps his final circle around writing, giving us another peak for literary and cultural criticism. Can one think of stepping out, beyond or before history to situate ourselves on earth? Can we imagine viewing ourselves without this overtly confessional, this “poisonously” autobiographic, literary lens that gives us our histories (47; 24–25)? For that lens cannot provide us with the proper means to view ourselves for who or what we are anymore, he suggests— who or what we have become at this point in time. Can we try an alternative? “Just to see,” he would add, if there is in particular in the history of discourse, indeed of the becoming-­ literature of discourse, an ancient form of autobiography immune from confession, an account of the self free from any sense of confession? And thus from all redemptive language, within the horizon of salvation as a requiting? Has there been, since so long ago, a place and a meaning for autobiography before original sin and before the religions of the book? Autobiography and memoir before Christianity, especially, before the Christian institutions of confession? (21) It is beyond the scope of this essay to follow Derrida around as he leads many of his animals, poets and philosophers on a quest for this vantage point. Nor is it my intention to follow the overall trajectory that brings Derrida to the mysterious animal that he ends up following. What I am after is the vantage point Derrida looks for and its possible relation to an island in modernizing Turkey. I would like to see if a barren island near Istanbul, where tens of thousands of dogs died in 1910, and the way this island has since figured historically to the East and the West of Istanbul, may enlighten the vantage point whence Derrida wants us to be able to look back at history as history, that is, moving beyond it—moving beyond confession, redemption, and “especially” Christianity. The view from this island, I believe, enables us to see how the question of the postcolonial animal only follows that of the autobiographical animal. Along the way, I discuss two accounts of the dog massacre, Catherine Pinguet’s Les Chiens d’Istanbul (2008) and Serge Avedikian’s award-winning short film The Barking Island (Chienne d’histoire 2010), while addressing the perspectives of several witnesses and critics, including Kurdish philosopher and Young Turk Abdullah Cevdet, caricaturist SEM, Mark Twain, and Sir Mark Sykes.

One After the revolutionary Young Turks overthrew Abdülhamid II, the pious tyrant of the late Ottoman empire, to reinstate the constitution and reopen

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  75 the Ottoman parliament in 1909, the stray animals of Istanbul, and particularly the city’s legendary dogs, became the next target of the revolutionary movement. Abdülhamid II’s long reign, which began with the dissolution of the Ottoman parliament and the suspension of the constitution, had long been considered an era of stagnation by the Turkish revolutionaries, a period when the century-old Westernization program of the Ottoman empire had come to a halt. Earlier rulers of the nineteenth century, ­Mahmud II and Abdülaziz, who were credited with being wise enough to religiously follow the civilized world and pursue the Westernization of all the institutions of the empire, seem to have had issues with the stray animals of the capital much earlier (Colomban 141; Timur 12–13; Twain 373–74). One prominent Young Turk, though, namely, the incredibly prolific Kurdish philosopher Abdullah Cevdet, expresses his disappointment at Mahmud II’s failure to take his modernizing efforts to eliminating the dogs of the capital earlier in the nineteenth century (Cevdet 7).1 Perhaps it is safe to assume that the dogs were not a priority for the earlier modernizers of the empire—that while following in the footsteps of these earlier visionaries, Young Turks also considered themselves far ahead of Mahmud II and ­Abdülaziz in imagining a modern life in Turkey. Regardless, Young Turks considered themselves having inherited a mission from the earlier Westernizers and other revolutionaries of the Ottoman Empire. Overthrowing the tyrant, reinstating the constitution, and reopening the Ottoman parliament were only a beginning for them. They were invested in cleaning up all aspects of life on the streets of the empire—religious and political, cultural and material—while modernizing and refurbishing all the institutions of the Ottoman state for the new century. The capital Istanbul was certainly a pilot urban setting for these revolutionaries. With the beginning of their “second constitutional era,” which, Young Turks thought, would fulfill the promises of the earlier era of reforms, print culture boomed across the empire, accompanied by numerous other institutional improvements in education and public services at large. 2 Hygienic concerns of a new, revolutionary municipal administration are in part the explanation for the new focus on the stray dogs of the capital, which was covered extensively by the booming print culture as well. The dog population slowly came to be viewed as a dog “infestation.” Dogs had been around in Istanbul since so long ago though, perhaps since the beginning of time and tradition—which is why critics have highlighted the fact that for the revolutionaries, the dog infestation was at once an infestation with tradition, with the old habits associated with an ancient, aging, outmoded way of living and being.3 Abdullah Cevdet, for one, made clear that his 1909 attack on the dogs of Istanbul was at once an attack on the superstitions of the pious, whom the simple folk mindlessly followed, he thought, like sheep or like those hordes of filthy dogs. When earlier modernizers of the empire showed cruelty to the dogs, God had sent them all sorts of plagues and punishments, or so believed the humble, lured by equally clueless religious leaders. All this

76  Efe Khayyat is nonsense, Cevdet explains (8–9). Eradicating the dogs was eliminating the aging, corrupting religion and the backward, terribly Turkish and Muslim way of being and living with animals, which itself appeared somewhat animalistic to Cevdet and his comrades. We do know that several options were on the table to deal with the dog infestation. For instance, one idea, as the French director of l’Institut Pasteur d’Istanbul explains, was to sell the dogs to an investor who would then install gas chambers around the city, where the dogs would be humanely killed, then butchered and processed to produce usable materials (Remlinger 65–66). Remlinger’s language already sets the stage for some “dreaded comparisons” between the fate of I­ stanbul’s canine population and the darkest moments of European twentieth century (Spiegel 1996; Armstrong 2002). Cevdet regrets that this offer was turned down by the government (4). There were parts of the city—­occupied mostly by Westerners—where dogs were already being poisoned, and that could have been another option (Colomban 140; or Pinguet, “Istanbul’s Street Dogs” 367–68). Cevdet goes further to ask his readers not to expect everything from the government and to take action themselves and kill the filthy creatures already (13). What I have narrated so far already makes it clear that in the late Ottoman era the persecution of the dogs of the capital was a matter of following the European example, a matter of “Europeanization,” as one says in Turkish, of the empire’s Westernization.4 The dog population of the capital came to be identified as an infestation by those who viewed human life at this corner of the world as one that had to be more strictly distinguished and demarcated from the animal habitat than it had been thus far, and one that had to be brought in more of a proximity to the European way of life. But for the Ottoman revolutionaries who took themselves to follow the European example, and the example of the earlier modernizers of the empire, it was also a matter of safeguarding and conserving the tradition, of saving tradition from itself and its stagnation, and of making sure that the traditional Ottoman, Muslim values and institutions would survive in the modernizing, Westernizing world. A Muslim capital of modern times, the Muslim capital, could not appear as if it were the capital of a canine populace. Cevdet’s pamphlet develops its argument not only on the basis of the necessity to follow the European, civilized example but also on the basis of a particular take on what it means to follow sharia and its prescriptions. But C ­ evdet also followed “biological materialism” and translated many pieces into ­Ottoman Turkish to teach Muslims biological materialism. The guiding premise of his work was that true Islam had always already been somewhat biological materialistic—avant la lettre, as it were—that the superstitions of the modern era that would easily pit Islam against biological materialism were the outcome of the degeneration of ancient Muslim thought (Hanioğlu, Doktor Abdullah Cevdet 129–58).

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  77 There was a great deal of following then. Ottoman revolutionaries, in pursuit of Europeanizing the Turkish way of life, only followed their revolutionary ancestors to safeguard the tradition. For the tradition to survive, the dog had to stop following the Turk. The question to respond to in living with or not, eradicating or not the dogs of the Ottoman-­Turkish capital was, primarily, the question of what it meant to follow (the Turkish, Muslim, Ottoman, European, “human,” or canine example) and what it meant to be (Turkish, Muslim, Ottoman, European, human, or a dog for that matter). What the revolutionaries had to respond to, with their actions and decisions, was the question of the relation of following, as in imitating and enacting (the European, the Ottoman, or the Muslim way of life) to being (European, oneself, or Ottoman and Muslim)—an ontological question after all. The weight of this question may explain the monstrously awkward response that the Young Turks improvized. This may also be the reason why Abdullah Cevdet had to make a case for how the proper Muslim way of life would have never shown tolerance to that strange scenery of a crowded city infested with filthy dogs. If Ottomans were to follow the prescriptions of Islam, which they thought they always followed, and be the ­Muslims that they took themselves to be, they had to change their Muslim ways and follow the European example in demarcating the human and animal habitats like never before. Yet this new path to follow was in no way a matter of transformation or conversion, but of preservation, even though the eradication of the dogs would radically transform the ancient silhouette of the city for good. Thus, although there seems to be a great deal of following, it is not evident whom or what the Young Turks followed as revolutionaries, nor is it entirely clear whom or what they thought the pious or the simple folk followed as Muslims. Because the revolutionaries did not simply follow the recommendations by Europeans or Abdullah Cevdet, whose influence at the time is at best questionable. They did not poison the dogs or build gas chambers across the city, nor did they call for their eradication. After all, as someone explained to Georges Goursat when he visited Istanbul in 1910, sharia banned the killing of the innocent (49). Nor did they leave the dogs alone though. They collected the dogs and shipped them to a barren island, apparently with a mind, at least initially, to guaranteeing their survival there, even appointing caretakers. Eventually, according to the mayor of the time, in 1909 and 1910 around 30,000 stray dogs living in Istanbul were systematically hunted, caged, and exiled to Hayirsiz Ada in the middle of the Marmara Sea, where they suffered from exposure to sun and dehydration, most of them slowly starving to death after eating each other for a while (Topuzlu 121). Regardless of the initial plan, Young Turks ultimately caused the deaths of tens of thousands of dogs under most horrid conditions—in the name of European modernity and tradition.

78  Efe Khayyat

Two Palmira Brummett accounted for how dogs figured in the revolutionary press during the print culture boom after the Young Turkish revolution, or rather how the dogs were represented by the “cartoon revolution” that accompanied the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turks. She is convinced that nothing less than “cultural schizophrenia” was at stake in this scramble for modernity and the battle to safeguard tradition (437). These satirical images equated “the dogs with the Ottoman people: starving, oppressed, and at the mercy of foreign entrepreneurs and an unsympathetic government,” questioning the difference between ordinary Ottoman citizens on the streets of Istanbul and their dogs (443). Insofar as the cartoons “bridged the gap between literate and illiterate culture,” Brummett explains, and their subject matter was often the life on the streets, while they were also circulated extensively on the real streets among the literate and the illiterate alike, cartoons enable us to catch a glimpse of life at this point in history that is not available anywhere else (436). Thus, Brummett comes up with an Auerbachian suggestion concerning the representation of reality. Mixing high and low genres and styles, bridging the gap between the humble and the learned, addressing the daily concerns of the simple, and elevating those concerns to unprecedented intellectual heights, the Ottoman revolutionary press, this emerging literary—if not exclusively “literate”—culture represents the kind of historical reality that other historical accounts do not and cannot. The cartoons of Brummett’s choice may not be representative, she explains, but they certainly represent some reality, and it seems to be the way they do the work of representing that makes them uniquely realistic (437). While the evolving revolutionary press, by definition, did obviously “address basically an elite audience,” cartoons also take us closer to the daily life of the simple people, whose simplicity, moreover, suggests the simplicity, the relative immediacy of the particular reality that cartoons represent (436). Even the dogs are there and in a way that is more realistic—which is to say, closer to the way they were perceived back then on the streets of Istanbul by the simple. But these literary-realistic representations of historical conditions also build invisible depths—historical depths—into the scenery of a crowded city occupied by people and dogs, situating the people, the simple folk, and the dogs around them in an unprecedented social space, ultimately offering new ways of making sense of human and canine lives. And in that, their literary realism is rather essentially political; it is more properly “politics,” this is to say, even literary politics or the politics of literature. It draws new demarcations between human and canine lives: the former historical and autobiographical, the latter barely life. While the very revolutionary press that Brummett analyzes, in its cartoons and articles alike, encouraged the revolutionary Young Turks

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  79 by publicly identifying a dog infestation in Istanbul, in the aftermath of the massacres, the attitude of the same revolutionary press evolved into one that identifies all Ottomans with the dogs (Gündoğdu 385). After the massacres, almost automatically, the revolutionary movement failed to identify itself with itself in its all-too-recent history, as if the massacres did not and could not follow the revolutionary, humanitarian ideals of Young Turks. Right after the eradication of the dogs, prominent members of the same revolutionary movement also founded the “The Istanbul Society for the Protection of Animals.” There seems to be a mysterious link between the eradication of the dogs of Istanbul and the revolutionary politics—the literary politics— that, while introducing new ways of engaging and representing historical reality, seeks to eradicate from memory that which came to pass. It may as well be the case that the gaze that identified the centuries-old canine presence in Istanbul as an infestation of the Turkish life with animality and tradition is the one that enabled the identification of the simple folk with the tortured and “slandered” innocents of Istanbul. It is this suspicion that obliges one to follow this gaze—this gaze that builds in invisible depths and enables literary realistic representations, historical consciousness, and autobiography—just to see where it stands before this history of violence. For, on the one hand, it is this gaze that creates the historical agents of this history. On the other, the same gaze makes it impossible for one to recognize oneself in this history. There is a parallel between the revolutionary, Europeanizing movement’s flawed representation of its own history, that is, its failure to identify itself in this history of violence (speak of “the lures” of “poisonous” autobiographies), and the way in which these dogs of history came to figure in the Western imagination historically, before and after the massacres. Although the Young Turks were after all in pursuit of Europeanizing the Turkish way of life in demarcating the human habitat more clearly, Europe itself could not by any means identify itself in this episode in Turkish history. Georges Goursat’s (aka SEM) 1910 illustrated essay “L’île aux chiens,” which was also quite the revolutionary moment for him personally, being his “literary debut,” tells the story of his visit to the island where the dogs were exiled.5 Goursat expected to see the streets of Istanbul swarmed with dogs, “after the legend,” as he puts it (49). This legend has an authorship of which Goursat was only a devout follower. The usual suspects, including Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Nerval, are among those who contributed to that authorship that is a much bigger collective for sure. There is hardly any work of travel literature on Istanbul predating the massacres that fails to take note of Istanbul’s incredible dog population.6 Needless to say, some dreaded that curiosity and some admired it.

80  Efe Khayyat Upon failing to locate the dogs on the streets of Istanbul, Goursat attends a dinner with Talat Pasha, one of the three pashas who were in charge of the revolutionary government: His Excellency assured us with a comforting smile that this measure had been taken by Mouheddin Bey, governor of Pera; that thirty thousand francs had been put aside by the Parliament for the maintenance of those dogs, that they were very well cared for and fed at the expense of the State. (50) But then something strange happens. Goursat and his friends run into three brutes chasing dogs on the streets, three terrible Kurds, after which they finally decide to make it to the island, just to see. “It was a hideous sight,” writes a disillusioned Goursat (49). Yet he made a literary debut out of it. A pitiful horde looking for rescue jumps into the water when Goursat’s boat approaches the island. The dogs even follow the boat in the sea as Goursat and his company leave, an English woman on board screaming: “Those poor dogs ought to be killed! Kill them, I beg you!” (48, 56). Goursat tells us that the dogs followed at the sea, most of them ending up getting killed by the propeller of their boat. But the dogs—and SEM—continue to haunt contemporary imaginary (57). “Like the poor Armenians,” Goursat would add (51). Goursat’s illustrations of 1910 can be traced all the way to Armenian-­ French film and theater actor, director, writer, and producer Serge Avedikian’s Cannes and Palm d’or winning animated short film Chienne d’histoire (2010). Avedikian carries Goursat’s dreadful comparison further and “links the Armenian genocide in April 1915 to these thousands of dogs cleansed from the streets of Constantinople and left to starve” (Dayan 133). Not only the film incorporates these earlier illustrations in a sequence, but its own illustrations by Thomas Azuélos, of dogs in particular, follow up on Goursat’s drawings. Its story line follows, sketch by sketch, Goursat’s illustrated account of 1910 in representing the extermination. Avedikian tells the story of a bitch that has just whelped a beautiful litter of healthy pups, all ending up in the island to meet their destiny. He illustrates for us Istanbul’s humble, Muslim Turks who seem to have no quarrel with the dogs. We also have here the Young Turk triumvirate with their mustaches and European outfits deliberating on the issue of dogs upon being briefed by a European expert, likely Remlinger himself, who also shows them exemplary images of Western urban locations. We see a boat of golden hues—Goursat’s boat—in the midst of the nightmare, approaching the island before the sequence that presents ­Goursat’s illustrations that have long called for pity for the dogs. So no one is spared. Then again, from the perspective of the European, whom Turks thought they only followed, here too we have a failure to identify oneself in historical reality. This time it takes the form of failing

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  81 to identify anything truly human, European or Turkish, in this tragic episode in modern Turkish history or the way in which it came to figure in the European imagination. Insofar as the film’s prestigious European recognition can be taken to celebrate and appropriate Avedikian’s ­vision, one must also identify the vantage point it enables. One is left to think, after the supplement of Avedikian’s award-winning corrective to Remlinger and Goursat, Cevdet and other Young Turks, that there was hardly anything truly European in the way in which the “problem” was solved, hardly anything European in the way in which the tragedy was represented in Europe, that is to say with some Orientalist distance. For the Turkish side of things, people themselves had no quarrel with those dogs anyway before Europeans and their ideals entered the scene—­perhaps with the exception of some brutes and some Kurds!

Three No one paid more attention to these lures of autobiography than Catherine Pinguet, whose Les Chiens d’Istanbul, despite not generating much interest in France, as she admits, created quite a stir in Turkish translation. Pinguet gave us numerous other examples of the failure, from missionaries copiously mourning over the tragedy after themselves having poisoned some dogs, to the director of l’Institut Pasteur d’Istanbul who, despite himself coming up with the option of gas chambers, found the Turkish solution to be utterly inhumane. Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, one of the signatories of the famous Sykes-Picot agreement between Great Britain and France that would divide up the Middle East in such a way that created a number of clearly demarcated habitats for a number of different peoples, figures prominently in this bestial history. Sykes preferred the tyrant Abdülhamid’s law and order to the anarchy that the revolutionary Turks stirred up—an order that Sykes himself would later instill in a different way (Sykes 507; Brummett 440–01). Even the dogs had a place and a role to play in the previous order of things and look what happened to them under Young Turks. Turks would eventually return to their place. Among those who pointed at the earlier, traditional Turkish-Muslim way of relating to dogs is Pierre Loti, who gives a different yet equally forceful account of resistance to the eradication of dogs by a conservative Muslim general (Loti 21–22). Pinguet resists the argument about the place and function of dogs in pre-modern Muslim Istanbul, which at one point required taking into consideration, by Turkish historians as well, the dogs’ role as scavengers and trash collectors (Twain 372; Işın 219–26). Instead she argues that what was at stake in the premodern Muslim Turkey could not be explained with some utilitarian perspective. It was simply a different way of relating to animals, a different conception of the gap dividing the human from the animal (Pinguet, “Le Chien éboueur” 239–40). A different way of being human.

82  Efe Khayyat Thus, the Muslim way of relating to animals is one of Pinguet’s main topics of interest. Her writings on the dogs of Istanbul, and her observations on how initially it was often the European and Christian neighborhoods of Istanbul that the dogs were most unwelcome, are always accompanied by intellectual and religious historical accounts of ­Muslims and their animals. No one paid more attention than Pinguet to the resistance on the streets to the eradication of the dogs, mainly by conservative Muslims, humble Turkish folk. And this, in part, explains the stir her book created in Turkish translation. If, for a variety of different reasons, Sykes, Loti, and Pinguet, among others, respond to dog massacres by turning their attention to earlier states of affairs in the Muslim lands, and if Pinguet in particular rushes to the humble Muslims of Istanbul who lived with many dogs around them for centuries, who had no quarrel with the dogs, and who resisted their eradication as well, this is because what is to be found there matters a great deal. It is quite an asset indeed. As Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Nerval had noted earlier, what is to be found there is a way of relating to life and living beings that is different than the European way—that difference and distance or distancing we already learned from Orientalism. It turns out, in hindsight, that this alternative way of relating to life and living beings was also radically alien to putting them in gas chambers or exiling them to barren lands, in the name of modernity and/or tradition. More recently, on the Turkish front, admirable historians and critics (in short essays such as Timur’s and Işın’s) have addressed the massacres with some nostalgia for these earlier times, often sympathizing with the dogs. And in that modern Turkish history follows up on the earlier failure to identify oneself in historical reality. These earlier times, from the modern Turkish perspective, provide one with the ultimate lure of autobiography. Who does Turkey follow today—who does the modern Turk come after? Which history is Turkish history? The history of massacres of innocents and genocides, or the history of an awkwardly familiar, somewhat pleasant but still exotic, rather more Oriental, and certainly less hygienic lives? There the argument is that what happened to the dogs of Istanbul does not follow the traditional, Muslim-Turkish way of relating to animals, as exemplified by the resistance to the massacre on the streets of Istanbul. And insofar as modern Turkey is the product of a popular upheaval, modern Turkish nation—a rather more hygienic version of the simple Turkish folk of the empire—seems to have hardly anything to do with this history of violence. Needless to say, Pinguet’s focus on the conservative Muslim reactions contributes to the Turkish failure to recognize anything Turkish or ­Muslim in this tragedy. This is why today Pinguet’s book matters more in Turkish than in French. And this is a Turkey where, today, as everywhere else, “farming and regimentalization” of animals has

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  83 reached demographic levels “unknown in the past” (Derrida 24). Cevdet is certainly partially responsible for this state of affairs on the Turkish front. Although his influence during the second constitutional era is questionable, Young Turks may have enjoyed his revolutionary analyses on ­everything ranging from ethics to animals, farming, and husbandry, which certainly contributed in significant ways to modern Turkish thought. When the scourge of Pinguet’s critical attention, Kurdish Young Turk Abdullah Cevdet, entertained the thought of Kurdish independence as he also fought for Turkish independence, that only created outrage among the conservative and the revolutionary alike. But Cevdet must have thought that Kurdish independence only followed Turkish independence—that in pursuing Kurdish independence, he only followed his Young Turkish ideals in a different way. When Cevdet later recommended that Turkey should open its gates to immigration to populate and farm the desolate Turkish lands, because immigration would also create diversity in Turkey and for the better according to his own humanist thought, he was declared an animal himself by the conservative and the revolutionary alike. Today in Turkey Cevdet is best known for his alleged call to import “brood males from Europe,” a most bestial thought unfit for any decent Muslim Turk (Hanioğlu, Doktor Abdullah Cevdet 386–95). The animal seems to have never ceased to haunt Abdullah Cevdet the Kurd! Just as he never ceased to pursue his reformist, European-humanist ideals, even at his own expense. That some humble Turks stood up against the violence inflicted upon defenseless stray dogs does not mean that before the massacres or before Europeanization, the Muslim capital was particularly animal friendly. The humane ways of the Turk are but somewhat legendary too. For instance, Mark Twain was just as disappointed as Goursat when he saw the dogs for himself in Istanbul almost half a century before the Frenchman. Twain too supposed that the dogs were “so thick in the streets that they blocked the way”—again “d’après la légende”—and he expected them to be “determined and ferocious” as well (Twain 370). He discovered that this was only a terrible misrepresentation. For the dogs turned out to be scattered across the city, also terribly lazy and miserable overall. And although Turks “are loath to kill them,” he explains, although they “have an innate antipathy to taking the life of any dumb animal, it is said … they do worse. They hang and kick and stone and scald these wretched creatures to the very verge of death, and then leave them to live and suffer” (372). Twain’s was certainly a corrective to the legend of Istanbul’s dogs, but to that of the Turk’s humane ways as well. Moreover, from the sacrificial slaughter of lambs and other animals, which Cevdet found more defenseless than stray dogs (8), to the breeding of roosters and camels, among other animals, to fight for human entertainment, Istanbul had seen a fair amount of bloodshed and violence before the Young Turks took power too (Gündoğdu 381–82; Sevengil 67).

84  Efe Khayyat Yet, certainly, like their European counterparts, “these traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down” (­Derrida 25) with the mass killing of Istanbul’s dogs at the turn of the century in Turkey. This is certainly a historic leap forward in late Ottoman history, a radical shift in the way people in this part of the world related to life, reality, and other living beings. It is, moreover, a historic shift for which “we no longer even have a clock or a chronological measure,” and which, later in modern Turkey, as in across the world, “intensely and by means of an alarming rate of acceleration,” would lead all the way to “farming and regimentalization at a demographic level unknown in the past … the industrialization of what can be called the production for consumption of animal meat” (24–25). Neither the Turks were the legend that one would want them to have been nor were their dogs the legendary creatures that populated Western literature. Those “slandered,” premodern Turkish and canine realities are bygone, moreover, and perhaps even inaccessible to us today. Nevertheless, once things were a little different, and we do know that too. That little difference was also the ultimate distance to mass murder of innocents committed in the name of modernity and/or tradition. It may as well have been what stood between entire peoples and their eradication. So the question remains—not that of the animal or violence or a grand ontological difference. It is a rather humbler question but one that addresses all of these contexts. How does one see oneself and other living beings, for instance dogs, the way the people of Istanbul saw them for centuries, all the way up to and including the times of these massacres? Can we, Europeans, latter-day Young Turks, or Muslims, reach out to them? If we do not have the means to make sense of their way of being, seeing, sensing, and relating to life and the world around them beyond the lures of autobiography or some Orientalist distance, what does this say about our means, our way of relating to life and the world, let alone the past? What does this say about us and the way in which we situate ourselves on earth—if not “after the fall,” as Derrida has it, at least after the fabulous and terrible Turk of pre-modernity? As we have seen in this historical account and in Derrida’s observations, the question of the animal in our day and age is at once a question concerning history, literature, and religion. More precisely, for Derrida the question of the animal is the question of history, literature, and Christianity, and the ways in which these condition each other before the animal and perhaps, for our purposes here, also before the ancient Turk—if not the “real” Turk, at least the fabulous Turk of the Christian imagination—the very fable, the legend that was the backbone of the Christian-European, Orientalist imaginary. This begs another question though, that of whether or not “in the history of discourse, indeed of the becoming-literature of discourse,” there is “an ancient form of

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  85 autobiography immune from confession, an account of the self free from any sense of confession? … Autobiography and memoir before Christianity, especially, before the Christian institutions of confession” (21)? A somewhat premodern, bestial, and again for our purposes here, canine or Turkish—fabulously Turkish—historical vision, a position outside or before Christianity, outside history, and free of the lures of confession and autobiography? An un-Christian, terribly Turkish literature and history?

Four What Derrida shows us, in the form of his own bestial autobiography, and his own account of his animals and philosophers, is that perhaps the “abyssal rupture” between the beast and the human—and perhaps also the Turk and the Christian, one could now add—here in the context of autobiography, despite being all too obvious, “doesn’t describe two edges, a unilinear and indivisible line having two edges” (31). He for one only follows himself and he had always been after himself, he shows us, without knowing where he would end up, and without knowing that he was following to begin with. As he had done many times before, Derrida catches himself talking about himself here at the end of his career, regardless of the topic he addressed. This time he was asked to lecture on “the animal,” before he was asked to address Platonism or the ends of man, Marxism or hospitality and spirits, etc. Here he discovers that there is a continuity to his work that he never seems to have intended. Nor could he have had such intention, he explains. Having followed the same Derrida for decades, intentionally or not, having repeated himself over and over again, very much like his own cat that followed him every morning to the bathroom, Derrida tells us in his posthumously published autobiographical lectures that he got locked in once again, despite talking about the animal, looking for a way out. And like his cat did every morning, he asks to be let out. But there is no direct way out, no “ancient form of autobiography immune from confession, an account of the self free from any sense of confession.” Then again Derrida shows us, in his own image and in his own way of following, that there is something quite bestial already about autobiography and literature, about history, Christianity, and confession, that the rupture “doesn’t describe two edges.” Working on the autobiographical, literary and historical, Christian side of the “abyss,” he shows us that he himself was only a follower after all, like his cat and perhaps like the dogs that followed Goursat’s boat and those fabulously submissive, fabulously fleshly, almost bestial, and beast-friendly Turks of the Orientalist imagination. These animals’ struggle for bare life, he teaches us, and their struggle for barely food and simply life, which even Twain found comparable to the predicament of the humble Turkish lives of Istanbul, cannot

86  Efe Khayyat be easily—through “a unilinear and indivisible line”—­distinguished intellectually from the overtly humane trials and tribulations of a philosopher of his caliber. Because there is no such thing as pure and “bare life,” human or animal, “Turkish” or canine (or Muselmann, for that matter), and we should put this thought behind us.7 That thought must now be history: “the one that man tells himself, the history of the philosophical animal, of the animal for the man-philosopher” (22–24). There is something animalistic—and perhaps also something fabulously Turkish (as opposed to “Christian”)—about one’s self even when and especially when one buys into the noblest lures of autobiography insofar as being is following—insofar as even on the autobiographical, literary and historical, Christian side of the “abyss,” one inescapably follows oneself and mindlessly so—like the Muselmann. Ottoman revolutionaries could not have escaped the animal simply by exiling some dogs to an island. The reaction of the revolutionary press to the massacres, the foundation of “The Istanbul Society for the Protection of Animals” that accompanied the massacres, and how these dogs continue to figure to the East and the West of Istanbul, not to mention Abdullah Cevdet’s misfortune, are the proof of this. Be that as it may we still do not have the coordinates of the vantage point whence such observation comes, that is, the place Derrida seems to have discovered for himself and invites us to search for in his lectures. We do know that it is not simply fabulous, and that it is not a theologism either nor a philosopheme. This place may be the same place that the critics I have mentioned were sniffing around when they followed the traces of the curiosities around the humble Muslim Turks of Istanbul—a place where people related differently to animals. Let me put this bluntly to queer things up a little. Was Derrida making a case to turn Turk—not Young Turk, but something akin to the fabulous Turk: the fabulous and at once terrible Turk of Orientalism? Could he be making a case to embrace that atrocity which European modernity and Europeanization of non-Europe have fought against most vehemently for “about two centuries”? Perhaps he asks us to consider translating that monstrosity from the distant past into an ideal for the future—an alternative ideal in full contrast with the ideals of European history and modernity? For it appears as though according to Derrida, it is not just “bare life” that must now become history for us humans and especially humanists. One must leave bare life behind us and move forward, but to learn how to relate to life and reality beyond the hierarchy distinguishing the life of thought, agency, subjectivity, etc. from bare life. Certainly, the fabulous Turk that Derrida may have wanted to follow cannot be located in—Turkish, Muslim, European, or otherwise—­ history. There would always be the lures of autobiography and history at every corner. This fabulous Turk, this different way of relating to life, which I too am tempted to follow, is not entirely real, despite not being simply a fable either. People of Istanbul once lived with many

The Turk That Therefore I Follow  87 dogs around them, making a legend out of themselves and their dogs. Perhaps the “legend” explains why Derrida looks for his place outside history “before the fall” and not to the East of Europe, still distancing himself from a great many exemplary Europeans—Benjamin, Levinas, and Heidegger, among them. Yet his is a similarly, if not equally, fabulous place. Regardless, my question of the postcolonial animal, which I believe only follows Derrida’s autobiographical animal, is now as follows: How to follow that terrible and fabulous, imaginary Turk—who I thought was far behind us?

Notes 1 For more on Cevdet, see Şükrü Hanioğlu, Doktor Abdullah Cevdet ve Dönemi. 2 Brummett’s “Dogs, Women, Cholera” gives a concise history of these developments in context. See also Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late ­Ottoman Empire, and for more particularly on Young Turks, see his Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 and The Young Turks in Opposition. 3 Witnesses and earlier critics, from Claude Farrere to Mark Sykes, made this point overtly clear in their observations, and Brummett and Pinguet follow up on these accounts and evaluations. 4 The term Europeanization, or turning European, sounds somewhat awkward, a little like a neologism today in English. But in Istanbul there and then and even today, the term is used to mean not only Westernization but also simply “modernization.” 5 All translations from Goursat are mine. 6 Critics I have cited so far, from Brummett to Pinguet and Gündoğdu, scanned this literature extensively, elaborating on every aspect of it, often in the opening of their works. All in all, the great majority of Orientalist literature and scholarship could not but take into serious account the curiosity that was the dog of Istanbul, or rather the way the Turk related to dogs. 7 Holocaust survivors popularized for us the figure of the Muselmann. The Muselmann of the camp is a figure of absolute submission reducible to flesh and garment, to “bare life.” The geneaology of the figure can easily be traced to the Orientalist figure of the terrible Turk. For more see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. Derrida’s commentary on “bare life” is at once a critique of Agamben’s terminology. For more on the Muselmann, see, for instance, Jill Jarvis, “The Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s Silence,” New Literary History 4.45, 2014, pp. 707–28.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz. Translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. Zone Books, 1999. Armstrong, Philip. “The Postcolonial Animal.” Society and Animals 10.4, 2002, pp. 413–19. Brummett, Palmira. “Dogs, Women, Cholera, and Other Menaces in the Streets: Cartoon Satire in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27.4, 1995, pp. 433–60. Cevdet, Abdullah. lstanbul’da Köpekler. Matba’a-i İçtihad, 1909.

88  Efe Khayyat Colomban, Pierre. “Les chiens de Constantinople.” Mission des Augustins de l’Assomption No. 173, September 1910, pp. 138–42. Dayan, Colin. With Dogs at the Edge of Life. Columbia UP, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). Translated David Wills. Fordham UP, 2008. Farrere, Claude. Fin de Turquie. Dorbon-Ainé, 1913. Goursat, George. “L’ile aux chiens.” La Ronde de nuit. Fayard, 1923, pp. 48–57. Gündoğdu, Cihangir. “The Animal Rights Movement in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Arly Republic: The Society for the Protection of Animals (­Istanbul, 1912).” Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire. Edited Suraiya Faroqhi. Eren, 2010, pp. 373–95. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton UP, 2010. ———. Doktor Abdullah Cevdet ve Dönemi. Üçdal Neşriyat, 1966. ———. Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908. Oxford UP, 2000. ———. The Young Turks in Opposition. Oxford UP, 1995. Işın, Ekrem. Everyday Life in Istanbul: Social-historical essays on People, Culture and Spatial Relations. Translated Virginia Taylor. Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1992. Jarvis, Jill. “The Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s Silence.” New ­Literary History 4. 45, 2014, pp. 707–28. Loti, Pierre. Suprêmes visions d’Orient. Calmann-Lévy, 1921. Pinguet, Catherine. “Istanbul’s Street Dogs at the End of the Ottoman Empire.” Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire. Edited Suraiya Faroqhi. Eren, 2010, pp. 353–71. ———. “Le Chien éboueur: mythe ou réalite.” Cogito 43, Summer 2005, pp. 222–42. ———. Les chiens d’Istanbul: des rapports entre l’homme et l’animal de l’Antiquité à nos jours. Bleu autour, 2008. Translated into Turkish as İstanbul’un Köpekleri. Yapı Kredi, 2009. Remlinger, Paul. “Les chiens de Constantinople. Leur vie. Leur mort.” Mercure de France No. 817, July 1932, pp. 24–70. Sevengil, Refik Ahmet. lstanbul Nasıl Eğleniyordu. İletişim, 1993. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. Mirror Books, 1996. Sykes, Mark. The Caliph’s Last Heritage. Arno P, 1973. Timur, Taner. “XIX. Yüzyılda İstanbul’un Köpekleri.” Tarih ve Toplum XX.117, September 1993, pp. 10–14. Topuzlu, Cemalettin. lstibdat-Meşrutiyet-Cumhuriyet Devirlerinde 80 Yılllk Hatıralarım. Güven Basım ve Yayınevi, 1951. Twain, Mark. Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims’ Progress. American Publishing Company, 1869.

5 Who Let the Mad Dogs Out? Trauma and Colonialism in the Hebrew Canon Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi From [the] Song of Balak [the Dog] Across [the] land None pass to or fro All flesh is mute Bow-wow-wow S.Y. Agnon, Only Yesterday. Translated from the Hebrew version by this paper’s authors

Introduction1 This chapter discusses two Hebrew texts in which dogs play pivotal roles: Shai Agnon’s 1945 novel Only Yesterday (hereafter OY, published in Hebrew as T’mol Shilshum) and Waltz with Bashir (hereafter WwB), the 2008 animated documentary film by Ari Folman (Figure 5.1).2 As different as these texts are from each other, both are considered part of the Israeli canon and thus are of significance in terms of their influence on the national ethos and in how they represent it (Hever and Silberstein). We focus on a specific shared and telling trope that makes

Figure 5.1  S creen Grab from WwB Opening Scene: Final Sequence, Dogs Outside Window.

90  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi recurring appearances in Hebrew literature: mad dog[s] as trauma. As we show, dogs play a dual symbolic function in OY and WwB: as signs that are as fixed in their recurrence as they are dynamic in their particular signifying function, they continually “work” within the Zionist dialogic imagination, specifically relating to Zionism’s colonial past and present (Bakhtin 271; Yosef, Beyond Flesh 10–11) Our reading relies on the premise that mad dog(s) as signs do not have a distinct signified, but rather are, a semiotic syllepsis: a sign that simultaneously has an apparent meaning within the text, but can also, in its certain peculiarity, be “activated” to signify additional elements within the text, thus relating the text to others through metaphor (Riffaterre 629). Our approach emphasizes the symbolic dimensions of animality— animals as metaphor—rather than the materiality of animals: animals as subjects or intersubjective exchanges with them. When we consider these two texts in relation to the overlapping of canonical Hebrew markers of colonialism and of the “stray” animal trope in post/colonial texts, these dogs then appear as “ambivalent figure[s]”, a “polyvalent sign” that, whether its significance is reflexively analyzed until it is seemingly resolved (as in WwB) or left roaringly awkward (as in OY), sustains a liminal poetic function with considerable critical interpretive potentialities (Baishya 2–3). The first symbolic function of the dogs is as a split subconscious, between the collective and the subjective. They thus mirror the characteristics of trauma that, as a prominent factor in Israeli culture and society, is both a mode of collective psychological engagement and a recurring trope, a structure that is mirrored between Israeli and P ­ alestinian national imaginaries (Bar-On 89–92). The second symbolic function is as representations of an abject-like indeterminacy that is politically perceived as other but functions—psychologically and poetically—as neither self nor other, thus destabilizing meaning (Kristeva 1–2). In certain cultures, animals, especially dogs, are viewed as near-humans that are thus vessels that humans look upon so to see themselves, even if they may at times be disruptive and, in such a case, trigger introspection (Derrida and Wills 391–92). Guilt and shame are projected upon animals, allowing humans to define themselves as they look at that which is similar if radically different from them. And yet, as our concluding segment shows, there is a sense of an embodied experience in the witnessing of and by animals that these texts represent and tactically convey. As symbolic as these depictions of animals are, they cannot be assumed to be dichotomously distinct from materiality. This concreteness hinges on the visuality of the animal, which maintains its agentive faculties and demands to be seen and written into history. As we will show, OY and WwB diverge in the semiotic leeway that animals as signifiers are charged with: whereas OY eventually affirms an indistinction between human and animal and thus undermines the colonizer/colonized epistemic, WwB

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  91 perpetuates the animal as signifier for an Other’s suffering inaccessible to the self, which thus leads to an infinite reflection into the colonizer’s psyche and history while erasing the narratives of victimized-colonized subjects. Dogs then mark the self’s confusing encounter with an Other/s history, an encounter that touches upon the subject’s own psyche, conveying a sense of fragility as personal and national-collective identities are formed, particularly when such identities experience crisis. The two texts share an element of reflexively pointing towards trauma, achieved also through the peculiarity of the dog as sign. Dogs, in comparison with other animals that are thought of by humans as distinctively nonhumans, are viewed as especially close and similar to humans (LaCapra, History and Its Limits 160). In OY and WwB, dogs are not portrayed as one’s best friend, but rather as violent and threatening, mad and deadly. In OY, the dog whom the protagonist labels as a “mad dog” (and eventually causes the death of the protagonist) represents the subject’s struggle between reconciling with the personal-familial and achieving a national calling that entails a potential historical loss, a different type of trauma (we elaborate more on these distinctions between traumas below); in WwB, a nightmare about a wild pack of dogs triggers its plot as the film’s opening scene—they are eventually recuperated to stand in for both dead dogs and other deaths, which in turn represent the protagonist’s trauma from the war in Lebanon, mainly the September 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. Though we will mainly focus on the context-specificity of these intertextual alignments, the complex function of the dog as sign is not unique to these texts, or to Israeli culture—animals are, in fact, a pertinent if often overlooked figure and prominent actors related to and entangled in colonial epistemics, discourses, and biopolitics. As such, animals must be recognized in postcolonial critique (Huggan and Tiffin 5–7). In post/colonial texts, dogs are not quite anthropomorphized, and therefore seemingly allow for narrower introspective space by readers and interpretive opportunities for critics. However, in this particular constellation of the two Hebrew texts, the dogs’ significance in Israel’s cultural history and activation of similar poetical devices is theoretically and politically salient. In Israeli cinema, as in cinema as a medium in general, the effort to locate a self within a traumatized nationality is a commonly depicted journey. As OY shows us, this dramatic narrative had earlier incarnations in pre-state Hebrew culture concerned with pre-national sentiments of hope and concern; in both cases, categories of identity (such as class, gender, and ethnicity) fluctuate throughout this journey, until they situate themselves on a continuum that runs between stability and disintegration or collapse (Bainbridge and Yates 300–03; Morag 65–66; Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema 41).3

92  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi Trauma has thus been repeatedly deployed in Israeli culture as a marker of collective and individual identities, instrumentalized to radically segregate between Zionism’s construct of the new (Israeli) Jew and its others, be they the old European and Arab Jewish identities (comprehended by Zionism as diasporic) and certainly non-Jewish Arabs, mainly the native Arab, that is, Palestinian. Within these nationalized semiotic dialogs, trauma is a key representational idiom for Zionism as a settler-colonial project (Shohat 229–49; Yosef and Hagin 1). It is important to note that OY and WwB were written in different historical contexts in terms of the status and phase of the Zionist project, certainly vis-à-vis the people it colonizes: OY was written throughout the first half of the twentieth century, when Zionism was still in its relatively early phases, contending not only with the Palestinian native but with the copresence of (first) the Ottoman and (then) British colonizers, and with the waves of violent anti-Semitism in Europe; during the production of WwB, Israel had already been deeply committed to its occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 and was a few years after withdrawing, in 2000, from Lebanon following a long period in which it occupied some of its southern parts. Through these phases and alignments, the two texts share a commonality of both witnessing and representing national traumas in the midst of a colonial struggle (Boheemen 72). The question we ask is not whether trauma is present in the text, but rather whose trauma OY and WwB try to represent, and how do the authors place these texts (and themselves) in relation to it? The possibility of conjoined or multiple parallel traumas does not annul the importance of analyzing the political and ethical work these texts do, and specifically how they function within post/colonial semiotic dialog.

National Poetics, Zionism’s New Jew, and Colonial Encounters Poetics inextricably tied to a national project, certainly a colonial one, contend with a concerted violent (and, indeed, nationalist) effort to minimize the arbitrariness of the sign (Bethlehem 79). When approaching texts written under such conditions, a useful critical methodology is tracing the genealogy of indeterminate signs, in this case, the dogs. This task is especially pertinent for these two texts, given how both Agnon and Folman are part of the colonizing hegemony and use protagonists that are an acknowledged representation of the author (in WwB) and his fictionalized version (in OY). Zionism sought to turn Jews from the European’s other into that to which there is other, in essence: transforming themselves from marginalized and colonized-like minorities to a colonizing majority with its own marginalized others. As Daniel Boyarin has shown, this radical shift of positioning within colonial power relations was to be achieved

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  93 by mimicking the national–colonial enterprise as it was formulated in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. This adaptation was actuated also by adopting certain intellectual modes of interpretation and representational strategies (Boyarin 139). Boyarin emphasizes that Zionism built its own ideal (gendered-male) type: The new Jew rather than the weak, feminine Diasporic (pre-nationalistic aspiration) Jew who could neither toil the land nor fend for himself. In its place, Zionism sought to build a strong, hypermasculine, virile ideal type, deeply connected to land and nature. Zionism thus first desired to transform and then to sustain Jewish masculinity as distinct from its diasporic present/past; it utilized literature’s, and later on cinema’s, dialogical potentiality that played a key role in building these symbolic bridges of memory, allowing for temporal intersections to play out within fictional narratives that integrated historical myths (Zerubavel, “Transhistorical Encounters…” 117). Some of these myths were subsequently further militarized and attached to martyrdom, due to and through Israel’s militarization, memories of the Holocaust, and the national effort to maintain an ethos of bravery and self-sacrifice (Zertal 1–52; Zerubavel, “The Multivocality” 112). Both OY and WwB are profoundly engaged with these national semiotic ideologies and convey different stages of Zionism as an ongoing settler-colonial project. After Zionism first grounded its ideal type based on an inner-othered version of (diasporic) Jewish identity, it turned in the early twentieth century to an additional other-identity that aided in relating its notion of sovereignty to a geopolitical space: the image of the soon-to-be colonized Arab-native (Palestinian). Thus, some thirty years before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing expulsion of Palestinians (the Nakba), Palestinians were already a prominent other for Jewish-Zionists, not wholly distinct yet always-already radically separate from the early fragile incarnation of the new self that Zionism was eager to develop (Busbridge 94–98; Veracini 1–16, 64–74). As Israel further strengthened its colonial identity after 1948, mainly (but not exclusively) through its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories, the national identities of Israelis and Palestinians have maintained a complex relationship of interdependency. In this relationship, closeness marks a threat of sameness, while distance is a violent, imposed, and artificial violation of the everyday (Kelman 586–93; Stein 68). Whereas relationality is ever persistent if often analytically ignored (Lockman 1–10; Stein and Swedenburg 10–11), Palestinians and Israelis generally refuse to recognize the commonalities in their collective identities and how their memories have been shaped (Bashir and Goldberg 82–89).

Postcolonial Trauma and Dogs Within these shifts in collective identities, dogs as a poetic trope have played a tiny yet interesting role in Zionist semiotic economies. Prior to

94  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi the emergence of Zionism, since Jews generally did not raise dogs as pets, dogs had already functioned as a rhetorical device, metaphorically (and in some cases, metonymically) standing for the gentile (non-Jewish) other in pre-sovereign, or “diasporic,” Jewish communities, a reversal of the “Jewish dog” in Christian rhetoric (Ackerman-Lieberman and ­Zalashik; Stow). This function changed after dogs became associated with the ­Holocaust: animals were prominent fixtures in Nazi rhetoric and propaganda from an early phase, including as recurring labels and defamations of Jews. Dogs were often used by Nazis as part of the security apparatuses in concentration and death camps, and so dogs became not metaphor but rather metonymic signifiers of the Holocaust (Sax 86–89). The dog is then not a founding myth in Zionist symbolic dialogs, but it is an important recurring sign; in its peculiar reemergence through different national-historical stages, the dog as sign conveys critical elements that OY and WwB may not coherently articulate unless we “activate” this intertext (Riffaterre 629). Our reading suggests that this peculiarity revolves around the dogs’ function as trauma. Postcolonial critique of trauma studies has reiterated that trauma has been theorized as the experience of white, powerful men, and so it does not apply when it comes to black wo/men (Craps and Buelens 3). In the post/colonial context, trauma can thus function as a counterproductive structure “that maintain[s] existing injustices and inequalities” (Craps 2). In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra maintains a critical awareness of trauma’s political imbalances; in relation to this paper’s focus, of pertinence is LaCapra’s contention that different types of trauma are brought together when they should remain separate, if we wish to aid the subject working through trauma and to maintain historical contextuality (Writing History, Writing Trauma 144–45). In this sense, LaCapra foresaw subsequent postcolonial critique of trauma that claimed that in Africa, trauma is mainly collective rather than personal and is not a set of fixed categories but a fluid spectrum (Craps and Buelens 4–6). LaCapra further claims that trauma is one of the human irrationalities that distance human from animal (LaCapra, History and Its Limits 155–57). He thus acknowledges the prevalent epistemological distinction of human/animal but rejects the common binary opposition between them (150–52). As much as animals are perceived as victims, they are also simultaneously viewed dualistically: as brutal, as animalistic. These are ambivalent perceptions of self-other that certainly echo, if not at times mimic, colonial modes of othering. In literature written in post/ colonial settings, dogs have also been viewed as simultaneously naïve and animalistic-sexualized; they thus replicate certain dynamics of the postcolonial encounter between colonizer and colonized (Attridge 107), certainly as it is enacted in Israel/Palestine. While LaCapra wrote specifically of the task of the historiographer documenting trauma, Michael Rothberg contends with the aesthetic

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  95 representation of trauma through what he famously defined as “traumatic realism”, which [F]ocusing attention on the intersection of the everyday and the extreme…provides an aesthetic and cognitive solution to the conflicting demands inherent in representing and understanding genocide. (Rothberg 9) Rothberg’s theory is of course applicable to other collective traumas, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus and WwB have already been compared along these analytical lines (see Greenbaum). What we add to these ongoing discussions is a reading that highlights a case in which an animal symbolically stands in for trauma itself within a post/colonial semiotic economy, rather than the common interpretive framing of animals as standing in for humans so as to mediate trauma. In these texts, the animal/human dichotomy is further emphasized by the straightforward juxtaposing of the two, and yet the dichotomy is also destabilized since the dog is the conveyer of the human’s trauma. We then suggest a seemingly contradictory acknowledgment of both the dichotomy and the continuum of human/ animal as a way to make sense of the dog as sign in these texts (see Chen).

Mad Dogs I: The Dog as a Radically Indeterminate Sign in OY A novel that engaged many scholars of Hebrew literature, OY stands out as a text that insistently evades decisive interpretations, and the dog as sign plays a significant role in this uniqueness. Agnon’s novel begins as a story common in Hebrew literature, that of immigration (Miron and Sokoloff). After his mother passes away, a young Zionist from a religious household, Isaac Kumer, decides to leave behind his diasporic life and immigrates to early twentieth-century Palestine. He tries to integrate himself into the secular life in Jaffa and new Zionist settlements. However, as opposed to other literary figures from the same period, Kumer cannot change and evolve into the new Jew; he moves to Jerusalem, returns to a religious lifestyle, and works as a house painter (and not an art painter, as the book emphasizes). At this point, the novel changes not only its tone but also its form of narration. One seemingly regular day, Kumer heads back home from work and meets a stray dog. Kumer decides, as a joke, to write on the dog “mad dog” in Hebrew. So he dipped the brush and stretched out his hand. The dog stretched himself toward him and looked at his brush as if with curiosity…The brush didn’t dry out until the words Crazy Dog were written on the dog’s skin. Isaac looked at the dog and was happy… (Agnon 287)

96  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi The writing on the dog changes its fate. From that point on, he is considered mad and is chased around by the people of the city. Here the novel splits into two parallel stories: the dog, now introduced by his (biblical) name Balak (see Book of Numbers 22:2–24:5), is a conscious being and is trying to discover why he suddenly evokes so much hatred, and, at the same time, Kumer searches for his path between the religious and secular worlds. At the end of the novel, just as it seems that Kumer found his way (he gets married and achieves some solace), he encounters the mad dog by chance. The mad dog bites Kumer, partially as a form of play and partially as vengeance. Kumer becomes sick with rabies, and eventually dies due to the dog’s bite. The oddness of OY’s tragedy is such that Baruch Kurzweil, one of the foremost scholars of Hebrew literature, claimed that the dog’s ­appearance—and, hence, the whole novel—makes the novel generically indeterminate (Kurzweil 115). Other scholars made similar claims, suggesting that the OY dog is either a sign completely indeterminate or so determinate that it destabilizes the rules and regulations of language and representation. Focusing on readings of the novel that discussed the role of the dog, we can point to a repeating claim: the figures of Kumer and the dog represent the tensions between the construction of a new nationality, an emerging nationalized subject sought after by Zionism, and the traditional Jewish subject. These readings provide a useful framing of the dog as a key syllepsis in the novel and of the underlying themes about tensions between nation (particularly one in its very early phases of coming into being) and subject, progress and tradition, state, and religion (Arbel; Ezrahi). Further indication of OY’s significance can be found in Yigal Schwartz’ understanding of the novel as part of the human engineering of the Zionist movement, a reading that highlighted OY’s ­tensions between the “new Jewish subject and the former Ashkenazi’s [Jews from Europe] different identities” (Schwartz, 42–43) A clear connection between OY and postcolonial thinking was suggested by Uri S. Cohen’s analysis of OY, as he suggests that the figure of the dog is a reflection of the various intersections activated in the forming of an Israeli identity (Cohen 158). For Cohen, the dog is the traumatic breaking point between the various identities that came together in the colonial encounter between early Zionism and then ­Palestine: the orthodox-religious Jew, the “new” Zionist-national Jew, and the native Arabs (Palestinians). It is the Hebrew-speaking dog that signifies the (failed) desire to build a non-diasporic Jew. The dog has another allegorical role 4: he represents Kumer’s rejection of the nativist element, and thus—we suggest and add to Cohen’s claims—the dog is both the new Jew and the Orientalized, soon-to-be colonized other— the Palestinian (161). The very same identity that the Jew tries to reject eventually reappears and avenges its demarcation by the colonizing human (168–69).

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  97 This doubled representation of the dog conveys the novel’s switch in roles between man and dog and between the various identities taken on by each of them. Furthermore, these shifts also highlight OY’s dialogical overlaps with postcolonial sign systems, in which identity distinctions are blurred and dynamic, yet remain crucial. If read as representative of OY’s intersectional prowess, the dog here is in constant movement between the (human)-self and the animal, between the new national(ized) subject and the old, and between the native and the colonizing citizen subject. These dialogical elements in the semiotic ideology of OY convey that the new Jew is simultaneously a colonizing and colonized subject.

Mad Dogs II: Dogs as Historical and Ethical Obstacle in WwB Folman’s WwB is an animated documentary that follows the director’s attempt to retrace the events of the 1982 Lebanon war in which he was a soldier, and specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The massacre took place in Sabra neighborhood and the nearby Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, from September 16th to 18th, 1982, as part of the Lebanese Civil War in which Israel took part. The massacre was, supposedly, retaliation for the murder of Bashir Gemayel, who—with the support of Israel—had recently been elected as president of Lebanon. About 1000–3000 people, mostly Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shiites, were killed by a predominantly Christian-Lebanese militia called the Phalange. While the massacre itself was carried out by the Phalange, Israel was the then occupier of the area, and the Israeli military did not stop the massacre even though the soldiers and their commanders were aware of what was taking place (see Ḥūt). WwB shows and contends with how Israeli soldiers were not only bystanders, but assisted the massacre in various ways, even without taking part directly in the killings. The film clarifies early on that Folman repressed much of the events of the war, mainly what occurred during the massacre. Folman eventually recalls that he himself fired flares that aided the perpetrators in their killings, thus clarifying that not only did he stand idly by, but he also actively aided and collaborated with the perpetrators. The film’s opening scene is a dream sequence, though at that point of viewing, we as spectators are unaware of it being a dream and do not know who the dreamer is. A pack of dogs runs through the streets of Tel Aviv, terrorizing its inhabitants. The dogs reach the house of Folman’s friend and bark outside his window; we then learn that this is a dream of this friend, who—during the war—was tasked with shooting and “disabling” dogs who barked at Folman and his unit. And now, the dogs he killed come back to haunt him. These dogs are dead in three different ways: they represent the dead dogs Folman’s friend shot, stand in for the dead victims of Sabra and Shatila, and initiate the doing away with trauma which will be dead and buried.

98  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi And yet, this triple death that we may assume was supposed to ­remain haunting is sidelined by WwB’s grand overall redemptive narrative, which stands in stark opposition to more nuanced, fine-detailed e­ xplorations of the visual representations of trauma (such as Maus; see Chute). These politically and mentally active dead mad dogs mark the return of the repressed and trigger the director/protagonist/narrator’s journey towards retrieving his own memory. Eventually, at the end of the film, the repressed events resurface into consciousness and Folman is aware of the massacre and his role in it; the film, which was fully animated until its very last few minutes, then shifts into displaying filmed footage documentation of crying Palestinian women who escaped Sabra and Shatila This dramatic visual methodological shift was perhaps the most intensely discussed element in the overall fiery debate around WwB. Scholars have focused on the film’s reflexive cinematic language as an effort to mimetically convey the tensions between trauma, memory, and history, the personal and the national collective, including a recurring claim that through its exploration of spectatorship, WwB provides its viewers with a critical moral experience of historical exploration (Landesman and Bendor; Yosef, War Fantasies). However, critics such as Ursula Lindsey pointed towards a bitter irony that brackets the film and distances it away from moral discourse: The Sabra and Shatila massacre was not repressed or historically marginalized, but rather caused an outrage in Israel and shook the public and the political system. Folman’s film is then a reexamination stemming from personal-psychological pangs of consciousness rather than a subversive, or even moral, act. As such, WwB continues an Israeli tradition in which soldiers who take part in violent injustices as perpetrators later on supposedly regret their actions – what is commonly referred to as “shooting and crying (yorim u’vochim) (Katriel and Shavit; Linn). The limited role of the dog in WwB in terms of extension of involvement in the plot (certainly compared to OY) can be explained as part of the more conscious effort of the text in terms of its reliance on and engagement with theories of memory and trauma, which culminates in the shift from animation to video documentation. This shift appears to be a practically intentional take on intensely discussed issues such as memory and post-memory, and representations of violence between the real and the radically synthesized (see Hirsch). The film also contains scenes in which the protagonist is in dialog with a psychologist friend, who interprets and “solves”—through the knowledge and authority of psychology—the riddle/problem of the protagonist’s trauma presenting the latter’s subconscious (or, to be more precise: the psychologist’s interpretation of it) unequivocally. It was guilt that made Folman repress his memories from the massacre; as the son of Holocaust survivors, to be in the position of a perpetrator, a de facto Nazi—he is told he was “forced to be a Nazi”—was an unbearable and hence traumatic experience for him.

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  99 Shira Stav focuses on the scenes that relate WwB’s engagement with the Holocaust to a wider trend in Israeli discourse. She builds on a claim that Jewish history and the Holocaust are utilized as a complex yet relatively common literary mechanism that pushes Palestinian suffering away from Israeli consciousness (see Hever and Silberstein, 101–17). The certain national memorization of the Holocaust allows the Israeli subject to perceive itself as moral. Stav suggests that WwB does the same, only in a manner intensified several times over. If references to the Holocaust in Israeli representations of the Palestinian Nakba entailed at least a limited recognition by Israelis of Palestinian suffering, or an attempt to locate a vocabulary to depict it, Palestinian suffering in WwB becomes a wholly Israeli story. Returning to LaCapra’s emphasis on the importance of categories of trauma, WwB is then a text that is entrenched in historical traumas: as much as the film centralizes on the subject’s own experiences and is rich in psychological terms, discourses and practices, the two traumas at its core are that of the Holocaust and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The Nakba is then a silent—or silenced and hence unacknowledged—­ additional trauma that crucially shaped the historical realities depicted in the film, since many of the massacre’s victims were Palestinian refugees expelled or fleeing in 1948 from the newly established state. These are traumas that Folman himself was not a victim of, but rather intensely exposed to one trauma’s post-memory (Holocaust) and was a rather active secondary perpetrator in a second trauma, even if the film refuses to acknowledge his role as more than a somewhat active bystander (Sabra and Shatila). The Nakba remains practically absent from this expansive and seemingly thorough engagement with trauma(s). The film’s narrative is then a depiction of an absence that is turned into a loss and an acting out that becomes a process of working through—the protagonist understands the (double) roots of trauma, recognizes reality, and can move on. There is a twofold problematic here in terms of the film as a text that represents certain historical events with profound repercussions on the historical present, a matter of an ethics and politics of representation. The first problem is how the protagonist’s trauma from the Lebanon war is comingled as the secondary trauma to his first trauma as the child of Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust is framed as Folman’s primary trauma, and as such it eclipses the trauma of the war he himself experienced and blurs the latter’s historical contexts. More important, the Holocaust’s post-memory relegates the importance and suffering of the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and thus triggers a hierarchy of violence and trauma, in which the Nakba remains unrecognized, at least on the surface text level. The second problem is that through the combination of emphasizing expert psychological discourses and the film’s aesthetic ­uniqueness— an animated documentary, a tempting and sensuous aesthetic of an

100  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi otherwise rather dull chain of conversations—Folman uses his own (double) trauma to turn from a victimizer to a sort of helpless victim himself. The director displaces the actual victims and their very real loss, radically distancing them from the cinematic text and from their history and its relation to the history of Jews. The exceptionality of the last scene further accentuates the absence of Palestinians (and other victims in Lebanon) from WwB. What Gil Hochberg claims as a failed witnessing in WwB is thus essentially a narrative opening towards reconciling that which the subject himself cannot necessarily reconcile without turning to the other (140). This ethical possibility, however, appears to us to be the result of a failure rather than of intent, and hence, the very ethicality of these representative structures should be questioned. Can the Jewish-Israeli subject bring to narrative form deaths and exile that he, to a certain degree, ­perpetrated but refused to acknowledge? By bracketing WwB between the dream about mad dogs and the reality of the massacre, Folman perhaps reflexively recognizes his inability to do so.

Maddeningly Intertextual Dogs In the historical trajectory of the poetical emergence of mad intertextual dogs, dogs have remained signifiers of the colonial native: the colonized other that is abject, all too intimately close, familiar, and known to the colonizer self. The process of historical tracing displays how this sign was transformed from one radically undermining the interpretive act— an indeterminacy attached to the dog in OY—to a sign that in WwB even occludes the possibility of diverse, let  alone subversive, readings of and into its signified elements. Instead, the dog as a reflexively acknowledged sign of trauma encourages a limited interpretive space that shapes WwB’s political–ethical claims. In OY and WwB, dogs’ multilayered signification—as representing the self’s trauma, as actual dogs, and as representations of the native Palestinians—intensifies the colonizer’s difficult (in)distinction between its-self as subject and its (animalistic) other. If in OY the dog remains alive, while the human dies, then in WwB the dogs are the ones that die and remain so, while the riddle of trauma is solved by the human for itself. By contrast to WwB, in OY the dog as trauma lingers on and cannot be resolved since it is truly abject—a part of the self that stays as such even if loathed; in WwB, the dog is radically separated from the self and is done away with along with trauma, and as trauma. This particular deployment of dogs in WwB, as layered with and by death, warrants a brief detour to observe the relation between dogs and death in other texts, specifically by comparing J.M. Coetzee’s use of dogs in Disgrace and Sa’adat H. Manto’s in “The Dog of Tetwal.” For Coetzee, the commonality between human and animal—death—is

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  101 what allows for grace, possibly redemption, to appear (see Danta; Giles; Herron). In Manto’s text, the dog represents for the postcolonial subjects their abject selves, until they finally shoot him, and “he [dies] a Dog’s death” (Manto 24). The dog stands in then not only for an animal other. Rather, the dog is a human companion and also represents the human self. As such, the dog is ambivalently positioned as both same and other and subjected to deadly violence that seeks to regulate this abject’s position, but only further blurs the human/animal distinction.5 In WwB, trauma is also a form of grace, an eventually redemptive experience that locates trauma in the subject victimizer. However, beyond a symbolic and problematic eventual gesture of seeing the other’s suffering, trauma as grace does little to relate, understand, and explore the trauma of the victimized other. Considering how WwB is a text so reflexively engaged with trauma, it bears witness to a very certain trauma that does not necessarily yield a critical historiography which destabilizes colonial power relations. This distancing of the colonized subject through the dog as trauma entails an opportunity to recognize the position of these texts and their authors within colonial power relations. In both OY and WwB, the Jewish-Zionist subject’s main struggle is the processual distinguishing of himself from his immediate surroundings. For Agnon’s Kumer, the distinction is of the subject as neither new Jew nor native Arab (Palestinian); for Folman, the protagonist, the distinction is as an untraumatized, non-victim, and redeemed perpetrator. Kumer’s failure and Folman’s success tell us something more than a projection of historical truths and desires; they also mark a relation to animals, to other subjects. In OY, it was Kumer’s marking of Balak that turned what could have been object to mad subject; as common as anthropomorphism has become in literature, to bestow a dog with such agentive force is to mark animals as (potentially) conscious beings (Nagel 437–41). As animals become exceptional when they display traits that are supposedly non-animalistic, Kumer’s own actions transformed him into Balak’s sacrifice, an act that distinguished him, as a subject, from other creatures. Balak’s success is the mirror image of Kumer’s failure to resignify his own break from the other. Kumer neither becomes an embodiment of the new Jew nor returns to traditional diasporic religious Jewish life; instead, he essentially turns into a sacrificed animal. Where Coetzee suggests unity of human with animal in death is a potentiality, Agnon fulfilled this narrative option at an initial point of a still-ongoing colonial struggle. Whether or not this was a deliberate subversion of Zionist orientations is difficult to assess and, more important, irrelevant given our dialogical perspective. What is pertinent here is that Agnon was able to portray a dog that both symbolizes and is an agentive figure. WwB displays a reverse process: the dead, sacrificed mad dogs in the film’s opening scene remain dead. Their death is reformulated later on as the death of those (mostly Palestinians) in Sabra and Shatila, in part as

102  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi a device that further distinguishes Folman as subject from his surroundings, specifically from those colonized subjects turned objects. Rather than looking at the animal as such, Folman looks at the dogs to look at himself, perhaps through how he thinks they observe him (Derrida and Wills 383). The guilt that Folman and his friend who shot the dogs feel because of the appearance of the mad-dream dogs allows him to redeem himself; Kumer feels no such guilt, perhaps because Agnon’s Balak was a dog-Other not so distinct from human self.

The Radicality of Not Seeing Others’ Pain The most crucial difference between dog as trauma in OY and in WwB is in how the dogs are looked at and in the textual and visual representation of their own points of view. WwB’s ethical stance towards animals is revealed in the film’s other scene representing animals where, we suggest, WwB most intensely binds animals with colonized subjects. In an extended scene based on an interview with an expert on posttrauma, Folman walks us through the re-presented memories of another traumatized soldier from the same war. The post-trauma expert recalls how this soldier told her about his experience in the war as an amateur photographer. Though he did not really have a camera with him, this soldier looked at everything through an imagined camera lens that distanced him from his surroundings, allowing him to distance himself from the reality around him and, by doing so, to mentally survive. But then, “his camera broke.” The film shifts, perhaps foreshadowing the final shift from animation to live footage, from animated vignettes displaying human suffering to an initially malfunctioning 35 mm reel that then slowly focuses on the place in which “things turned traumatic for him,” near stables in Beirut. As long as he witnessed human suffering, the soldier was able to protect himself from being traumatized, and the film displayed a rapidly edited sequence of what can be defined as clichéd images of (the Lebanon) war. Now that the soldier encountered scores of dead, dying, and wounded horses, he could no longer distance himself from the war, and the film reverts to a painstakingly slow and steady portrayal of horses suffering, culminating in a slow-motion collapse of a horse, and then a close-up of the dying horse’s eye6 with flies hovering around it. WwB’s semiotic strategy of looking through animals to look at oneself culminates in this excruciatingly detailed and reflexive scene, described by Garrett Stewart as “a fly-swarmed eye, where an anonymous soldier sees his own reflection in death’s brute anamorphosis” (59). Whether as mad dogs that are dreamed versions of dead dogs, or dead (Arabic) horses, for WwB, animals are to look at oneself—another type of speculum enabling the white man to gaze at himself through the Other—a gaze that constitutes the Other as such despite, and because, it does not see that Other (Irigaray 47).

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  103 That this self is traumatized, whether structurally or historically, does not whitewash WwB’s inability to recognize that this encounter is, as phrased by Naisargi Dave in a different but relevant context, [A] critical moment…an intimate event in which the sight of a suffering animal, the locking of eyes between human and nonhuman, inaugurates a bond demanding from the person a life of responsibility. That event is uniquely intimate because it occurs between two singular beings… (434) And yet, even if within the cinematic text such an intimate event does not take place, its deferral is potentially reversed by the intimate cinematic event occurring between the film and the viewer. By examining OY and WwB as conveying a certain historical trajectory of Zionism as a colonial project, Folman’s refusal or inability to see the other beings (dog, horse, Palestinian) as anything but a gateway into his own trauma, marks WwB not as a moral text but as a representative of Israel’s continually radicalizing effort to not see the suffering it perpetrates as a settler-colonial project (see Hochberg). OY’s very narration incorporated the indeterminate subjective yet certainly agentive perspective of Balak the dog; from Agnon’s mad dog to Folman’s, the overladen Jewish trauma is sustained, yet in the latter and later text, it eclipses the others’ traumas (colonized subjects – humans and animals) and denies the possibility of an emphatic unsettlement that could build a bridge towards a shared future. OY’s mad dog is disruptive, which does not allow neither the national (historical trauma) nor the personal-familial (structural trauma) to dictate the course of history or its narration; WwB’s mad dogs (and horses) are dead, deaths that tell us a story other than their own, and thus—in the mise en abyme of the signifier of animal as trauma—­ perpetually defer an emergence of an anti-colonial narrative.

Figure 5.2  S creen Grab from WwB Opening Scene: Mid-sequence, Dogs Running through Streets.

104  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi

Notes 1 The authors thank Louise Bethlehem, Amos Goldberg, Ariel Hirschfeld, Liran Razinsky and Yigal Schwartz. Special thanks to the editors of this volume for their advice and patience. Some of the ideas about Waltz with Bashir presented here appeared in earlier form in Ashkenazi, 2010. 2 We define these texts as Hebrew texts, rather than as Jewish, Zionist, and/or Israeli, for several reasons. Explained succinctly, the texts do not necessarily focus on Judaism (as religion) and relate to specific elements of Jewish history only through an Israeli myopia, nor do they necessarily promote a Zionist stance, and they are not Israeli since OY was published before the establishment of the state of Israel, even if it foresaw it. We are left then with the option of defining them as Hebrew, due to the common language they share. 3 Though we do make mention of masculinity and the hegemonic heteronormativity that are key in how OY and WwB question national identity, due to limitations of scope and space, we are unable to provide the muchneeded critical intervention of deconstructing the prominence of patriarchy and of seemingly fixed gender categories that greatly shape the trauma–­ postcolonialism–animal juncture in Israel/Palestine and beyond. 4 Cohen relies on Paul de Man’s conceptualization of allegory as a mechanism that strives to reconcile temporal fissures in narration and poetics, yet is disruptive itself: allegory as a self-contained play that oscillates between incompatible figures of speech and thus conveys language’s inherent failures (see De Man 10). 5 These postcolonial texts about/with animals are then radically different from anthropomorphic representations of animals, especially in children’s literature, in which dogs serve a different narrative function, allowing the (human) child to make mistakes in the process of socialization, yet remain active and able (see Morgenstern). 6 In a thinly veiled reference to Hitchcock’s famous Psycho scene, a reference that packs its own rather rich intertextual baggage since it further evokes the reflexive structures of cinema in general and WwB specifically, loaded with questions of voyeurism and documentation, and representation as sadistic violence (see Morris; Telotte).

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106  Omri Grinberg and Yiftach Ashkenazi Herron, Tom. “The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Twentieth Century Literature 51.4, 2005, pp. 467–90. Hever, Hannan, and Laurence J. Silberstein. Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse. New York University Press, 2002. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2, 1992, pp. 3–29. Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Duke University Press, 2015. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, ­Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010. Ḥūt, Bayān Nuwayhiḍ. Sabra and Shatila: September 1982. Pluto Press, 2004. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Cornell University Press, 1985. Katriel, Tamar, and Nimrod Shavit. “Between Moral Activism and Archival Memory: The Testimonial Project of ‘Breaking the Silence’.” On Media Memory. Edited Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg. Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2011, pp. 77–87. Kelman, Herbert C. “The Interdependence of Israeli and Palestinian National Identities: The Role of the Other in Existential Conflicts.” Journal of Social Issues 55.3, 1999, pp. 581–600. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982. Kurzweil, Baruch. Essays on the Stories of Agnon [in Hebrew: Masot Al Sipurav shel Agnon]. Schocken, 1962. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. ­Cornell University Press, 2009. ———. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Landesman, Ohad, and Roy Bendor. “Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir.” Animation 6.3, 2011, pp. 353–70. Lindsey, Ursula. “Shooting Film and Crying.” Middle East Research and Information Project, March 2009. Linn, Ruth. Not Shooting and Not Crying: Psychological Inquiry into Moral Disobedience. Greenwood Press, 1989. Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in ­Palestine, 1906–1948. University of California Press, 1996. Manto, Sa’adat H. Kingdom’s End and Other Stories. Translated Khalid Hasan. Verso, 1987. Miron, Dan, and Naomi B. Sokoloff. “Domesticating a Foreign Genre: Agnon’s Transactions with the Novel.” Prooftexts 7.1, 1987, pp. 1–27. Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. I.B. ­Tauris, 2013. Morgenstern, John. “Children and Other Talking Animals.” The Lion and the Unicorn 24.1, 2000, pp. 110–27. Morris, Christopher. “Psycho’s Allegory of Seeing.” Literature/Film Quarterly 24.1, 1996, pp. 47–51. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83.4, 1974, pp. 435–50. Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960.

Who Let the Mad Dogs Out?  107 Riffaterre, Michael. “Syllepsis.” Critical Inquiry 6.4, 1980, pp. 625–38. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism—The Demands of Holocaust Representation. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sax, Boria. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust. Continuum, 2000. Schwartz, Yigal. “The Ashkenazim: East vs. West: An Invitation to a Mental-­ stylistic Discussion of Modern Hebrew Literature.” Around the Point: ­Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture. Edited by Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman and Ber Kolterman. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 39–69. Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. I.B. Tauris, 2010. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Penguin Books, 2009. Stav, Shira. “Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination.” Jewish Social Studies 18.3, 2012, pp. 85–98. Stein, Rebecca L. Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism. Duke University Press, 2008. Stein, Rebecca L., and Ted Swedenburg. “Popular Culture, Relational History, and the Question of Power in Palestine and Israel.” Journal of Palestine Studies 33.4, 2004, pp. 5–20. Stewart, Garrett. “Screen Memory in Waltz with Bashir.” Film Quarterly 63.3, 2010, pp. 58–62. Stow, Kenneth R. Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter. Stanford University Press, 2006. Telotte, Jay P. “Through a Pumpkin’s Eye: The Reflexive Nature of Horror.” Literature/Film Quarterly 10.3, 1982, pp. 139–49. Veracini, Lorenzo. Israel and Settler Society. Pluto Press, 2006. Waltz with Bashir. Dir. Ari Folman, 2008. Yosef, Raz. Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli ­C inema. Rutgers University Press, 2004. ———. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. Routledge, 2011. ———. “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9.3, 2010, pp. 311–26. Yosef, Raz, and Boaz Hagin (Eds.). Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. Bloomsbury, 2013. Zertal, Idith. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Zerubavel, Yael. “The Multivocality of a National Myth: Memory and Counter-­ memories of Masada.” Israel Affairs 1.3, 1995, pp. 110–28. ———. “Transhistorical Encounters in the Land of Israel: On Symbolic Bridges, National Memory, and the Literary Imagination.” Jewish Social Studies 11.3, 2005, pp. 115–40.

6 Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation Suvadip Sinha

Can the human animal be contemporaneously terrified and vulnerable with its nonhuman, in this case canine, counterpart? Or, are they hopelessly destined to mark each other’s ontological limits even against an ambience of terror? Can the survival of animal cohabitants amidst such terrified existence be the only possible horizon of “human” survival? This essay looks at two literary texts, written against different backdrops and at different times in postcolonial India, to think through these zoopolitical1 and zoontological questions. These questions provoke us not to think of human and nonhuman animals on separate registers under the condition of precarity, vulnerability, and violence, since any assumption of speciesist classification gets profoundly upended under the zoopolitical regime. This essay aims to address these questions through an active and ethical act of listening, as I argue that listening—listening to barking dogs in precarious conditions— is essential for imagining a species-defying ontological mutuality. The oral and aural landscape of “I am Feeling Fine Now” (“Mein Hun Thik Thak Han”), a short story by Punjabi author Waryam Singh Sandhu and Lubdhak (“The Dog Star”), a novella written by Bengali author Nabaraun Bhattacharya are peopled and irony intended, with haunting and howling canine beings.2 Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction 2015), a recent critically acclaimed film by Gurvinder Singh, is an adaptation based on two of Waryam Singh Sandhu’s stories, “I am Feeling Fine Now” and “The Fourth Direction.” In my discussion of Sandhu’s story, I will turn to this film text, for the cinematic adaptation enhances and underscores the terrorized animality of the written text. By translating the literary dog into a visible and audible figure, Sandhu’s film prevents any kind of effacement of the nonhuman animal. The doggedly canine characters not only make interspecies coexistence possible in these narratives, but, as this essay will demonstrate, bark, tantalize, and exasperate to reveal how terror as a lived experience lacerates the human and animal worlds alike. Apart from the presence of seen and heard canine characters, both stories are enveloped with a pervasive atmosphere of terror and violence. As we suggested in the introduction to this volume, any version of bio/necropolitics is always a version of zoopolitics. The ever mutable and porous boundary between different

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  109 figurations of animalities, between human and nonhuman subjectivities is essential for any engagement with hybrid and fluid ontology. An elaborate intertwining of terrorized existence and animal precarity in Sandhu’s and Bhattacharya’s narratives makes us readers aware that our existence and survival as humans is at stake not because of our uniqueness; rather they make us think that even a slight move towards humanist estrangement from nonhuman animals would only make the situation irreversibly doomed. In his elaboration of Carl Jung’s work, the cultural studies scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit points out how the term dehumanized, for Jung, implies the absence of nonhuman animals rather than that of the human itself (17). Here Jung points out how the fullness of the human world is itself partially reduced and caught in a perpetual state of mourning as a result of the gradual disappearance of animal beings. Dehumanization of the human world in the wake of modernity, for Jung, is a result of animal’s metamorphosis into a being other than human. Dehumanization, in this sense, implies a deep predicament—a predicament produced “in the very process of humanity’s becoming-human” (18)—that the human being has to face all alone. I find the usage of the word dehumanization in this sense profoundly important, as it implies something radically different from a species-centric and anthropocentric nostalgia. It does not imply a simplistic desire for a return to a world in which the human manages to restore its wholeness; rather, it reveals that any escape from this dehumanized world can only be possible through an acceptance of a commonality between human and nonhuman animals. Both Sandhu’s and Bhattacharya’s stories provoke us to engage in somber and animistic rumination over in what ways a speciesist removal of nonhuman animals could leave us in a lonely, dehumanized world. As Susan McHugh cautions, thinking of nonhuman animal figures as sites of perennial abjection or as deconstructive traces can inadvertently restore an anthropocentric notion of independent human subjectivity. My argument is somewhat similar here. Even if the canine bodies are either killed, or abandoned, or expelled in these stories, their abjection does not reconstitute the selfhood of their human counterparts. Rather, their abandoned presence inherently marks an ontological subversion of human subjectivity.

A Barking Dog Needs to Be Killed In “I am Feeling Fine Now,” the dog Tommy’s presence amidst his terrified human companions makes that escape from that dehumanization somewhat possible. Only a barking dog—an animal companion and cohabitant’s incommunicable shrieks—can get humans like Joginder, Beero, Harbans Kaur, and Sukhdev out of this precarious and claustrophobic dehumanized world. I urge us here to listen to Tommy’s barking not because the sound can take us to a posthumanist horizon; I do so, because

110  Suvadip Sinha I think this sound can lead us the readers to think of a creaturely vulnerability. My use of the phrase “creaturely vulnerability” is inspired by Anat Pick’s discussion of creaturely and vulnerability in Creaturely Poetics (2011). Through a discussion of the work of Ralph R. Acampora, Pick proposes that vulnerability, a state of radical powerlessness belonging to the “the ethicoreligious exploration of creaturely exposure” (15), can push us towards imagining what she calls “creaturely poetics.” Creaturely poetics, according to Pick, implies a realm of embodied vulnerability that accounts for the zone of the animal (and the vegetative) and provides an antidote to dehumanized anthropocentrism. A partial aim of my discussion of the barking dogs in these narratives is to think how they force us think in terms of postcolonial zoopolitics by bringing nonhuman and human animals into the shared zone of vulnerability. I see a philosophical affinity between Shukin’s term zoopolitical and Pick’s vulnerability, and that affinity is useful for my argument in this essay. This zoopolitical vulnerability of nonhuman and human animals in these stories is not only symptomatic of, but also critical for, understanding how biopolitical power blurs the species boundary under terrorizing conditions. Set against the backdrop of the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement that raged in the province of Punjab in the 1980s, “I am Feeling Fine Now,” published in 1991, is seemingly about a very human dilemma: whether the humans need to get rid of their canine cohabitant, Tommy? This dilemma is not without a real context: when the separatist militancy was its peak and the province, particularly its rural areas, was experiencing a surge in young Sikh men joining the movement, the Indian government implemented several oppressive measures to crack down the movement. Although an exhaustive historical retrospection into this is still awaited, state-sponsored massacres of young Sikh men both in and outside Punjab are well documented. However, these historical documents forget to talk about another set of victims—not surprisingly—the dogs. There was indeed a decree from some militant groups that pet dogs should not be allowed to bark after dusk, as their barking could potentially jeopardize the safety of militants trying to move secretly in nearby areas. If families failed to control their pet dogs, they were asked to kill their dogs. It is necessary to provide some details about the story’s context at this point. Once considered one of the most politically stable states in India, the northwestern province of Punjab saw the emergence of a violent Sikh ethnonationalist movement in the early 1980s. Soon transformed into an openly secessionist movement demanding a separate Sikh homeland of Khalistan, this insurgency and its subsequent brutal repression by the state apparatus resulted in an unimaginable atmosphere of terror gripping the province for years. Political theorists and historians have provided a number of explanations behind the emergence of this Sikh subnationalist sentiment during this time. I do not have the scope or space to discuss all of these threads here or to provide a comprehensive discussion of the

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  111 political landscape of the province at the time.3 For the purpose of this essay, it is more important for me to provide few details that would reveal the extent of terror and violence that was caused during this time. By the time the movement drew to a close in 1993, some estimates suggest that the security forces killed more than 25,000 Sikh men. During this period, over one million security force personnel were deployed, and many of them rampantly engaged in extrajudicial execution of thousands of young Sikh men, brutally tortured many thousands more, and conducted unauthorized searches and raids of Sikh households.4 Such violent and repressive measures implemented by the state pushed the province into a prolonged atmosphere of unpredictable violence and terror. Any zoopolitical reading of “I am Feeling Fine Now,” a reading that calls for an affective attention to human–canine co-subjectivity in the story, needs to be undertaken against this overwhelming backdrop of political terror. Before we encounter any human character in Sandhu’s story, we hear a dog’s bark disrupting a tranquil night: “Suddenly, a dog howled. And then continued howling” (46). And the dog continues to howl as if it is trying wake up the human inhabitants of the house. Through the repetitive use of “as if” following the dog’s barking, Sandhu engages in an anthropomorphizing gesture of attributing a language to the dog that it does not possess or care about. In fact, the title of the story is taken from one such assumed human dialog from Tommy. After Joginder hits Tommy with a wooden plank in a fit of angry desperation, the terribly injured dog lies still and silent. Joginder tries to assure him that he would be get better: “But Tommy had put its neck on the ground and was looking towards Joginder with innocent, and pitiable eyes as if saying, ‘I am feeling fine now … You can go and relax….’” My reading of the story, however, doggedly refuses to endow importance to the as if, the anthropomorphic imposition of human language on a canine creature. Listening to Tommy’s nonsensical barking as just barking will help us think beyond several other humanist impulses in Sandhu’s story. Only if we move towards an ethical acceptance of the incomprehensible animal shriek, we can hope to break free from our anthropocentric stagnation. Apart from implying the living together of human companions outside of wedlock, cohabit, in some legal and cultural discourses, also refers to dwelling together of beings of different species.5 This concept of interspecies cohabitation, dwelling together, needs to be pondered over in order to fully understand the zoopolitical underpinning of Sandhu’s story. Resulting in filial production without hereditary reproduction, the idea of absolute cohabitation does contain the potential of radical interspecies existence. In The Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway briefly ponders over the importance of cohabitation, along with coevolution and embodied cross-species sociality, in thinking about companion animals (4). Arguing passionately against considering dogs just as an alibi, Haraway proposes that we need to live with them in order to fully

112  Suvadip Sinha understand this story of biopower and biosociality (5). Sandhu’s story underlines the significance of human and nonhuman animals dwelling together in order to bring out their reciprocal vulnerability. Let me quote a particularly perplexing section from the story that distinctly exemplifies the zoopolitical potential of Sandhu’s story. When Tommy returns home after the family’s second attempt at abandoning him, a short-tempered Sikh youth visits the family to convince them to kill the animal. After openly threatening Joginder, the youth continues, Brother, we are also your kith and kin. For the sake of the community, we left our hearths and homes and now wander through the nights. Security forces are pursuing us like dogs. Thirsty for our blood. We have to move around during nights and only at odd hours. Visits and lodging also have to be at places like yours. Dogs kept by you will bark, bite … block our way … you understand what I say…. (64) There are noticeably two sets of dogs in this passage: young militants and political activists being hunted down by government forces “like dogs” and dogs that bark, bite, and block the way of those young men. The first one is analogical, the second actual. Following this urgent appeal, the youth goes on to refer to how innocent men of a family in the neighborhood were brutally killed by the security forces: “Similar burning smoke can come out of anybody’s house … from our house too … your house and anybody else’s…” (65). This short exchange between Joginder and the unnamed Sikh youth demonstrates Sandhu’s story’s most profound ethical gesture towards a zoopolitical conundrum. The rebellious and terrorized youth is exasperated and angry at being treated like a dog, and requests Joginder to kill the actual dog to resolve the situation. In order to save the life of analogical dogs, the actual dog needs to perish. In this brilliant moment of porosity and permeability between the analogical and the real, human and canine, we see the contiguity or bleed that Shukin talks about. The figure of the dog, or the animal in general, is often invoked in tales of human atrocities as a figure standing for the debased and abjected subhumanity of human beings. In this story however, I would like to argue, this rather intentional move accomplishes something more significant. Instead of making a humanist gesture of treating the animal as a token of the subhuman, Sandhu provokes us to think how deeply the analogical and real dog worlds are zoopolitically intertwined in the atmosphere of terror. Tommy comes to the household as a replacement for another dog, Rocky. After the puppy Rocky gets killed by a ferocious bitch, Joginder and Beero bring Tommy him to calm their bereaved son, Sukhdev. In a sense, this may seem as a usual human indiscretion of considering the dogs mutually replaceable. But soon the narrative manages to get out

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  113 of this quandary: Tommy is not Rocky. Although he is brought to the household to fill the void left by Rocky’s untimely death, the story goes on to describe elaborately how Tommy became an integral part of the family. Sandhu often uses detailed flashbacks to recount how the dog gradually came to be another member of the household: When it was called out to, young Tommy would run toward them scampering on its small paws. It would cling to their legs. It would lick and kiss their feet. Lest it got killed like the earlier one, all the members of the family too extra care of it. All of them would start searching even if it was out of sight for one minute…. Scared of what had happened earlier, Joginder would make it lie at the foot of the cot at night. Many a time, there would be a laughter in the family. It was being said, “Sukhdev is his mother’s son, Gurdev that of grandmother, and Tommy of Joginder…” (57) This is just one of the many sections that give such details of how the human and canine worlds come to merge with each other, through the process of affective cohabitation, within the space of this household. Besides these details of how Joginder and his family have developed an emotional attachment to Tommy, the story also provides details of how Joginder and other family members continuously resist succumbing to the militant’s pressure. Joginder, who is well known for his physical strength and courage and who has fought fearlessly against human opponents in past, is shown to hesitate to kill Tommy throughout the story. He had killed other animals—cocks and goats—that he had reared with his own hands. Yet, the idea of killing this dog opens up a completely unknown ethical conundrum for him (119–20). We need to pay close attention to these details, as they reveal how meticulously the narrative world of the story is actually constructed through a mutual and relational worlding of human and nonhuman beings. These details are necessary in order for us to understand why Tommy’s death leaves the human world, although biologically alive, irrevocably dehumanized. Just because Tommy’s human cohabitants kill him in the end, can we render his life as bare life, a mere natural life exposed to death? Although Tommy is, it might appear, killable with impunity, I hesitate to consider his life just as another biological life. Yes, we feel sorry, along with Tommy’s human family, after his killing. Rather, his violent death makes Tommy an irreducible other that makes the atmosphere of human social life surrounding him question itself. Yes, we need to mourn his death. We need to do that without considering Tommy’s death as one among many others. His death too, like the proper noun Tommy, is his very own. In this sense, Sandhu’s treatment of this canine creature, I would like to argue, is quite different from that of Saadat Hasan Manto’s in his “Tetwal ka Kutta.”6 If the figure of homines sacri, or lives reduced to the

114  Suvadip Sinha level of bare life, as Agamben theorizes it, gets thrown out of the realm of the political, the body of Tommy, living and dead, in Sandhu’s story is squarely located within the immediate realm of politics. Although he is killed with impunity, nonetheless I hesitate to treat him as mere bare life. By turning Tommy’s life into grievable life, Sandhu invites us to reconsider Agamben’s humanist biopolitical frame. In fact, there is detailed description of how the family tries to keep injured Tommy alive, and how the family and the larger community grieve after his death: The news of Tommy’s death had spread to the nearby farmhouses. The people had come to pay condolence and also expressed satisfaction that it was perhaps for the better…. It may not have… Filled with a feeling of guilt, Joginder wandered about sadly. Whenever he looked towards the corner of the haveli, the small raised heap of mud appeared to him like a carbuncle on his body which had burst and was emitting a strange smell. (96) For days after Tommy’s death, Joginder is haunted by the stench of ­ ommy’s rotting dead body. He would often fail to distinguish that smell T from that of “burnt dead human flesh” (97). The use of this spectral olfactory register, triggered by the stench of dead human and nonhuman animals alike, provokes us to mourn the death of Tommy and of those perished because of state-sponsored atrocities simultaneously. Taking Tommy’s life as grievable prevents us from rendering it as simply bare life. Judith Butler poignantly observes: Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, “there is a life that will never have been lived,” sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start. (15) Butler’s notion of grievablility as an apprehension of life lived can be seen as a counterpoint to Agamben’s biopolitical structure of state of exception. Butler argues that these grievable lives, collectively exposed to “precarity as an existing and promising site of coalitional exchange” (28), are not bare lives, since they are not thrown “cast outside the polis in a state of radical exposure, but bound and constrained by power relations in a situation of forcible exposure” (29). Hence, instead of thinking of Tommy’s violent death as a mere expulsion of him from this world, we need to see this as a moment, or the entire narrative, as an explication of how terror, enacted by both the state and the militants, defies species boundaries to enable ontological co-constitution.

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  115 The discussion of Sandhu’s story remains incomplete without briefly turning to Gurvinder Singh’s recent cinematic adaptation of the story. Singh’s decision to bring two of Sandhu’ stories together might come across as a strange one, since there are no narrative overlaps apart from the fact that both these texts have the Khalistan insurgency as their backdrop. The title of his film, Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction), is in fact taken from that of the other story. The story “The Fourth Direction” is about three strangers, two Hindus and a Sikh, desperately trying to travel to the city of Amritsar in the middle of a night. Much like “I am Feeling Fine Now,” this story, written in 1998, captures the mutual distrust among various people and the environment of uncertainty that engulfed the province during the period of Sikh insurgency. After the guard of a nighttime train refuses to give them a ride (since he is not allowed to let any passenger board the train), the three strangers force their way into a compartment. Seeing four other passengers who were already in the compartment, these three spend their entire journey in an atmosphere of suspicion. At the end of their journey as all passengers are forced to get off a slow-moving train before it reaches the station, the distrust and suspicion dissipate when they realize that all of them are in this together because of their shared vulnerability. There is no nonhuman animal in this story; however, “The Fourth Direction” too contains the same vulnerability shared between Hindu and Sikh co-passengers that Tommy shares with his human cohabitants. The process of adaptation and translation in the “I am Feeling Fine Now” segment is particularly interesting. The sonic register, to which the written story can only appeal to, comes alive in Singh’s film. It gets further accentuated through the visuality of terror. The segments on “I am Feeling Fine Now” are mainly shot in the evening or against the backdrop of gloomy, overcast sky. As one reviewer correctly notes: “That sense of growing dread is evident in each frame, especially the threat that is held out to their beloved dog, Tommy.” Singh manages to re-create an environment of terror and dread by resorting to long shots filled with deafening silence. Human characters often speak in hushed voices. It is only Tommy’s barking that disrupts this eerie atmosphere of silence. As I discuss the ethical and philosophical implication of the dog’s barking in the following section, the sonic register employed by Singh is an essential part of the creaturely cine-poetics of this film. Apart from Tommy’s voice, we hear other natural sounds. We hear other animal sounds, the wind gushing through the fields, flies buzzing, and leaves rustling. These aural cues enable us to engage in an endless apprehension of a violent moment. In the chapter suggestively titled “Animetaphor,” Akira Lippit suggests that the cinema is the medium that inherently and internally contains animal traits within itself. Cinema as a medium, arriving after gradual disappearance of wildlife, is perennially haunted by the animal spirit. In performing the textual translation of Sandhu’s story from the written to

116  Suvadip Sinha the visual medium, the filmmaker infuses cinematic realism with such animism. While there are terrifying and realist reproduction of scenes of state security forces entering and searching through the household, Singh also alerts us to animal vulnerability by inserting close-up shots of Tommy’s face. As the security personnel mindlessly rummage through the household, we also get shots of other animals and hear animal noises. Not only in this scene, there is a matter-of-fact banality in almost every shot that shows how an engulfing sense of terror was an ordinary part of everyday life in Punjab. Singh purposefully stays away from engaging with any melodramatic mode of visuality. By relying on such infusion, Singh’s film turns into what Pick calls “creaturely cinema.” I would like to conclude my discussion of Singh’s film by paying close attention to the closing scenes of the segment: soon after Tommy is furiously hit by Joginder, the camera lingers over the face of the wounded dog. For seconds, we see a close-up shot of Tommy panting and gasping for his life. By looking at the face of the helpless, wounded animal and by intimately capturing his body, the camera forces the human viewer to experience a profound creaturely encounter. The following morning the camera again captures a close-up shot of the draped corpse of Tommy, before showing faces of human inhabitants and neighbors. Joginder is about to haul away Tommy’s body. As the camera captures Tommy’s lifeless body on the back of a tractor in the foreground, we see another dog in the background. Soon after we see a live stray dog, far distant and barely visible, chasing the vehicle carrying its species-mate, while the camera cuts to show a lush green agricultural field. I think this visual interjection of two dogs is intriguing. By carelessly juxtaposing the motionless body of a dead dog with that of a running, living one, the filmmaker reminds the viewers of how different the worlds of these two dogs are. The fact that they belong to the same species is rendered immaterial here; it reminds us that the lifeworld of Tommy was similar to that of his human cohabitants.

Canine Outcasts Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novella Lubdhak7 (“The Dog Star”) is set in the city of Kolkata that is meticulously plotting to get rid of its street dogs. An atmosphere of terror and precarity, similar to Sandhu’s story, persists in this text too; however, the intertwining of human and nonhuman precarity of existence is less explicit in Lubhdhak. Nonhuman animals are alone here. In this story, nonhuman precarity presents itself as a possible premonitory marker for a forthcoming human vulnerability.8 Here the lives of animals in an increasingly de-animalized cityscape are not considered grievable and accountable. While discussing this story following that of Sandhu’s, one needs to acknowledge different spatial dynamics at work in these texts. While

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  117 Tommy the dog is a domestic cohabitant, the dogs of Lubdhak occupy the public space of the city. There is a blindness towards public animals in almost the entire body of theoretical and philosophical works coming out of the industrialized world. While talking about the stray dogs of Kolkata, a city that has not yet deanimalized its public spaces, we need to imagine a very different spatial relationship between nonhuman and human animals.9 To think of a public space that is intimately cohabitated by both, we need to be remain disengaged from what Anne Friedberg has termed as “petishism”10 and open to radically reimagining the spatial aspect of transspecies intimacy. In order to accommodate stray dogs, I think certain ideas proposed by thinkers like Haraway need to be probed and expanded. Haraway’s formulation of “companion animal” is mostly premised upon human–canine cohabitation in domestic settings. But how can one imagine any possibility of companionship and cohabitation beyond the limits private space? Etymologically speaking, the word “stray” originally referred to domestic animals gone awry and astray. This transition from domestic to stray provokes us to think of a companionship that is not necessarily predicated upon the condition of domestic cohabitation. In the process, it deepens the species-defying zone of alterity and co-constitution even further. A transgression of spatial politics of cohabitation is profoundly necessary in order to transgress any assumption of species difference. Bhattacharya provocatively opens his story by observing that the archive of disasters, natural or human-caused, keeps records and numbers of only human casualties, whereas the nonhuman animals remain unaccounted for. The noisy soundscape of city is eerily without any canine sound. Talking about an earthquake that destroyed the city of Kolkata in 1737, a dog informs that 300,000 human beings died in that disaster: But only human beings don’t live in a city. Like today’s countless non-human animals outside of the zoo in Kolkata, they certainly lived in the city too. For example, dogs, cows, goats, cats, crows, sparrows, Indian pipistrelle, and many more. Be it an earthquake, be it an event like the world war, or an event like a famine or an accident on a nuclear submarine, there is always an approximate estimate of human casualty. What does loss of life mean? Certainly human life! (383)11 These uncounted dead bodies of nonhuman animals return to haunt, as the city is on the verge of another massive phase of expulsion. “The unloved, unwanted, and abandoned,” Colin Dayan writes, “are not always left alone. Sometimes they are lost, taken, discarded, or made ready for predation” (35). Similarly, the unloved and unwanted stray dogs of Kolkata will be meticulously eradicated. They are considered a nuisance for an urban landscape that is trying to gentrify itself. They

118  Suvadip Sinha will soon be killed off or be moved to pinjrapole, as there is a proposal for beautifying the city with the arrival of the new millennium. Pinjrapoles were conceived as a part of animal management in India during the nineteenth century. It referred to a reserved space outside of the city boundary, where diseased and old animals of all species were kept and looked after.12 In Bhattacharya’s story, however, we encounter a grotesquely different version of pinjrapole: it is a camp-like place where unwanted nonhuman animals are forcefully transported and abandoned. It is strewn with corpses of dogs that dies at various stages of their lives. While there are signs that few of them resisted before getting killed, most of them helplessly accepted their fate. The human inhabitants of the city are engaged in elaborate and pathologically official planning behind a “much-needed” removal of street dogs. There are five proposals in front of the civic body, and all of them are being vigorously debated. Amidst these, we also hear a number of other non-pet animals talk about their vulnerable existence in the city. Not only dogs! Even cats, bats, and crows think it is their turn next. They fear that city will only keep human beings and their pet animals, and all other nonhuman animals will turn into living-dead figures that are violently and mercilessly ostracized. From time to time, we see cats, dogs, and crows interact with each other and inform each other about the situation. Brutal abjection here leads to a transspecies solidarity. Bhattacharya often draws comparison between these plans to similar actual events in human history. Events like extrajudicial killing of Brazilian young men from underprivileged backgrounds during the so-called Brazilian miracle and annihilation of Jewish people in Nazi camps are invoked. It might be tempting to this as an allegorical move. Perhaps, the author is merely using the violent treatment of dogs here to caution us of a similar forthcoming move against abject human populations. However, I would like to argue that these comparisons do not turn one set into an allegory for the other. These comparisons do not try to convey that human beings too have been treated like these dogs in the past. Rather, the extermination of both human and nonhuman animals together directs our attention to a state of zoopolitical exception that makes certain human and nonhuman lives unwanted and dispensable. To fully fathom the sense of violence Bhattacharya wants to convey, we cannot stay away from the issue of representation here. While describing the dead dog bodies, Bhattacharya often anthropomorphizes the animals. By presenting minute details of their life stages, their bodily reality, and their emotional anxiety, he reminds us how similar these dogs are to human beings: They are lying in different, strange manners. Some have torn ropes around their neck. Someone old! Some young ones! Someone was about become a mother for the first time. Now they are eaten away

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  119 by worms! They will be for another seven hours. Some of them tried to bite before submitting to death. Some of them raised their paws, whereas some withdrew. Some dogs looked calm and sleepy after death! (384–85) Bhattacharya uses such intimately corporeal language to describe generally overlooked suffering bodies of dogs in a number of instances. The graphic details of grotesque state of animal bodies in pinjrapole of course have a purpose beyond merely representing the reality of the space. Their purpose is to infuse the language of representation with a corporeal sensation to remind the human readers of the overlaps and similarities between seemingly different creaturely worlds. As the corpse of Tommy, buried in the courtyard, in Sandhu’s story remains a spectral reminder of how the terrorized lifeworld of Joginder and his human family was similar to that of Tommy’s, these graphic descriptions too enunciate a subversion of the discourse of ontological and biological difference between nonhuman and human animals. The battered canine bodies seem similar to those of human ones that are incarcerated or brutalized in camps.13 The stray dogs of Kolkata, however, do not remain silent and passive victims of human repression. Before the humans could execute any of their plans, the dogs themselves decide to stage a historic exodus on their own, and they do so to leave the humans of the city alone. The real dogs of Kolkata decide to leave the city after they get orders from their cosmic counterparts. The Dog Star, Canis Minor, and several other constellations have agreed to send an asteroid to hit the city soon. The entire city will be destroyed and turn into a space of death. Hours before such a catastrophe could hit the city, streets, roads, boulevards, and bridges of the metropolis get filled with uncountable dogs walking silently. All the human institutions that were plotting to get rid of these canine beings now stand silently and helplessly: We don’t know where we are going. We are going, because the elders have asked us. Yes, your city, your shops, your market, hotels, knives to cut chicken, skewers to roast meat, TV tower, slaughterhouse, police station, guns, sticks, flags, CD player, your surgeon, anesthetist, leaders—everything will remain yours. We are leaving. Not with our heads down; with our dignity. (412) A long description of how helplessly human beings stand looking at this endless procession of dogs follows. The city has come to a standstill. By taking the decision to leave the city on their own, without any coercion, by claiming their agency in the face of utter abjection, the street dogs of Kolkata stage an act of passive resistance and turn their own vulnerability into that of their human oppressors. With their audacious departure, they threaten to truly dehumanize the city. I would like to argue that the forthcoming destruction of Kolkata contains a symbolic meaning

120  Suvadip Sinha here. It is immaterial whether this will actually happen or not. As Carl Jung proposed, it is with the disappearance of animals, that an absolute dehumanization will happen. The forthcoming destruction of Kolkata implies a similar destruction of all life forms. Provocatively challenging any possible incommensurability of human history and animal lives, this absolute destruction indicates that any violent expulsion of dogs and cats will soon lead to the annihilation of everyone in the city. That moment of final destruction, an erasure of any difference between human and nonhuman worlds, is the unavoidable moment of shared vulnerability. Lubdhak alerts us, keeps us in a state of nervous apprehension, and forces us to acknowledge us the human readers of the finitude of a lifeworld that remains immersed in a speciesist illusion.

We Need to Listen to Those Barking Dogs In order to fully understand why dogs are fundamentally necessary for humans in these stories, we need to hear and listen to their barks. In Sandhu’s story, Tommy barks uncontrollably and without precaution. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, we hear the dog’s voice before any human one. Throughout the story, humans of the household try to make him stop and keep him quiet, since they do not want the militants to know that they are still hosting Tommy. In Bhattacharya’s novella, as mentioned earlier, animals do talk in humanly comprehensible language, yet the story is consistently punctuated with the sound of dogs barking. In fact, the last sound we hear in the text is “Woof, woof!” In this concluding section, I want to argue that these “non-linguistic” barks are not mere sonic interjections or disruptions to provide authenticity to the canine worlds of these texts; rather, they are, as traces of puzzling pre-semantic openness, profoundly significant for any comprehension of a linguistic human world. A radical acknowledgment of mutual incomprehensibility of animal “noise” and human “language” is not only a symptom but an essential precondition for zoontological mutuality of human and nonhuman animals. In one section of his Language and Death, Giorgio Agamben engages with Hegel’s discussion of the animal voice and human language in his 1805–06 Jena lectures.14 Agamben cites from Hegel at length: The empty voice of the animal acquires a meaning that is infinitely determinate in itself. The pure sound of the voice, the vowel, is differentiated since the organ of the voice presents its articulation as a particular articulation with its differences. The pure sound is interrupted by mute [consonants], the true and proper arrestation of mere resonation. It is primarily through this that every sound has a meaning for itself, since the differences of mere sound in song are not determinate for themselves, but only in reference to the preceding and following sounds. Language, inasmuch as it is sonorous and

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  121 articulated, is the voice of consciousness because of the fact that every sound has a meaning; that is, that in language there exists a name, the ideality of something existing, the immediate nonexistence of this. (44) Hegel locates the incommunicable voice of the animal, only a vowel, in a dialectical relationship with the consciousness of human language. Quite similar to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, human language can only become possible through the sublation of the animal’s empty voice. The word “empty” in Hegel’s text, Agamben argues, is not really empty; it simply implies that it lacks “in any determinate significance” (45). My reading of dogs’ barking in these two texts urge not to hear them as empty sounds signifying nothing. A number of scholars of animal studies have taken up Heidegger’s famous (or notorious) observation that animals are poor in the world because they do not have access to language to propose that the humanist understanding of linguistic signification helps maintain an obstinate form of anthropocentrism in Western metaphysical tradition. From the perspective of Heideggerian humanism, this lack of language—animals only have voice, but they do not have speech—makes animals mere non-agential existents in a world that can only be made by human language. Hegel’s identification of the animal shriek as the limit of human language, as discussed by Agamben, however, can offer an inversion of this understanding of voice, language, and animality. Soon afterward, Agamben cites another long section from Hegel that contains this curious proposition: “Every animal finds a voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed-self (als aufgehobnes Selbst)” (45). Elaborating on this, Agamben writes, “If this is true, we may now understand why the articulation of the animal voice gives life to human language and becomes the voice of consciousness” (45). The animal howls before death, an absolute death, to preserve the living as dead. The barks of wounded, abandoned, and expelled dogs in Sandhu’s and Bhattacharya’s texts are particularly important for understanding the zoopolitical provocation made by them. If the state of creaturely vulnerability enables an embodied and ontological mutuality between human and nonhuman animals, that mutuality needs to be lived and experienced at the level of language too. Here I am not referring to human language alone. I am also hesitant to the prefix “pre” to render this as a pre-linguistic contact zone. Rather, I urge us to listen to the canine voice to envision a non-binaristic fluidity between animal shriek and human speech. The tantalizing barking sounds that the dogs make in Lubdhak and the groaning sound Tommy makes before succumbing to his injury force us to step out of the humanist world of language. An acceptance of human inability to fully comprehend those sounds is the premise upon which any human and nonhuman ontological co-constitution can become a possibility

122  Suvadip Sinha Discussing dead dogs and their spectral return, Dayan asks, “What gives dogs their unique capacity to haunt” (17)? Using the figure of Hecuba, the Greek mythological character who was turned into a dog, Dayan observes that dogs, like ghosts, belonging to “the trash bins of society,” can haunt and howl at us because of their ability to erase the difference between spirit and body. Even after their death and even after their bodies disappear, Tommy and those stray dogs of Kolkata haunt the humans, who have been left alone, through their last barks. Their barks echoing through the suspended fields of Punjab and the terrified streets of Kolkata remind the humans of their zoopolitical vulnerability.

Notes 1 My use of terms like zoopolitics and zoopolitical here is influenced by the way Nicole Shukin conceptualizes it. Zoopolitics does not only indicate a reduction of the human being to the level of animals; rather, it signifies a systematized network of power, “an inescapable contiguity or a bleed between bios and zoē, between a politics of human social life and a politics of animality that extends to other species” (9), that exerts its control over human and nonhuman animals alike. 2 I am sticking to the Bangla original title of Bhattacharya’s novella, since it has not yet been translated into English. Film scholar and visual artist Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee and filmmaker Abhik Mukhopadhyay are in the process of making two simultaneous adaptations, a graphic novel and a stop-motion animated film, of Bhattacharya’s novella. 3 There is an extensive body of works available on the reasons behind the rise and fall of Sikh militancy. Few of the most useful sources are Jugdep S. Chima, Verne Dusenbery, and Surinder Singh Jodhka. 4 The disturbing details of human rights violations by the state during this period is well documented in the 1995 report Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab. 5 See in this context Susan Crane’s elaboration on how modern-day domestication of pet animals is fundamentally different from medieval practice of cross-species cohabitation (11–41). 6 See Amit R. Baishya’s discussion of Manto’s story in his essay in this volume. 7 Lubdhak is the Bangla name of Sirius, colloquially known as “Dog Star,” the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Major. 8 For a discussion of a similar situation in the canine history of Istanbul, see Efe Khayyat’s essay in this volume. There are several actual precedents in South Asia too. Municipal authorities regularly capture stray dogs to remove them from Indian streets. 9 One of the very few book-length studies on stray dogs of non-Western spaces is The Ecology of Stray Dogs by Alan M. Beck (1973). 10 See Laura Marks’ brief explication of this idea in Friedberg (24–26). 11 Here I would like to note that Bhattacharya actually uses the Bangla phrase for nonhuman animals—na-manush prani, which is not at all common usage in Bangla literary writing. 12 A detailed historical study of pinjrapole is still awaited; however, brief references to different pinjrapoles appear in a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century journals and magazines. Some of them continue to exist in a number of Indian cities.

Pariah Dogs—Precarious Cohabitation  123 13 See Dayan for a discussion drawing similarities between the spectral, the animal, and the incarcerated bodies. 14 For a brief discussion of Agamben’s text, and how this can be read as an interface between Derrida and Agamben in the philosophical conceptualization of the animal voice, see the chapter “Between Derrida and Agamben” in Seshadri.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated Michael Hardt. University of Minnessota Press, 2006. Beck, Alan M. The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-ranging Urban ­Animals. Purdue University Press, 1973. Bhattacharya, Nabarun. Lubdhak. In Upanyas Samagra. Dey’s Publishing, 2010. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009. Chauthi Koot. Dir. Gurvinder Singh, Perf. Suvinder Vikky, Rajbir Kaur, ­Gurpreet Kaur Bhangu, and Taranjit Singh. NFDC, 2015. Chima, Jugdep S. The Sikh Separatist Insurgency in India: Political Leadership and Ethnonationalist Movements. Sage, 2010. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Dayan, Colin. The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton University Press, 2011. Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab. hrw.org, 1 May 1995. Accessed 30 April 2019. Dusenbery, Verne. Sikhs at Large: Religion, Culture, and Politics in Global Perspective. Oxford University Press, 2007. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Jodhka, Surinder Singh. “Looking Back at the Khalistan Movement: Some ­Recent Researches on Its Rise and Decline.” Economic and Political Weekly 36.16 (April 2001), pp. 1311–18. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. ­University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory of Multisensory Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. Columbia University Press, 2011. Sandhu, Waryam Singh. The Fourth Direction and Other Stories. Translated Akshey Kumar. Sahitya Akademi, 2005. Seshadri, Kalpana R. HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. University of ­M innessota Press, 2012. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. ­University of Minnessota Press, 2009.

Section III

Megafauna

7 No Place for Waltzing Matilda Uncanny Australian Swamps and Crocodiles in Rogue, Black Water, and Dark Age Isaac Rooks Though its population enjoys one of the world’s highest life expectancy rates, popular stereotypes present Australia as a harsh terrain teeming with deadly animals, and the exuberant men eager to wrestle them. This vision of Australia offers the ingredients for yarns not dissimilar to ­classic colonial narratives, as the defiant exotic land yields to the mastery of Anglo men. Yet darker narratives may also emerge from this vision of the Land Down Under. Australia’s association with dangerous creatures makes it an ideal ­setting for texts belonging to a subsection of genre cinema centered on extant nonhuman animals attacking humans. Iconic examples ­include Hitchcock’s The Birds and Spielberg’s Jaws. These texts pose unique ­ethical considerations. They differ from other works of horror ­fiction; films manipulating images of real animals in order to construct narratives about that species’ wickedness have different stakes than ­ films featuring fictional monsters or human actors playing villains. They are also ­distinct from other films focused on human–animal relations. Films prominently featuring ambivalent or positive human–animal ­interactions differ dramatically from narratives positing fundamentally antagonistic relationships between humans and animals. With their emphasis on conflict between humans and nonhumans, these animal attack narratives possess a particular resonance in an age of anthropogenic ecological crises. It is important for scholars to explore how these films conceptualize the relationship between humans, the world they inhabit, and their planetary cohabitants. Typically, animal ­attack films construct a clear human–animal binary, complemented by a ­conceptualization of civilization and wilderness as distinct realms. The drama lies in contesting the conceptual borders delineating human and ­nonhuman spaces on imaginative cultural maps. These films undercut ­hubristic ­notions of human supremacy, as characters struggle to survive in the wild. Yet they often conclude with the threatening animals being slain and humanity’s dominance being reasserted, even as the unsettling possibility of a different dynamic lingers still. It potentially implies that that which does not belong to humans, or that which is not conducive to human

128  Isaac Rooks life, can be made accommodating through management and ­development. additional In  the context of settler colonial societies like Australia, ­ ­symbolic resonance accrues around narratives of humans winning the right to live in lands once populated by bestial nonhumans. After all, the foundation of these societies involved the systematic ­dehumanization, displacement, and attempted erasure of the land’s original inhabitants. A recurrent villainous species in Australian animal horror films are saltwater crocodiles, an ancient species holding totemic significance for some Aboriginal tribes. Crocodiles feature in two films produced during a 2007 boom in Australian horror: the high-budget Rogue ­(director Greg McLean) and the independent Black Water (directors ­David ­Nerlich and Andrew Traucki). Striking similarities between these texts aid comparative study. Both take place in the Northern Territory’s wetlands and ­feature stranded Anglo tourists imperiled by ­crocodiles. Both films largely elide ­ etaphorical the existence of non-Anglo Australians while presenting m hostile indigenous species, all contests between human outsiders and ­ in a setting which itself is often considered primordial, monstrous, and ­inimical to human civilization. Both films illustrate how ­popular animal attack texts can progressively engage, but problematically resolve, questions about humanity’s relationship to the environment and nonhuman (and human) alterity. Throughout this chapter, Rogue and Black Water serve as the primary animating texts. Towards the conclusion, an earlier killer crocodile film, Dark Age (director Arch Nicholson, 1987), offers an example of different ways this trope can function. Dark Age features Aboriginals prominently while demonstrating how a horror film can ­ avoid demonizing or punishing dangerous animals. This chapter proceeds in three sections. First, I contextualize these films in relation to the ideological project of Australian national ­cinema and horror. I argue that Rogue and Black Water provide mythic ­allegories about identity and belonging in a settler colonial society. In my discussion, I pay particular attention to the role landscapes play in defining Australia’s national cinema. I then analyze how these films ­present their uncanny heterotopic swamps and their monstrous residents. By ­endowing visually striking settings with an element of danger, these narratives convey the sublime qualities associated with mythic imaginations of Australia. Both the settings and the animals present obstacles to the colonial project and challenge broader notions of human supremacy. However, their defeat paves the way for human, specifically Anglo, domination. In the final section, I discuss the significance of these texts in relation to interrelated settler colonial and environmental themes. Here, Dark Age provides a useful point of comparison. Dark Age illustrates how animal attack films might explore these anxieties with less problematic outcomes. In so doing, it demonstrates how a text might indulge genre conventions while fostering humility and an acceptance of varied forms of alterity.

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  129

The Lay of the Land Labeling these texts “Australian” necessitates reckoning with the fraught concept of national cinema. Exchanges of technologies, ­capital, and personnel often make it difficult to identify films as belonging to a single country. Scrutiny complicates national categorization of all the films considered in this chapter. All three take place in Australia, deal with Australian themes, and feature Australians in key roles in front of and behind the camera. However, most of Rogue’s financing came from the Weinstein Company, a U.S. film studio (Ryan, “A Dark” 111). Rogue also underperformed at the Australian box office (157). Black Water received international distribution but struggled to secure ­domestic screenings (139). Dark Age experienced a latter-day resurrection after being championed by Quentin Tarantino and the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (director Mark Hartley, 2008), a celebration of ­“Ozploitation” films (Thomas). Ironically, a text Hartley identifies with an important part of Australia’s production culture never played in that nation’s cinemas at the time of its release (Ryan, “A Dark” 162). Moving beyond business and exhibition concerns, the national cinema lens can distort perceptions of an industry and its output. Ross Gibson argues that all Australian films are “about landscape” (63). The environment functions as a central concern, not a passive ­setting. Beyond its narrative significance, scholars suggest that the A ­ ustralian environment shaped national aesthetics, as filmmakers worked with a distinct geography and quality of light (O’Regan 190). The notion that these unique environments define Australian cinema requires a ­selective focus. Tom O’Regan questions the d ­ isproportionate attention devoted to “rural and outback stories”; most Australian films take place in ­cities and suburbs, but these settings receive less ­attention because they ­appear less distinctly Australian (193). Audiences and scholars expect ­Australian films to conform to “the National ­Geographic imaginary,” showcasing exotic flora, fauna, and landscapes (85). Popular and ­scholarly discourse consequently develops a skewed sense of what constitutes an Australian aesthetic and narrative, biasing local and global perceptions of Australia. Regardless of whether “outback stories” depict life in Australia accurately or are indicative of the majority of films produced in Australia, these cultural texts craft a heightened sense of national identity. ­Returning to Gibson’s earlier statement, he describes the transformative process whereby the representation and dramatization of geography turns land into landscape, allowing it to function “as an element of myth, as a sign of supra-social Australianness” (75). What spaces define this sense of mythic Australianness, an identity as significant internationally as it is domestically, and how are those spaces represented? Gibson argues that the conventions of settler Australian narratives betray deep-seated anxieties, and that the “landscape becomes the ­

130  Isaac Rooks projective screen for a persistent national neurosis deriving from the fear and ­fascination of the preternatural continent” (69). The ­inhospitable ­grandeur of much of Australia’s landmass inspires that fear and ­fascination. Most Australians live in cities hugging the coast, ringing the continent’s massive heart. As a settler colonial society, Australia’s non-­Aboriginal people lack an inalienable sense of belonging. This a­ mplifies the neurotic sense of Australia as an unhomely homeland (64–65). The continent must be tamed, domesticated, and aestheticized in order to ­facilitate Anglo settlement. At the same time, Australia’s national character derives from the land’s intractability (66–67). Settler Australians use the ancient land to define their identity, while seeking to control and change it. John ­Tulloch suggests that the defining non-Aboriginal A ­ ustralian ­legend concerns “the drama of man’s struggle against nature in the face of great physical and mental hardship, his eventual triumph, and his magnificent reward” (O’Regan 191–92). Of course, Tulloch ­alludes to the idealized outcome of that scenario. The potential for failure makes tales of hardship and struggle resonate. If extraordinary individuals must fight to live in Australia, presumably not everyone makes the cut. The inverse of the legend to which Tulloch refers, stories of struggles lost or won at monumental cost, offers rich material for horrific narratives. Though the national legends described above have horrific potential, Australia lacks a strong tradition of cinematic horror. Since the 1970s, government subsidies have shaped Australian cinema, encouraging “the ‘representation and preservation of Australian culture, character and identity’” (Ryan, “Australian” 27). Funding often favors projects ­utilizing a realistic aesthetic, distinguishing these films from formalist Hollywood fare (O’Regan 186). While naturalistic films make up the bulk of Australia’s national cinema, Gibson contends that realist representations ­struggle to convey the mythic quality of the nationalist ­project (74). That level of supra-reality requires a heightened ­presentation, something matching the inflated fantasy of Australia many people hold. Horror’s inclination towards extremity makes it conducive to mythic stylization. However, horror cinema in Australia enjoys neither c­ onsistent government funding nor strong domestic audiences (Ryan, “A Dark” 157). Horror producers must look to private and/or international investors and target foreign audiences (Morran and Vieth 107). These factors prompt questions about whether these films represent the ­ rrol Vieth national cinema and its attendant mythos. Albert Morran and E argue that Australia’s engagement with horror signals “the g­ lobalizing of the film industry … [because horror] motifs and narratives are not linked to a particular country. Rather, the attraction of revulsion … invoked by films of the genre is common to many people in Western cultures” (110). While horror’s appeal stretches beyond the West, Morran and Vieth are correct that economic concerns demand that these films resonate with international as well as domestic audiences. However, genre material should not be positioned as adrift from cultural moorings.

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  131 Focusing on characters lost in the wilderness and threatened by flesh-eating creatures, Rogue and Black Water play on primordial, ­perhaps universal, fears. Their basic scenarios are comparable to any number of monster movies. Yet while Australian films on the i­ nternational market may benefit from a degree of homogeneity, elements marking them as unique, including signs of Australianness, attract attention in a crowded marketplace dominated by Hollywood. The contexts from which these films emerge shape their presentations, and their choices of regional settings and local “monsters” resonate on a deeper level. These films shed light on the persistent fear and fascination to which Gibson refers. I am inclined towards the argument of Mark David Ryan, who suggests that these films address the question: What do Australians fear, and why? (“Putting” 7). With its use of the “Australian” label, issues of identity and belonging are implicit in the above question. They are also central to Rogue and Black Water. After millions of years of existence, Australia’s saltwater crocodiles faced extinction in the 1970s. The crocodile population rebounded thanks to conservation efforts and the recognition that crocodiles constituted a natural resource, one exploitable on multiple levels. C ­ rocodiles draw tourists, whether they are wild or raised on farms, awaiting ­harvesting (Quammen 157–58). From an ecological and economic ­perspective, the resurgence of crocodiles represents a positive trend. Rogue and Black Water mine it for horror. Black Water begins with ominous text displayed over the image of a seemingly empty swamp: “The Saltwater Crocodile population in Northern Australia is expanding… So is the human population.” The unstated premise, animated by the subsequent action, is that people can only coexist with these creatures if humans are in control. If not, people’s tendency to explore and expand their territory makes conflict inevitable. Early on, both films present a status quo of human supremacy over the natural world. In Rogue, tourists cheer as guides goad wild ­crocodiles into leaping for food. The central tour group’s guide, Kate (Radha ­Mitchell), provides factoids about the crocodiles and the local geography, establishing both as knowable and as manageable. In Black Water, the ­protagonists’ vacation begins with a visit to a crocodile farm. The t­ ourists’ gaze figuratively consumes crocodiles awaiting literal ­consumption. The farm features indicators of humanity’s casual domination of this fearsome species, including the ill-fated protagonists jokingly posing inside a giant model of a crocodile’s jaws. In this environment, the notion that this species poses a threat seems laughable. Later, as they sail down a river, their guide assures them that wild crocodiles no ­longer occupy these waters; the crocodiles have all been either relocated to farms or killed. Within the swamps, however, a disruption of this mastery occurs. Arguably, these narratives about struggles to expand into an unconquered frontier exploit an anxiety simmering throughout ­Australian culture. One returns to the caveat that, in myths of belonging, not everyone belongs. In these

132  Isaac Rooks films, exclusion from the nation manifests in characters being unable to survive (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). A foreigner emerges as Rogue’s unlikely hero. Among Rogue’s all-­Anglo group of domestic and international tourists is Pete (Michael Vartan), an American travel writer. Pete appears to be an effete cosmopolitan. He ­arrives in the sweltering Outback dressed inappropriately in a business suit, complaining about flies and cell reception. Local bullies label him a “four-eyed poofter.” In the end, those boorish individuals become meat for the crocodile, while the “poofter” proves his masculinity by defeating the monster and rescuing Kate from its lair. Local recognition ­becomes Pete’s ultimate reward. In Rogue’s final image, the camera dollies towards a framed news story about his exploits that hangs on the wall of the backwoods general

Figure 7.1  I n Black Water, tourists watch crocodiles at a farm being coaxed to jump for food.

Figure 7.2  Later, in the swamp, the wild crocodile replicates this behavior as it leaps from the water to snap at our protagonists.

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  133 store that Pete navigates uncomfortably at the film’s start. Rogue’s decision to focus on an international group makes sense for a film intended to travel abroad. Narratively, it also allows an outsider to emerge as a ­stronger, better man after his trial in the ­Australian ­wilderness. Indeed, Pete proves better suited to the land than stereotypical Australian locals. This suggests that being born in Australia does not a­ utomatically make one more equipped to thrive in this land than a foreigner—an ­important moral for a country whose non-Aboriginal population all came from abroad ­originally. Rogue’s scenario may imply, however, that Anglo-Australians are the ones who do not belong in this land. Anxieties about locals needing to prove their merit pervade Black ­Water more explicitly. Lacking Rogue’s international profile, Black ­Water’s tourists are a trio from an Australian suburb. Like Rogue, Black Water reverses expectations as the most apparently competent members of the group die first, starting with a male guide erroneously claiming knowledge of the land and its creatures. In the end, the job of killing the crocodile falls on Lee (Maeve Dermody), the waifish baby of her family forced to grow up fast by her experience. As Lee leaves the swamp, one witnesses an inversion of the Australian narrative trope of the child lost in the wilderness. Here, the battle-tested representative of a new generation is the only member of her party to escape the wild and rejoin society. Despite their differences, both films valorize individuals who do not conform to national stereotypes. Respectively, their heroes are an ­educated global citizen and a strong young woman. These are i­ ndividuals suited to thriving in the civilized world, more so than Rogue’s bullies or Black Water’s would-be outdoorsman. Yet these unconventional heroes are made better still by their violent tribulations. As if they were the country’s first human inhabitants, they must confront and defeat terrible creatures in this harsh land.

The Beast and Its Lair Both Rogue and Black Water present an unsettling scenario of displacement in a destabilized environment. Swamps serve as the crucible through which bourgeois Anglo tourists must pass before emerging as masters of the land. Black Water’s characters begin their holiday touring paved roads in their car. Gradually, they leave the stability and security of modern development. They venture off-road and hire a boat to travel down a sunny open river. Their problems begin when they pass a ­border of trees and enter the dark mangrove swamps, where the crocodile upends their boat. The tourists then spend much of the film stranded up a tree. Rogue presents a similar progression. After their boat sinks, the tourists are stuck on an island in a tidal river where rising waters threaten to submerge their perch. The multifaceted and shifting nature of these wetland environments gives them a heterotopic quality, making them alien to Western notions of spatial stability (Figures 7.3 and 7.4).

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Figure 7.3  I n Black Water, the tourists begin their journey on an open river that facilitates safe transport and offers clear sightlines.

Figure 7.4  T  he tourists’ boat ends up overturned in a dense and shallow mangrove swamp, forcing them to huddle awkwardly in a tree.

Michel Foucault describes heterotopias as areas juxtaposing ­multiple (sometimes-incompatible) sites within a single space. They reveal the ­mutability of all space, undermining notions that spaces possess a l­ ogical ­ reoccupies modand consistent character. Foucault suggests that space p ern Western society, which struggles with a sense of emplacement rooted in the Middle Ages. Foucault argues that Westerners “live ­inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one ­another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (23). This understanding assumes a place for everything and (ideally) everything in its

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  135 place. It  follows that heterotopias, which challenge those notions and ­everything built upon their unstable foundations, can unnerve. ­Wetlands are spaces where the relationship between land and water is in flux. In these films, that is not the only relationship they upend. Though adjacent to spaces where ­humans dominate the natural world, these wetlands are wilder. The swamp may seem an odd choice for Australia’s mythic proving ground, being so different from the iconic dusty Outback. Yet, like other uniquely Australian landscapes, swamps appear to be anachronistic temporal enclaves. As discussed previously, the way Australia’s ancient terrain resists human encroachment becomes part of its distinct character. Development and modernization happen on the continent, but it seems to coexist with things from an earlier time. This invites scenarios where modern orthodoxies require re-interrogation. These privileged tourists can indulge in leisure activities, enjoying picturesque locations from the security of their enclosed cars and large boats. Yet these luxuries are lost in the swamps. The protagonists must prove that they can dominate the land and its inhabitants personally, rather than relying on the accomplishments of pioneers. The heroes must slay the beasts before returning to the environment from which they strayed, the modern “human” spaces that these films distinguish from primitive “wild” spaces. Still, Rogue’s filmmakers seem aware of international audiences’ potential confusion. As the tourists head downriver, aerial shots situate the waterway and its adjacent wetlands in a canyon, deep below an arid and more recognizably Australian plane. That contextualization underlines the Australian character of the setting and increases its uncanny nature. Allen Shelton notes that one of Freud’s examples of the uncanny was the sensation of entering a dry riverbed and the overwhelming dread that water would rush from the earth and wash everything away. ­Shelton muses: “Perhaps the uncanny is linked to wetness or is a specific ­instance of porosity where the wetness suddenly bursts through a thin dry ­surface” (154n1). Much as the creeping tides in Rogue threaten to remove our heroes’ perch, these shots destabilize notions of Australian landscapes. At the same time, the presence of uncanny elements endows the traditional Australian landscapes featured in these films with an ­element of the sublime (Figure 7.5). Theorists discuss the uncanny and the sublime as distinct, yet related, aesthetic categories (Vidler 20). The uncanny evokes the horrific—­ horror being a sensation linked to the visual, the individual, and the bodily, as the subject witnesses or experiences something repugnant ­(Cavarero  8). The sublime instills terror, a feeling associated with ­abstract or ­anticipatory dread, responding to an impossible object that humbles and awes the subject (Giblett, Postmodern 30). Gibson notes ­ nglo-Australian literature regards the continent as sublime. that early A

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Figure 7.5  I n Rogue, an aerial shot situates the film’s wetland setting within an iconic vision of the Australian outback.

It is a strange land “beyond classification or representation, beyond ­nowing, beyond imagining” (17). Unapproachably alien, the land k ­reveals the ­limitations of Western settlers’ knowledge. As Gibson’s description suggests, the sublime’s incomprehensible ­grandeur makes it a difficult aesthetic to capture. Giblett explains: “for Kant [the sublime] was associated with the formless and the devoid of form” (32). Jennifer Lynn Peterson notes that, according to classic ­definitions, “the sublime is always unrepresentable. But there is a long tradition of representations of the sublime, which we can understand not as literal representations of sublimity but, rather, as representations of the idea of sublimity” (185). Peterson argues that most attempts to convey sublimity fail. This holds especially true for representations in commercial cinema that strive for realism and mainstream accessibility (185). These attempts typically lapse into the tangible aesthetics of the beautiful or picturesque. The narrative and visual mediation of potentially sublime subjects provides distance and renders them digestible and safe (185). The initial presentations of landscapes in these films mark them either as picturesque (in the case of Rogue with its glossy cinematography, carefully composed shots, and travelogue-like montages) or as quotidian (as in Black Water’s sites of commercial tourism). Crocodiles enter these landscapes as uncanny chaos agents, disrupting the benign pleasures of attractive scenery and endowing the viewing experience with a new ­affective dimension. Rogue opens with a montage of soaring aerial shots showcasing the land. While indulging a touristic gaze, the elevated camera gives spectators a sense of ethereal mastery. Rogue then jarringly cuts to a static

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  137 ground-level shot of water buffalo drinking from a lake. S­ uddenly, a crocodile explodes from the water, grabbing an unfortunate ungulate. After this violent disruption, the film features another quiet, ­picturesque shot of the lake, its surface rippling slightly in the wake of the attack. This does more than foreshadow the danger the characters face. It  ­endows innocuous and aesthetically pleasing landscapes with an element of ­sublime terror. Previously, one might simply gaze upon the scene and appreciate its beauty; now it must be scrutinized. This applies particularly to the still waters, which reflect the land and sky while concealing potentially dangerous depths. The landscape holds an astonishing and overwhelming power—a power made tangible by the crocodile’s fearsome presence. The flatly beautiful gains a mysterious, fearful dimension and approaches the sublime. In Rogue, the visual device of the picturesque montage recurs as the tourists set out on their trip. These interludes mirror the ­opening, ­reminding audiences of the natural world’s lurking danger. They also ­potentially position that beauty as the prize at stake in the contest b ­ etween humans and nature. Black Water offers less spectacular ­imagery and deploys it to different ends. Once the action begins in Rogue, the film suspends its nature montages. In Black Water, these scenic interludes continue throughout the film and follow moments of great drama. After the crocodile kills a pregnant woman’s husband, her cries fade from the soundtrack, replaced by the ambient noise of the swamp and shots of busy insects, attractive flora, and still waters. In Black Water, these quiet moments submerge the human melodrama, showcasing the mundane rhythms of nature. Of course, given the heightened emotional context of the film, the land’s indifference takes on an almost sociopathic cold menace. This feeds into a negative impression of swamp environments extending beyond the Australian context. Rod Giblett suggests that the indefinite quality of swamps and wetlands, spaces combining land and water, partially explain their dreadful associations in Western culture (Postmodern 3). The swamp’s mixing of elements violates notions of proper placement, making them dirty, according to Mary Douglas’ conception of dirt as “matter out of place” (13). Yet in Western culture, swamps are not merely dirty; they possess ­ redictability of a malevolent character. Swamps lack the stability and p other environments, making them inimical to transportation (18) and ­ ften therefore human development and colonization (55). They are o characterized as monstrous environments; as such, they make ideal homes for monsters (186). Swamps are associated with various dangers, including miasma and disease, but in these films the threat comes from solitary crocodiles. ­Giblett observes a trend within Western culture of casting swamps as “a secular underworld into which the hero of the modern adventure romance has to descend and in which he has to overcome monsters”

138  Isaac Rooks (“Alligator” 306). The convention dates back to antiquity, as demonstrated in legends about the trials of Hercules and Beowulf’s battle with Grendel (Giblett, Postmodern 183). While those myths use fantastic creatures to test their heroes, crocodiles can play these monstrous roles easily. Physical traits mark crocodiles as monstrous. The impassive faces of these dinosaur-like creatures betray no emotions, except for what humans perceive as incongruous grins. Rogue and Black Water exaggerate their predatory natures, as their insatiable crocodiles keep returning to eat more and more people. It is revealed that the crocodiles are greedily hoarding the dismembered corpses of their victims in their lairs, where the final confrontations in both films take place. It bears mentioning that, despite their voracious appetites, these crocodiles have a penchant for taking blonde women captive, as if they were dragons in a children’s storybook. Other qualities also make crocodiles ideal monsters. After all, they are exceptional embodiments of the uncanny. “Uncanny” derives from a translation of Freud’s original term: unheimlich or “un-homely.” In orienting readers to the concept of unheimlich, Freud offers several definitions of heimlich. One is “tame,” as in animals that are “companionable to man. As opposed to wild” (Freud 222). Quite literally, these crocodiles are unheimlich. As Rod Giblett explains, crocodiles display other uncanny traits. These living fossils appear as timeless as Australia’s ancient geological features. These relics emerge from the turbid waters like something returning from a repressed past. Freud also writes about the uncanny sensation of being unsure “whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (233). Crocodiles are infamous for their tendency to appear like floating logs before springing to life (Giblett, “Alligator” 300). Their ability to rapidly and violently “come alive” complements another categorical confusion presented by these creatures. Just as the wetlands combine the terrestrial and aquatic habitats, the crocodile functions on the land and in the water. While humans flail in unpredictable swamp environments, crocodiles thrive. Freud does not emphasize the significance of crocodiles, but they illustrate his discussion of the uncanny. Freud relates the story of an English couple haunted by ghostly crocodiles, which invade their home after they purchase a piece of furniture decorated with crocodile carvings (Freud 244–45). Shelton paints the scene: “In the dark at night they feel something moving around the room. There is a wet stench. Freud is momentarily unnerved as the room in the story changes into a swamp crawling with crocodiles” (62). Giblett notes that, in the story Freud references, the carved furniture comes from New Guinea, making it a colonial artifact. Giblett therefore reads the incident as manifesting “the colonial unconscious…. The return of the repressed is a return not only to the individual’s own repressed but also to the culture’s repressed”

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  139 (“Alligator” 300–01). The British couple brings a colonial token into their home, only to have their domestic space transform into a nightmarish swamp. Spaces like swamps and creatures like crocodiles present obstacles to colonization, and this object from a colonialized country brings with it echoes of the land’s resistance. Black Water evokes this anecdote indirectly by having its suburban characters stranded in a ­ swamp and terrorized by a ghostly crocodile, a throwback to a time before Anglo colonization. Black Water never suggests its crocodilian antagonist is a­nything other than a flesh-and-blood creature. Still, its scenario carries ­intriguing ­elements of spectrality and haunting. Within the film, the only ­information given about crocodiles is that there should not be any living in these waters. Despite this, once the characters enter the swamp, the ­inscrutable crocodile emerges from the murky waters periodically, materializing out of nowhere. As the crocodile kills people, the waters concealing the ­animal allow its victims to become ghostly. Their dead bodies float about, appearing and disappearing. Even before death, the humans in this “secular underworld” have effectively entered an otherworldly realm. At several points, Black Water highlights the continuation of the human world just around these characters, yet out of reach. At one point, a character stares wistfully through the trees at an airplane overhead. Later, Lee hails a boat passing by on the main river, just ­beyond the fringe of trees. Despite its proximity, her cries go unheard. Eventually, Lee, like the mythic hero, leaves this realm and returns to the civilized land of the living. Yet the film ends on an enigmatic note emphasizing this undercurrent of ghostliness. Though the crocodile is dead, Lee hears a splash while exiting the swamp. Throughout the film, similar splashes herald the crocodile’s appearance. Lee looks back but sees nothing. Rogue’s crocodile functions as a more explicit agent of the colonial repressed. Before encountering the crocodile, the characters cross an ­invisible threshold as they leave the tour’s usual route to respond to a distress signal. Kate explains: “We shouldn’t really go through here. This is sacred land.” Specifically, it is Aboriginal sacred land. Disembodied stereotypical chanting heralds their border crossing. It is the same sound cue scoring the film’s opening montage. One shutterbug tourist gazes in awe at an Aboriginal painting of a crocodile on the overhanging cliff walls. After a moment’s hesitation, he takes a snapshot, reducing this grand vision to an easily consumed picture. This is the closest either film comes to acknowledging Aboriginal culture (Figure 7.6). Rogue’s tourists soon learn that this land does not just belong to ­(absent) Aborigines. The territorial crocodile also claims this space and sees the trapped humans as intruders. Their presence, a local warns, will ­ riting be “driving [the crocodile] crazy; he’ll feel like we’re moving in.” W about Australian animal horror films, Catherine Simpson suggests that

140  Isaac Rooks

Figure 7.6  I n Rogue, a tourist spies a cave painting of a crocodile through his camera’s viewfinder as the group enters the sacred Aboriginal land. After a few moments of apparent reverence, he takes a snapshot.

nature” by they “undermine the notion of human supremacy over ­ ­granting agency to their nonhuman antagonists (47). If an a­ lpha ­predator claims sovereignty over an area, humans cannot automatically assume dominance. Yet, as Simpson concedes, with the crocodile’s defeat this group of Anglo tourists can now claim a space unoccupied by either Aboriginal peoples or uncanny beasts.

Different Paths Simpson positions Australian human-versus-nature “eco-horror” films as inherently progressive. Val Plumwood’s ecological-feminist work ­inspires Simpson’s optimistic reading. Simpson draws upon an ­essay in which Plumwood reflects on her experience being attacked by a ­saltwater crocodile. Plumwood’s essay illustrates how critical ­reflection on ­ dangerous animals can yield insights that are distinct from, but ­related to, the work done in relation to other animal species. Theorists like John Berger and Jacques Derrida shaped critical animal studies with their ­descriptions of how benign interactions with animals ­(including domesticated pets) grant humans a greater sense of self-awareness. ­ ­Falling under the animals’ indifferent gaze reveals humans to simply be part of the larger world. Plumwood’s near-fatal encounter brings her to a similar conclusion, but she articulates a different set of stakes. ­Plumwood argues that people’s willingness to live with large predators indicates “our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to recognize ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  141 food chain.” The presence of predators reminds humans that they are not the privileged center of the world and requires humans to “acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability” (Plumwood). Claiming that films like Rogue and Black Water exemplify this moral of vulnerability dismisses too easily the fact that the crocodiles in these narratives pay for their predatory natures. In both films, people t­ respass into inhospitable landscapes. Rather than discovering the limits of their privilege, these sites host mythic battles for mastery. Such narratives ­resonate with settler-colonial societies like Australia especially. In the past, producers did not feel the need to disguise tales of heroic settlers battling hostile Indigenous populations. While such narratives have not disappeared, there exists an increasing awareness that they are no longer acceptable. Instead of explicit depictions of Anglo-Australians fighting to take Aboriginal land, these eco-horror movies enable the ­metaphorical enactment of similar stories. The Aboriginals are gone, replaced by monstrous indigenous nonhumans that guard their territory jealously and require destruction. indigenous A long legacy exists of colonial narratives positioning ­ ­peoples as being close to the environment. This can manifest in romanticized fantasies of “noble savages” living at peace with the ­natural world. Jodi Byrd argues that this perceived connection also ­enables the pro­ ehumanizing jection of bestial qualities onto indigenous populations, d them and facilitating their persecution. To amplify and naturalize the apparent threat of native populations, settlers compared them to ­predatory animals (Byrd 152). Rogue guides viewers to these connections by referencing the now-absent Aboriginal people and the reverence with which some tribes regard crocodiles. The only time Rogue shows ­living Aboriginals are in brief shots at the opening as Pete approaches the general store. These shots feel like variations of the opening landscape shots, satisfying the “National Geographic imaginary” to which ­O’Regan refers. Black Water makes no direct reference to indigenous peoples. Yet, like Rogue, it presents an exclusively white Australia and focuses on a pocket of resistance to modern development. Rogue’s brief references allow one to see both films as displacing and erasing indigenous peoples, a crucial element of the settler colonial project ­(Veracini). Both perpetuate notions that the land is unpeopled and open for occupation, if it can be cleared of inhuman beasts. However, these films do not resonate exclusively with the particular anxieties of settler colonial societies. Both were made to and/or did travel internationally, suggesting that their tales have traction on another level. These stories can be read metaphorically; however, on a literal level, they address anxieties about the connection of humans to the land and other animals. Not all nations or people are concerned with the historic mistreatment of indigenous populations. However, all human settlements must carve out spaces for themselves in nature, displacing

142  Isaac Rooks or destroying other forms of life. In particular, humans seek to protect themselves from environmental threats, including alpha predators. This does not diminish or excuse the violence of settler colonialism or other imperial projects. It merely explains how these dramas, which can be read specifically in relation to their originating contexts, might resonate globally as tales concerning the place of humans in the natural world. The risk is that these narratives contribute to the demonization of species and settings already vilified in Western culture. Swamps are sites of great biodiversity, and crocodiles have occupied an important place in their ecosystem for millions of years. Despite this, negative attitudes cause both to face severe threats from human activity. If arguments about ecological worth are insufficient to protect these places and creatures, what role might culture play in addressing environmental attitudes? Horror has a long tradition of both reveling in and condemning the abnormal and the grotesque. Halberstam notes that early critics of ­ Gothic literature who denounced the ghoulish texts failed to realize that “rather than condoning the perversity they recorded, Gothic authors, in fact, seemed quite scrupulous about taking a moral stand against the unnatural acts that produce monstrosity” (12). Stephen King similarly argues that the genre “appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us” (39). The majority of a text may focus on spectacular disruptions of the status quo by nonnormative agents, but the resolution usually involves punishing the Other and restoring order. This leads King declare horror movies “innately conservative, even reactionary” (175). Considering this, can films focusing on predators’ fearsome potential have positive ideological value without requiring major caveats? The existence of predatory animals played a role in the development of human culture and consciousness, explaining people’s dreadful fascination with them (Quammen 3). This makes it unlikely that animal attack narratives are going anywhere anytime soon. Besides, they need not lead exclusively to negativity; theorists like Plumwood argue that consideration of our relationship to predators can encourage progressive ecological attitudes. Yet, can these anxieties be explored in popular genre cinema without the animal, and the thing that the animal represents, being punished? Such a narrative requires the animals’ actions and agency not to be read in human terms, which enables predators to be judged in accordance with human morality as deviant and deserving punishment (as the title Rogue implies). It requires accepting the animal’s alterity and its attendant potential danger. I argue above that the crocodile’s presence lends sublimity to the land. Christopher Hitt notes that ­environmental humanities scholars regard sublime treatments of the natural world warily, due to the sublime’s common trajectory in Western culture. As the human struggles to grasp the sublime object, “the result is a kind of cognitive dissonance, a rift between perception and conception. This rift

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  143 is then overcome by the triumphant emergence of reason, revealing to us, finally, our ‘pre-eminence over nature’” (Hitt 608). While the sublime might initially humble the human subject, they ultimately process their encounter in a way that nurtures the human ego. In Rogue and Black Water, that takes the form of the natural world’s unknowable dangers being defeated spectacularly, leaving only the pleasurable, consumable natural world. Ideally, these narratives would recognize and accept those chaos agents as existing on wholly other terms. That comes courtesy of an older film, Dark Age. Grahame Webb’s novel Numunwari inspired Dark Age. Webb is a ­specialist in crocodile biology and management, so it comes as no s­ urprise that Dark Age’s hero, Steve Harris (John Jarratt), is a sexy s­ pecialist in crocodile biology and management. It also comes as no s­urprise that Dark Age features a more enlightened attitude towards crocodiles. The narrative enjoys its share of crocodile-related carnage and features the most disturbingly violent act in any of the three films, when the ­crocodile devours an Aboriginal child. Even after this, Dark Age avoids ­vilifying the crocodile. Following this death, an ­anthropologist living in the ­Aboriginal community demands that Steve kill the crocodile. Without dismissing the tragedy, Steve explains that the crocodile’s actions were not motivated by malice. This predatory act was simply part of its nature. Action should be taken, but that action need not involve the slaughter of this or any other crocodile. For most Anglo-Australians in Dark Age, the crocodile simply ­threatens human life and regional development. These factors justify its extermination. Steve concedes that the crocodile must be dealt with, but argues that the age of the species and the age of this individual crocodile give it inherent worth and a right to exist. Members of the local Aboriginal tribe, who endow the crocodile with spiritual and cultural significance, support Steve’s mission. It should be noted that another objection to the natural sublime is its underlying fantasy of an unpeopled wilderness, an ahistorical construct that requires overlooking the fact that indigenous peoples once lived in those spaces before their coerced removal (Cronon). The wilderness spaces in Rogue and Black Water are guilty of this, either ignoring Aboriginals or using them as exotic window dressing. Dark Age showcases the vitality of contemporary Aboriginal communities and the continuance of indigenous people’s traditional beliefs, as a father and son team help Steve relocate the crocodile to the remote billabong home from which it strayed. Dark Age even offers a variation on the notion that crocodiles embody the colonial repressed when a tribal elder suggests that the crocodile’s violence stems from its fear at seeing how Anglo settlers changed the land and treated the Aboriginals. Though the crocodile is deadly, Dark Age directs audience animus towards a gang of poachers. These poachers run afoul of the crocodile while hunting illegally. They become increasingly deranged and violent

144  Isaac Rooks in their attempts to take revenge upon the creature, in part by killing r­andom crocodiles. The presence of these villainous humans allows Dark Age to avoid scapegoating the animal, which even becomes an agent of justice in attacking the poachers. The film culminates in events reminiscent of a bloody precursor to Free Willy, as the heroes race to save the crocodile and relocate it to an isolated river. One should note, while Dark Age avoids killing the crocodile, it cannot suggest a solution other than relocating the crocodile to a remote pristine natural ­environment. This does not offer a practical solution. Quammen notes, alpha predators “will not survive into the distant future unless they are allowed to survive amid, and not just apart from, areas of landscape that are o ­ ccupied and exploited by humans” (365). In contrast to the romanticized ending of his fiction, the pragmatic Webb suggests that the best hope for crocodiles, and other predators, lies in their commercial exploitation, as seen in Rogue and Black Water (Quammen 166–68). Dark Age does not offer a definitive example of how to resolve the i­ ssues within animal horror texts unproblematically. However, it offers a valuable illustration of a different way to tell these stories, one in which humans recognize the inherent value of the Other, and allow its alterity to coexist with, if not near, them. Humans will probably never lose their fascination with wholly other environments and living things. Sometimes, this fascination manifests as morbid curiosity and fear. Genre texts like Rogue and Black Water can potentially serve positive functions, helping to exercise and temporarily exorcise those anxieties. The problem lies in the way such texts ­potentially feed into a larger demonization of the places and animals in question. This could cause humans to ignore their value and concentrate on their elimination, which perpetuates Western notions of human ­supremacy that justify violence against both the natural world and other people. Critics must guard against these impulses and understand where such attitudes come from and what aggressions they stand in for—in this case, the anxiety of not belonging in a settler colonial country ­already populated by indigenous people. When one understands those factors, they can be addressed and one can also recognize texts that acknowledge and counterbalance those impulses, pointing towards a way of imaging and a form of discourse that does not falsely elide the Other’s alterity, but that recognizes it respectfully.

Works Cited Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? Penguin Books, 2009. Black Water. Directed by David Nerlick and Andrew Traucki, performances by Maeve Dermody, Diana Glenn, and Andy Rodoreda, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007.

No Place for Waltzing Matilda  145 Byrd, Jodi A. “Follow the Typical Signs: Settler Sovereignty and Its ­Discontents.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 151–54. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Columbia UP, 2011. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” William Cronon. http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/ Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html. Accessed April 30, 2018. Dark Age. Directed by Arch Nicholson, performances by John Jarratt, B urnam Burnam, and David Gulpilil, International Film Management ­ Limited, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills, Fordham UP, 2008. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” The Standard Edition of the Complete ­Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVII. Translated by James Strachey. The Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 219–52. Giblett, Rod. “Alligator, Crocodiles and the Monstrous Uncanny.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 299–312. ———. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh UP, 1996. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Indiana UP, 1992. Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Hitt, Christopher. “Toward an Ecological Sublime.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3, 1999, pp. 603–23. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Berkley Books, 1983. Morran, Albert and Errol Vieth. Film in Australia: An Introduction. ­Cambridge UP, 2006. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!. Directed by Mark Hartley, City Films Worldwide, 2008. O’Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. Routledge, 1996. Peterson, Jennifer Lynn. Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogue and Early Nonfiction Film. Duke UP, 2013. Plumwood, Val. “Surviving a Crocodile Attack.” UTNE Reader. Ogden Publications, July–August 2000. http://www.utne.com/arts/being-prey. Quammen, David. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Rogue. Directed by Greg McLean, performances by Michael Vartan, Radha Mitchell, Sam Worthington, Dimension Films, 2007. Ryan, Mark David. “Australian Cinema’s Dark Sun: The Boom in Australian Horror Film Production.” Studies in Australian Cinema, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 23–41. ———. A Dark New World: Anatomy of Australian Horror Films. 2008. Queensland University of Technology, PhD dissertation. ———. “Putting Australian and New Zealand Horror Movies on the Map of Cinema Studies.” Studies in Australian Cinema, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 3–7. Shelton, Allen C. Where the North Sea Touches Alabama. U of Chicago P, 2013.

146  Isaac Rooks Simpson, Catherine. “Australian Eco-horror and Gaia’s Revenge: Animals, Eco-nationalism and the ‘New Nature.’” Studies in Australian Cinema, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 43–54. Thomas, Deborah J. “Tarantino’s Two Thumbs Up: ‘Ozploitation’ and the ­Reframing of the Aussie Genre Film.” Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, no. 161, 2009, pp. 90–95. Veracini, Lorenzo. “Introducing.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–12. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. The MIT Press, 1992.

8 Plotting the Elephant Graveyard Anthropomorphism and Interspecies Conflict in Tania James’s The Tusk That Did the Damage Jason Sandhar As John Dixon Mirisola has remarked, Tania James’s 2015 novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, coincides with a “recent swell in ivory ­awareness” that includes a spate of star-studded public service advertisements, a ­near-ban on ivory antiques by the Obama administration in 2014, and a growing body of literature in the social ­sciences about ­poaching ­crises in Africa and Asia. Given that elephants, like ­polar bears and ­tigers, enjoy a peculiar charisma in the Global North, we should perhaps be unsurprised by the flood of concern about ­elephants that ­coincides with James’s novel (cited in Williams, n.p.). While ­conservationists ­valorize ­elephants, however, they have been ­accused of ­minimizing, or o ­ verlooking entirely, both the suffering that state governments inflict on local ­residents who must live and die with wild animals and the vexed role of poaching as an economic necessity for d ­ esperate people.1 To ­investigate how James’s fiction challenges ­conventional narratives of ivory awareness that have been accused of excluding the poor, I argue that The Tusk That Did the Damage—which consists of three ­interwoven narratives told from the perspectives of a South ­I ndian villager, an American filmmaker, and a traumatized ­elephant, ­respectively—­refuses to offer easy answers for poaching ­crises in the Global South. Further, I suggest that the novel’s foray into the mind of a traumatized elephant overturns a­ nthropomorphism as a literary trope in that James does not imagine the elephant’s experience through terms that are recognizable to humans. Instead, she imagines its lived ­experience—as that which is necessarily unknowable to humans—in a way that is understandable to her reader. I posit that James’s technique demands that we, as readers, empathize with the animal by confronting the limits of our own understanding of its experiences. The tension between the limits of our experience and our ability to empathize with radically different beings can, in turn, nuance the political and social entanglements that structure local communities as spaces that thwart resolutions to human–animal conflicts prescribed by First World conservationists.

148  Jason Sandhar

Interspecies Conflict in the Global South In 1997, Ramachandra Guha argued that conservation biologists such as Daniel Janzen and Michael Soulé engaged in an updated version of the White Man’s Burden. According to Guha, this line of thinking a­ ssumes that indigenous communities in South Asia should surrender their ­territories to “biologists, park managers and wildlifers” who would then ­“determine collectively how [that] territory is to be managed” (­15–16). Guha’s intervention precipitated a sea change in Western attitudes to interspecies conflict management in the global south. An anthology of essays on conservation biology edited by John Knight, for example, ­proceeds from the premise that “many people-wildlife conflicts can be understood as … people-state conflicts.” (2). Moreover, environmentalists and conservation biologists have begun to acknowledge Rob Nixon’s formulation of “slow violence,” long-historical processes of disenfranchisement characterized by environmental toxicity, the forced displacement of the rural and urban poor, and the struggles by the poor to resist those processes. Preindustrial communities in South Asia such as the Gonds and the Baiga, for instance, continue to suffer displacement at the behest of state officers who appropriate their traditional lands for tiger and elephant reserves, even though their local presence on such lands predates the arrival of Portuguese traders at the turn of the sixteenth century. The conservation movement’s emerging consciousness of these struggles has prompted, in Francine Madden’s words, “a collective vision … for how conservationists, biologists, social scientists, practitioners and researchers should address human-wildlife conflict.” (“Creating Coexistence” 248). Madden’s remark echoes Nixon’s a­ ffirmation that ­“Western activists are now more prone to recognize, engage, and learn from ­resource insurrections among the global poor that might previously have been discounted as not properly e­ nvironmental” (5). Indeed, central to Madden’s “collective vision” lies the acknowledgment that “[t]he conflict about wildlife is between people with historical wounds, cultural misunderstandings, socioeconomic needs, as well as gaps in trust and communication over how to conserve wildlife and ensure the well-being of people at the same time” (“Creating Coexistence” 250). However, the transition to a more inclusive environmentalism has not always been smooth. Madden, in an article coauthored with Brian McQuinn, admits that the conservation field’s move towards “more collaborative governance models of engagement” still “fail[s] to recognize or reconcile the deep-rooted conflict” between conservationists and the rural poor (“Conservation’s Blind Spot” 98). For Madden and McQuinn, as with other conservation scholars who hold sympathetic views towards subsistence groups, this misrecognition lies in the persistence of decades-old mistrust fomented by the very neocolonialist attitudes Guha critiqued in 1997. To make matters worse,

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  149 the interhuman aspects of human–wildlife conflict remain entangled in an uneasy network of power inequities between conservationists; the state, national, and international law enforcement agencies; animals; and local peoples. Bearing in mind this network of instabilities between species as well as global and local subjects, I consider how Tusk’s two human protagonists, Emma and Manu, offer vastly different interpretations of the ­elephant. Their incommensurable interpretations, I suggest, complicate the apparently stable figure of the animal as Other such that the ­elephant’s perpetually shifting roles as a mass murderer, a mascot for animal rights, a deity, and a commodity is refracted through the structural, class, and race inequities that destabilize the species boundary.

Intersecting Boundaries: The Biopolitical Limits of Anthropocentrism The novel consists of three distinct but interwoven narratives. In the first narrative, a local teenager named Manu Shivaram recounts his family’s involvement in the local poaching trade. The reader bears witness to Manu’s father’s alcoholism and gambling, his brother Jayan’s poaching career, the decline of the family farm, and the riots that follow Manu’s death at the hands of an overzealous forest officer. The second narrative follows Emma, a young American filmmaker who travels to Kerala with her friend Teddy to shoot a documentary about an internationally celebrated veterinarian named Ravi Varma. When she arrives in ­Kerala, Emma envisions her film as “a rescue mission involving elephants” (14), but the project gradually disintegrates under the pressure of a love ­triangle between Emma, Teddy, and Ravi. The elephant’s narrative, told in the limited third person, shifts between the elephant’s perspective and that of Old Man, his caretaker (pappan). While still a calf, the e­ lephant, later nicknamed the Gravedigger by Sitamala’s villagers, squeals in ­terror as a group of poachers eviscerate his herd. The poachers spare the baby Gravedigger, and he eventually ends up under Old Man’s care. The Gravedigger and Old Man live a precarious existence as part of a traveling festival, and certain sights, smells, and events trigger in the Gravedigger a sort of dissociative reverie wherein he cannot distinguish between his present experience and his fragments of memory as a calf. After a number of bad episodes at the hands of an abusive trainer, the Gravedigger turns rogue. He kills several of his handlers, including Old Man, before he buries them with leaves and disappears into the forest. These three narratives alternate by chapter, but James staggers their timelines so that the Gravedigger’s narrative ends shortly before he ­enters Manu’s world, while Manu’s and Emma’s respective narratives accelerate at alternating speeds, thus providing us with different insights into certain events that are revisited from multiple perspectives. In some

150  Jason Sandhar ways, the novel’s tripartite structure resembles the “network narrative” of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (Jainsing 69), but James departs from Ghosh insofar as The Hungry Tide’s “shifting narrative gaze” ­reveals the gendered, classed, institutionalized, and racialized complexities that articulate the exchanges between Piya, Kanai, and Fokir. With the exception of Manu’s penultimate encounter with the Gravedigger, The Tusk That Did the Damage maintains a narrative boundary in which Manu, Emma, and the Gravedigger occasionally bump at the edges of each other’s worlds, but never meaningfully engage with one ­another. For critics such as Jonathan Steinwand, Ghosh offers a potentially meaningful moment of engagement between the rich and the poor by representing the way in which globally mobile figures such as Piya and Kanai acknowledge the entanglement between Bengal’s ecological crisis and rural poverty. James, on the other hand, thwarts any such possibilities in her representation of Kerala, thereby compelling us to reckon with how the Global North continues to fail the poor of the Global South. The novel’s confrontation with the nexus between global inequality and interspecies encounters provokes us to revisit anthropomorphism as a conceptual and rhetorical tool for species boundaries. That is, our ­impulse to overlay human characteristics upon nonhuman ­animals raises the question of how we are to define “the human” as a stable ontological or political category in the first place. At the same time, as interspecies relationships raise questions of how, in Ursula Heise’s estimation, “‘the human’ has been formed and transformed amid e­ ncounters with ­multiple species of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes” (195), the power differentials that underlie broad neo-­imperialist structures such as America’s military presence abroad or lax environmental regulations for ­transnational corporations raise the question of how “the human’s” phenomenological encounter with “the non-human” reiterates neo-­ imperialist power dynamics between the Global North and the Global ­ arratives of species boundaries compel us to South. ­A lthough popular n ­ therness rests on the primacy of a self-­ assume that the nonhuman’s o identical, stable human subject, the ­symbiotic contingency of ­interspecies encounters—coupled with the discursive economies of power that order human and nonhuman ­subjects before the law vis-à-vis the neoliberal state—in fact throws our notions of a self-identical human into question while simultaneously destabilizing the anthropocentric trope of “the ­animal” as an ontologically and biopolitically stable being that resides on the other side of the species divide. When we take such contingencies into account, animals (both human and nonhuman) morph into discursively contingent bodies that encounter each other at the horizon of a necessarily fluid assortment of species boundaries predicated on a network of power that cuts across the global and the local, the human and the nonhuman, at the same time as such

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  151 categories remain themselves politically fraught. The epistemic and ontic instability of the species divide—articulated by recent theoretical interventions such as Vinciane Despret’s investigation of animal intelligence and ethology; Donna Haraway’s musings about the bacterial, or even viral, exchanges between herself and her dog; or Akira Lippit’s notion of “animetaphor,” the “demetaphorization” of language in which “words are thrust … into living animal bodies” (163)—impels us to interrogate the institutional power discrepancies of global capital that shape our ­assumptions about life in general. Bearing in mind the network of ­instabilities that throw into question the human and the nonhuman in relation to the global and the local, I suggest that the novel’s representation of Emma’s and Manu’s vastly different interpretations of elephants in the localized setting of Sitamala complicates the apparently stable figure of the animal as Other: the elephant’s perpetually shifting roles as (among other things) a mass murderer, a mascot for animal rights, a deity, and a commodity demand that we take into account the way that structural, class, and race inequities complicate species boundaries. State Corruption and the Slow Violence of Cosmopolitan Environmentalism The power inequity that mediates Manu’s and Emma’s respective relationships with elephants recalls Ursula Heise’s observation that ­multispecies ethnographers have recently started to explore the question of “who bene­ fits, cui bono, when species meet” (195). For residents of Sitamala such as Manu, elephants represent crop destroyers and a threat to human life on the one hand, and, on the other, a vital commodity for the underground poaching economy in light of the state’s bid to destroy local subsistence through the mechanisms of the law. Early in his narrative, for instance, Manu remarks that Sitamala’s Forest Department officers, nicknamed “greenbacks” by the villagers “for their dingy green uniforms and their love of currency” (James, Tusk 8), uphold local laws that forbid local subsistence practices while supporting resource exploitation by transnational timber companies (10). This all-too-familiar narrative of the state’s marginalization of the poor extends to the greenbacks’ response to the Gravedigger when the Forest Department “promoted it to rogue status but stopped short of issuing the order for its killing. Not until it would kill more of our own” (7). Emma, meanwhile, sees the Gravedigger as a violent anomaly in the popular narrative that informs her vision of elephants as gentle, primitive creatures to be protected by Ravi Sharma’s state-funded elephant rescue. Although Emma and Teddy investigate the corruption that undergirds the Forest Department, they ultimately stand to gain from Ravi and his elephants because their documentary addresses itself to globally mobile consumers, eschewing the material displacements that accompany “the juggernaut of conservation” (Guha 17) as it

152  Jason Sandhar “proselytise[s] Western ideals of wilderness” and ­“people-less landscapes” (Brockington and Igoe n.p.). Manu, whose family is “neither poor enough nor princely enough to appear on Western screens,” has “never seen this Ravi Varma, M.D., though I had heard of his exploits with the greenbacks, and I was no fan of theirs nor his by association” (James, Tusk 10). Manu’s disdain for Ravi suggests a further point of departure from The Hungry Tide, which “demonstrates the process through which cosmopolitan elites must go in order effectively and responsibly to use their privileges and agency in solidarity with the disenfranchised” ­(Steinwand 192)—indeed, Emma’s First World environmentalism betrays the racial and economic privilege that insulates her and Teddy from the very environment they claim to engage with. Whereas Piya comes to realize the interstices at which the Sundarbans’ ecological and social crises converge following her relationship with Fokir, Emma’s ignorance of Manu’s world presents an implicitly pessimistic view of Western environmentalism’s self-serving insularity before the ongoing social and environmental crises that articulate James’s vision of the Global South.2 In addition to the disconnect between the Global North and the Global South that punctuates Emma’s failure to engage with Sitamala’s locals, the conclusion of Manu’s arc refuses to provide any resolution for the local unrest that follows Manu’s death, and the narrative’s irresolution resonates with the novel’s concluding image as a promise of a death yet to come. Speaking to us posthumously, Manu describes Jayan’s confrontation with the elephant. According to Manu’s description, Jayan experiences a sort of revelation that his life will bring only “grief and bitterness,” so he “wills” the elephant to crush him, leaving us with a suspended image of the elephant’s foot overhead (221). Because of the novel’s fluid temporality, however, we know that Jayan survives this ­encounter (we learn a few pages earlier that the “hoopla” surrounding Manu’s death comes about in part because Jayan mobilizes the ­locals) (219). Accordingly, James’s decision to conclude the novel with the ­elephant’s foot as a deferred promise of death after a life that will bring only “grief and bitterness” plays on Manu’s earlier lamentations about a future that promises only drought and starvation: The dirt was brittle and pocked, and soon we would have seed again. From here I could see all five of my mother’s acres; she would will half to each son. And so would Jayan and I divvy our plots for the generation to come, on and on, all of us living elbow to elbow, head to toe. I felt my future dragging me deep underground. I thought of my brother and my uncle and the greenbacks and the farmers. I thought of the elephants and the forest creatures, all their vengeful yellow eyes. (149) Manu could easily be speaking here to the ongoing crisis of farmer ­suicides following India’s decision to open its markets to global trade

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  153 in 1991 (Mukherjee 1–2), a process that has only been worsened by ­ onetary the state’s subsequent lack of oversight for transnationals and m agencies like the International Monetary Fund (Nixon 1–6). Here, ­Manu’s description of the “brittle” and “pocked” dirt suggests a futurity of agony for rural laborers in which individual human lives blur into an undifferentiated mass of hungry mouths begetting hungry mouths across generations. Meanwhile, the animals, the greenbacks, and the farmers push and pull against the toxic flows of global capital that poison what little remains of the earth’s obliterated landscape. ­Sitamala’s collective death drive, invoked by Manu’s vision of the imminent suffering of its future generations, does not work according to Freud’s ­formulation of the death instinct, in which reproduction and death exemplify the ­species’ collective desire to restore the world to a state of rest, but a logic of life choking off life in its drive towards a future of absolute scarcity accelerated by capitalism’s impulse to infinitely reproduce itself.3 Land dwindles into nothingness under a bloated biomass of human bodies, and this unbearable condition feeds a longer process of suffering ­specific to a legacy of mismanagement and exploitation by state actors and transnational corporations. Admittedly, Manu’s fatalistic outlook does a disservice to Adivasi tribes such as the Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas, and the Gonds, who, as Arundhati Roy importantly reminds us, have long resisted the imperialist imperative to be “civilized” or ­“assimilated” (119). Indeed, as the “backbone” of ongoing struggles that date to ­British encroachment on indigenous territories in the late nineteenth century, Adivasis continue to “wag[e] nothing short of a civil war against the ­I ndian state which has signed over Adivasi homelands to infrastructure and mining corporations” (Roy 119). However, the question of how those of us in the Global North are to actively, responsibly, and r­ espectfully ­ uestion, engage with the armed struggles of Adivasis remains an open q and Emma’s failure to acknowledge Manu’s world gestures towards an overall sense of frustration throughout the novel that resonates with Ramachandra Guha’s trenchant critique of Western conservation as an updated version of the White Man’s Burden (16). Emma’s subject position as a globally mobile consumer initially reveals itself when she admits to learning about Ravi’s elephant rescue from an in-flight magazine. She remarks that her initial motivation for the film turned on the “photos of fuzzy elephant calves” that “hooked me for the usual cutesy reasons” (James Tusk 15). The magazine’s “description of the veterinary doctor,” Emma adds, “glowed with dramatic potential” for her and Teddy’s first documentary (15). The reader gradually learns that “dramatic potential,” for Emma, entails a preference for action and trauma that flattens the uneven and contingent historical structures of interspecies conflict into documentary as a form of spectacle. Indeed, when Emma and Teddy arrive in India, Ravi assures them that “there would be no shortage of rescues and calamities to film” (15). Rescue and

154  Jason Sandhar calamities, in turn, are enmeshed in Emma’s notions of authenticity, but authenticity as such does not concern the lived conditions she encounters so much as her personal aesthetic and professional goals. Claiming that she wants “to stand behind every frame, every choice,” Emma admits that her personal stake in the film arises from her anxieties around the fact that “[o]ther people my age had reels and résumés; all I wanted was a single work that could speak for me” (16). Unfortunately, for her, the “period of Pax Romana in which zero calamities had taken place” falls short of her aspirations to capture what she envisions as the essence of Indian elephants in the wild, resulting instead “in footage that had all the depth and nuance of a promo video” (16). Eventually, however, ­Ravi—“in a last minute break”—calls Emma and Teddy to a calf rescue, signaling the long-awaited disaster that she had been waiting for (16). In the high-octane episode that follows, Ravi retrieves the calf and ­returns it to its mother just as the mother begins to charge Ravi, Emma, and Teddy. For Emma, the mother–calf reunion is to become the “heart of our film,” consisting of a single shot that “would hold its weight ­onscreen, all sixty-two pulsing seconds,” an eternity in filmic time (39). The camera dwells on the elephants’ “twining trunks, whose m ­ inistrations seemed to suggest comfort and tenderness, and yet seemed somehow private, ­primal, on a plane of communication we could glimpse only indirectly” (39). The camera’s fixed position on the trunks—body parts that express a ­“primal” “plane of communication”—augmented by Emma’s description of this moment as the film’s “heart” renders the lived engagement between the reunited elephant calf and mother through a metonymic ­iconography of dismembered elephant bodies mediated by the shot’s spectacular economy. That is, the shot evokes what Matthew Brower ­identifies as an “image of ahistorical eternal nature,” a visual semiotic of ­ atural world deep time wherein the “evolutionary temporality” of the n “positions nature as an eternal and unchanging base outside of human affairs” (4). Thus, “in presenting us with an image of deep nature, the image detaches itself from the moment of its taking, adhering instead to a deeper chronology” (4). The unintentional consequence of this imperative to access a “deep” history embedded in animals’ bodies ascribes upon those animals a notion of temporal stasis such that Emma’s documentary image (re)interpellates life into a universal economy of nature as an ­unchanging, primeval force, the im/passive witness of the Anthropocene’s Protean fluctuations. In so doing, the image effaces the material conditions that establish Emma’s sentimentally imagined scenario. ­ bjectifies The semiotic economy of Emma and Teddy’s filmic gaze also o Vasu, the Forest Department officer who shoots and kills Manu, when Emma describes a photo that he offers her: He had cut around his own shape and that of the jeep attached to his foot, as if they were one. I pulled focus on the photo, held delicately in his fingers, dirt under the nails. There was something so humble,

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  155 so heartwarming, about both Vasus, large and small, now and then, neither of whom seemed capable of harm. Yet two days later, Officer Vasu would shoot a poacher dead. At first I wouldn’t believe it; the shooter had to be some other Vasu, not our Vasu, not Vasu of the clown-sized camo shoes. Even in the space of a few hours, I thought I’d come to know him. Had he been playing to the camera? Or had I cast him as the sweet, clumsy native before he’d even opened his mouth? (101) From this “single puzzle piece,” Emma constructs her fantasy of “sweet, clumsy” Vasu, crystallized by his monosyllabic utterances and the image of his disembodied, dirt-encrusted fingers as they hold a cutout from a photograph that severs the smaller Vasu from his surroundings. Emma’s construction of this doubly dismembered and displaced Vasu effaces his personhood through the role that he plays as the forest officer who shoots the unnamed poacher. That is, even after she realizes the disconnect between her fantasized vision and the “real” Vasu, Emma continues to script him according to signifiers of her own choosing. In other words, “both Vasus” are restricted to either the “clumsy native” of Emma’s Orientalist fantasy or “Officer Vasu,” a violent state agent who kills an anonymous poacher in cold blood. So preoccupied is Emma with the mutually exclusive logic of the doubly fragmented Vasu—dirt-encrusted fingers that pinch a dislocated body—that she fails to see Vasu in the larger context that surrounds him. Unfortunately, James puts us into the same position as Emma insofar as she gives us little to no information about Vasu himself. Were it not for the fact that Vasu shoots Manu, his underdeveloped character would not weigh so heavily in an overall assessment of the novel. When Emma confronts Ravi about his role in Samina’s conspiracy, which involves a bullet planted in a dead elephant to frame Manu after the fact, Ravi justifies his choice out of pity for Vasu, who was “frightened” and “one year from retirement,” prompting him to approach “Samina Madame for help” (204). Ravi’s appeal to clichés as justification for the cover-up leaves the reader with little choice but to also construct Vasu as either a fool or a manipulative opportunist. In any event, Vasu refuses to take the responsibility for his actions when he defers to Samina. This, in turn, casts both Ravi and Samina into the role of Vasu’s representatives, and they side with the institutional power of state conservation, which is implicated in the generalized imperatives of global capital over the interests of local people and animals. For Ravi, the choice ostensibly appears as one between animal and human, or more accurately, Ravi’s continued assurance of his role as Kerala’s internationally celebrated elephant doctor. When Ravi chooses to protect Vasu, he ultimately protects his own self-interests because Samina, as head forest officer, controls the fate of the Rescue Center. This, again, marginalizes the villagers under the auspices of Ravi’s

156  Jason Sandhar choice to protect his animals by demonstrating his loyalty to Samina. But in choosing to protect the animal through the discursive networks of state-sanctioned conservation, Ravi also feeds the structure that forces the animals’ ­dependence on him and, at the same time, reinforces the criminal discourse of the local poaching economy that displaces local farmers. This complicates Ravi’s outburst at Emma after she insists that she wants only to understand what happened following Manu’s shooting, only to be met by outrage from Ravi (204). His response is fraught from the outset, as his justification for framing Manu is entangled in his investment in the Rescue Center, which both helps and hinders the elephants. That is, the elephants need Ravi because of the ecological displacements that they suffer. But those ecological displacements come about through incidents like Manu’s shooting when the issue at stake (beyond the material consequences of the event itself) is the way that agents with political sway protect their own institutions even if that means displacing people and animals or framing an innocent person, as Samina does when she asks Ravi to plant a bullet in an elephant carcass. Ravi can delude himself with the belief that the Rescue Center helps the elephants in its care, but in so doing, he is implicated in the conditions he claims to alleviate. Consequently, Ravi’s outburst speaks to his own self-delusions about the Rescue Center, that he ignores as best he can the reality that the Rescue Center, by virtue of its very existence, implicates him in the state’s necessary, but politically cynical, solution to the human–elephant crisis that plagues Sitamala. Even though he can genuinely express his frustration to Emma that he is “bailing water from a sinking boat with only my hands” (206), that boat also ensures his livelihood, his local celebrity, and the elephants’ dependence on him. Meanwhile, the Forest Department’s complicity in human and a­ nimal suffering under the aegis of neoliberal capital is inextricably embroiled in its efforts to perpetuate a narrative of criminal justice in which ­Sitamala’s elephant crisis begins and ends with poachers while it fails to provide practical solutions for farmers who suffer crop ­destruction by invasive animals. Following a local scandal involving a transnational timber conglomerate, Samina approaches Leela, Jayan’s wife, to act as an informant. Leela, incredulous at Samina’s obtuse attitude towards her and the other villagers, furiously reproaches Samina for accepting bribes from the timber representatives. In ­effect, Leela understands that while Samina, on the one hand, parrots the neoliberal rhetoric of “pilot project[s]” that seek to “harmonize the economic needs of local people with the needs of wildlife” (111), her interests extend only to a model of private accumulation that excludes local people such as Jayan from participating in those projects at the outset. Samina, meanwhile, maintains her veneer of authority as she compares poachers to “chin hairs” and asserts that they cannot be rehabilitated (113). The question

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  157 at stake here is not exactly whether Samina is justified in excluding Jayan from the project; rather, this exchange gestures towards the tension between the Forest Department’s law-and-order approach to poaching and state-sponsored initiatives that claim to support social justice even as the state perpetuates the self-interested structures of global capital. This contradiction emerges from the fact that Samina’s proclivity for criminal justice indirectly reinforces poaching so long as the state ­remains beholden to power networks of non-governmental organizations and transnational capitalism that destroy farming communities and ­local subsistence practitioners who turn to poaching out of e­ conomic ­necessity. In other words, the state effectively feeds into a circuit whereby conservation networks save animals and marginalize people who, in desperation, marginalize the very animals that the state claims to save. The horrible irony here is that in spite of Samina’s claims to the contrary, poaching remains not a problem to be solved, but, perversely, a vital component of a tangled network through which the faces of local and global power speak. Capitalist desire, as the engine that drives these entanglements, ensures that the circle of death continues. The material conditions of capital, meanwhile, remain necessarily ineffable as they flow through state actors, NGOs, poachers, rural dwellers, animals, and global industry.

“And Say the Animal Responded?” James’s “Strange and Methodical” Elephant I would like now to consider how the elephant responds to the dynamics of life, death, and institutional power that surround it. Throughout its narrative, James constructs an approximation of the elephant’s experience by drawing inferences based on zoological findings about elephant behavior. To avoid anthropomorphizing the animal, James has remarked that she would shift perspectives to the Gravedigger’s human handlers as a means to “write around the elephant” (Turits, n.p.). Hence, our window into the elephant’s world is not exactly structured around feeling the world from the elephant’s body (a phenomenological impossibility) or an anthropomorphized version of the Gravedigger, but from the relationships that structure the shared experiences between the Gravedigger and the people he encounters. Early in the novel, the Gravedigger initially appears to share a tender ­intimacy with his pappan, Old Man, “who bent low and let [the ­elephants] drape their trunks along his neck” (James, Tusk 23). For the Gravedigger, “it was a comfort, to touch and to be touched” (23). The serene affection of this exchange explodes into pain and shock, however, as Old Man uncoils himself from the Gravedigger’s trunk, assumes a “hard” face, and holds in his “fist” a

158  Jason Sandhar long stick, capped by a metal talon. !! said Old Man.!! The Gravedigger stared. Old Man wore a strange new face, hard and blank as a wall. He reached out and tugged sharply on the Gravedigger’s left ear. The Gravedigger squealed, but Old Man kept pulling until the Gravedigger swerved to the left. !!! said Old Man.!!! A sharp tug to the Gravedigger’s right ear. He squealed, swerved right. !! !!! ! !!!! On and on until the Gravedigger could extract a meaning from each ugly note. Left! Right! Stand Still! Kneel!—the last learned by the whack of the stick across his flanks. Pain pulled his mind to a taut and terrible line, its only goal: to do whatever would prevent the pain. (24) At the same time as Old Man’s affection is shot through with violence, James reverses the terms of conventional anthropomorphism here so that the animal’s incomprehension, by way of the exclamation points, becomes our new point of entry into that animal’s experience. Hence, our focus rests not entirely on the animal but on the necessary coerciveness of dominion and care that structures the power relation between the human and the animal. Romeo, the drunken pappan who chronically abuses the Gravedigger, justifies this formulation when he insists that elephants cannot be trusted, and that pappans must perpetually inflict violence upon them to reassert their dominance over the animal. For a pappan such as Old Man, cruelty and affection flow through each other as expressions of power. And power, first and foremost, structures the human–elephant relationship. The Gravedigger’s tendency to bury his victims later on in the novel echoes the tension between affection and violence that defines his experiences with Old Man, as Manu’s description of his cousin Raghu’s mutilated body fluctuates between carnage and an attention to detail that flirts with artisanship: By morning, the palli was strewn about as if exploded. Roof smashed, legs snapped. At the calm center of this chaos: a pile of thatch laid with care across the body of my cousin. Raghu’s mouth was a hollow of astonishment. From the chest up and the hip down he looked unharmed. The middle of him looked like something the elephant had tried to erase. (49)

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  159 The villagers who bear witness to Raghu’s mutilated body cannot help but infuse the trace that the elephant leaves behind with significance as they “[push] in with all manner of theories” about the Gravedigger’s “work” (49). Their impressions of the gravesite imply any number of questions for readers: Is Raghu’s grave a symptomatic reversal of the Gravedigger’s relationship with Old Man, in which the elephant repeats the fraught synthesis of violence and care he learned from Old Man upon the humans he encounters? Might we read Raghu’s makeshift grave as an open signifier in which life and death from the perspective of an elephant might speak—or refuse to speak—according to registers that escape human conceptions of life and death? For that matter, if we interpret Raghu’s grave as a representation of the Gravedigger’s trauma, might that representation imply an elephant unconscious, or does the very notion of elephant trauma only betray an anthropocentric reduction of nonhuman animals to what we, as storytelling animals, tell o ­ urselves about other animals through Western rubrics of thought? Although a sustained investigation of these issues exceed the scope of this essay, I gesture towards them here because the unknowability of the Gravedigger’s state of mind impresses upon us the urgency to respond to his actions, even if we do not—and perhaps cannot—know how to. And although we cannot know what the elephant feels (to paraphrase W.G. Sebald), our urge to speculate about what his actions might mean ­signals our responsibility to the animals with which we share our world. In effect, Manu’s encounter with the Gravedigger near the end of his story speaks to the necessity of response, if for no other reason than to ­acknowledge the presence of life in general as something that escapes our systems of knowing, and to raise the question of how we might ­deploy our imperfect knowledge in response to the impossible c­ omplexity of life. Manu and the Gravedigger share a confrontation with this impossible complexity when they encounter each other in the forest, as Manu gapes in wonder at the immensity of the creature before him: It regarded me with its honey-hued eyes as if to take my measure, my potential for harm. As I stood there, I felt an odd calm settle over me. Fathoms deep, those eyes, small inside the cliff sides, close to the colour of my own. Remote and ancient. Eyes that had seen the wild and not-wild, eyes that knew things. (197) The “odd calm” that settles over Manu signals a moment where he gives himself over to the unknowability of the encounter with the elephant, and in which he and the elephant, wild and not wild, momentarily arrive in a realm of presencing where the elephant’s “regard” for Manu exceeds any symbolic order we might try to impose upon the exchange. While power expressed through the tension between affection and

160  Jason Sandhar violence articulates the Gravedigger as a recognizable subject before Old Man, and the “twining trunks” of Emma’s filmic gaze reduce animals to ­objects that serve the spectacular impulses of cosmopolitan conservation, James provides us with no conceptual anchor for this e­ ncounter. We are, like Manu, struck dumb and left without any means to ­orient ourselves in this state of being that presents itself to us through its a­ bsolute strangeness. Manu and the Gravedigger’s encounter suggests, at least from Manu’s perspective, a flash of insight into an absolute alterity that includes both himself and the elephant as brute life—to which Giorgio Agamben alludes in The Open as embodiment unmediated by the law and the law’s requisite investment in language4 —and in which contingent human and animal subjects dwell in a vast, inexpressible horizon of being that exceeds the discursive and biopolitical power networks that surround both the elephant and the boy. To return to my earlier remarks about the ontological and biopolitical instability of human life, Manu’s encounter with the ­Gravedigger as an absolute other also reflects back upon Manu those elements of himself, as a subject of power, that are unknowable by virtue of their contingency. The Gravedigger resides on the other side of a necessarily unstable species boundary, so the very question of how we are to define and understand that boundary—and, by extension, the Gravedigger’s otherness—grows more complex in light of the fact that the e­ mbodied human subject can no more make sense of itself than it can of the nonhuman other that it encounters. Anthropomorphism’s breakdown at this juncture is twofold: First, the Gravedigger is ­radically other as ­racialized/speciesist “Other” to Manu in the Western humanist ­t radition of subject–object relations; second, the elephant’s embodied ­alterity encounters a human self that refuses any stable definition in the first place. The Tusk That Did the Damage refuses to provide us with a ­solution to the conflicts it presents. Manu’s story matters because we bear ­witness to an average person who struggles with, and falls victim to, the confusing and confused web of power networks instantiated by the legacy of ­imperial forestry and its resident commercial interests. ­Elizabeth ­Kuruvilla dismisses Emma’s narrative as “tiresome” and “unnecessary” (n.p.), but Emma’s self-serving idealism forces us to reckon with the disconnect between the cosmopolitan left’s self-celebration of its so-called progressivism and the real damage it commits to those who suffer from the circuits of global capital. The elephant’s violence, coupled with James’s refusal to sentimentalize it through conventional anthropomorphism, explodes out of a world that articulates Emma’s cynical idealism and Manu’s struggles. If we assume that the elephant does not seek vengeance for what we have done to it, how might we read its violence as a response to the world we must share? In a word, how do we respond to what the elephant feels?

Plotting the Elephant Graveyard  161

Notes 1 See Francine Madden and Brian McQuinn, “Conservation’s Blind Spot: The Case for Conflict Transformation in Wildlife Conservation,” Biological Conservation 178, 2014, 98. 2 However, as Shakti Jainsing importantly notes, Piya’s realization does not entirely disentangle her from the discursive circuits of Western ­privilege. Even as her idealized and romantic impressions of Fokir and the other fi ­ shers in the villages give way to the ugly realities of rural life in the ­Sundarbans, Piya never entirely unyokes them from her fantasy of an ­“authentic” ­subaltern that gestures toward an idealistic and universal ­precolonial past (82). 3 “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death,’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’ (Freud 45–46, emphasis in original). 4 Brute life is not to be confused with bare life (zoē), which implies a state of exception before the law.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Open. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford University Press, 2004. Brockington, Daniel, and James Igoe. “Eviction for Conservation: A Global Overview.” Conservation and Society 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 424–70. Brower, Matthew. Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photo­ graphy. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Translated by Brett Buchanan. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. W.W. Norton & Company, 1989. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. Penguin Books India, 2005. Guha, Ramachandra. “The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-­ Humanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World.” The Ecologist 27, no. 1, 1997, pp. 14–20. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Jainsing, Shakti. “Fixity Amid Flux: Aesthetics and Environmentalism in ­A mitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Ariel 46, no. 4, 2015, pp. 63–88. James, Tania. The Tusk That Did the Damage. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Knight, John. “Introduction.” Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective. Edited John Knight. Routledge, 2000, pp. 1–35. Kuruvilla, Elizabeth. “Book Review: The Tusk That Did the Damage.” ­livemint. com. 18 April 2015. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. ­University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Madden, Francine. “Creating Coexistence between Humans and Wildlife: Global Perspectives on Local Efforts to Address Human–Wildlife Conflict.” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 9, no. 4, 2004, pp. 247–57.

162  Jason Sandhar Madden, Francine, and Brian McQuinn. “Conservation’s Blind Spot: The Case for Conflict Transformation in Wildlife Conservation.” Biological Conservation 178, 2014, pp. 97–106. Mirisola, John Dixon. “An Elephant Remembers.” lareviewofbooks.org. 20 March 2015. Mukherjee, Sujit. “Tigers in Fiction: An Aspect of the Colonial Encounter.” Kunapipi 9, no 3 1987, pp. 1–13. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. Roy, Arundhati. “The Doctor and the Saint.” Annihilation of Caste. Edited B.R. Ambedkar. Verso, 2014, pp. 15–180. Steinwand, Jonathan. “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Natural Environment. Edited Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 182–99. Turits, Meredith. “A Strange and Methodical Thing, an Interview with Tania James, Author of The Tusk That Did the Damage.” electricliterature.com. 2 April 2015. Williams, Alex. “Gray Is Their New Black.” Nytimes.com. 22 May 2016.

Section IV

Human–Animal Interzones

9 Beyond Bare Life Revitalizing the Animal in Dany Laferrière’s American Autobiography Rebecca Krasner Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière is a notoriously difficult ­author to describe; he deliberately resists easy classifications of identity, genre, and thematics. It is somewhat surprising, then, that scholarship has to this point eschewed a thread that runs through his works: the constant presence of animals. In keeping with Laferrière’s overarching slipperiness, the status and functions of these animals vary, yet they elicit a recurring set of questions about embodiment, power, and categorization. It is worth beginning with a somewhat lengthy excerpt that both brings together these themes and, for the unfamiliar reader, offers a taste of Laferrière’s distinctive style. People look oddly like birds, tortoises, monkeys, owls. Never eagles. Yes, just one. Just once … An eagle. A real one. Beak and talons, round eye and lofty gaze. I only know a very few contemporaries I’d want to look like. Him, yes. A haughty and carnivorous look. Live up there. Way up there. And sometimes come gliding down among them. Feed on their flesh. Pluck my supper out of the crowd, simple as that. And rise, at sunset, back towards the heights of solitude.1 (Eroshima 95) This passage stages a becoming-animal much more literal than D ­ eleuzian, demonstrating a blurring of the human/animal boundary that is both characteristic of Laferrière’s work and central to my discussion here. The excerpt also speaks, in its image of manhunting, to a logic of predation that informs the biopolitical aspects of Laferrière’s texts, inverting the polarity of man as hunter and animal as hunted, placing man in the barelife role of the killable. At the same time, the passage revels in the ­animal transformation and emphasizes the physically upward momentum ­occasioned by the metamorphosis. It bears noting that, while the final movement of the passage is from human to animal, this ­trajectory in fact stems from an observation of the human as animal, gesturing towards the animality always already contained within the human. Ultimately, the passage suggests that a degree of transcendence may be achieved by embracing this inner animality, and this notion of human animality as a positive affective position is at the heart of my argument here.

166  Rebecca Krasner Before engaging with these questions, it is worth attending to another aspect of this epigraph: its provenance, which highlights the challenges awaiting any critic of Laferrière. The excerpt comes from the 1987 novel ­Eroshima, but it is also included in Kama Sutra Zoo, excerpted and reedited from the original novel and published alongside one new novel and reeditions of two others in the 2016 collection American ­Mythologies. This process of rewriting and republishing is not unique to Eroshima: indeed, fifteen years into his career, Laferrière stopped writing in 2000 in order to “revisit” his earlier novels, six of which were significantly altered (Académie française). Laferrière’s revisions of his novels render his corpus unstable, but this is only one of several factors that make Laferrière critically c­ hallenging. Laferrière’s style relies on irony, humor, and the ­mobilization of ­stereotypes, as has been apparent since he first rocketed onto the l­iterary scene with 1985’s How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. The novel’s provocative title, and its unapologetic depictions of sex ­between black men and white women, created a media frenzy that both lauded and condemned Laferrière, and this type of ­dichotomous ­reaction from public and critics alike has remained throughout his ­career. If taken too literally Laferrière’s works come across as entertaining but ­apolitical; certain Haitian intellectuals have attacked his perceived ­refusal to engage with the urgent political realities facing his country of origin. 2 While I contest the notion that Laferrière’s texts are apolitical, or alienated, or anti-feminist, 3 equally problematic is the opposite tendency to take too seriously Laferrière’s social and political commentary and ascribe to his works a specific ideology—even though Laferrière has insisted that he does not wish to be associated with any such viewpoint. This self-commentary by the author highlights the final complication I want to mention. As David Homel, Laferrière’s longtime translator, has noted, Laferrière “gives students of authorial intention a giant headache” (8), and this is true both within and without the texts. On a textual level, Laferrière’s work consists mainly of autobiographically inspired fiction, and his first-person narrators often discuss his texts. In addition, the ­fictional texts are surrounded by an endlessly proliferating, self-generated paratext, as Laferrière gives innumerable interviews. In these, as in his novels, he consistently refuses the labels of francophone author, Haitian author, writer of exile, black author, and so forth, despite being a Haitian political exile who writes in French and pays great attention to race. Attending to the controversies and complications surrounding Laferrière is essential here for two primary reasons. First, the impossibility of pinning down Laferrière’s stance on any of the obvious issues in his works, coupled with the overdetermined lenses through which Haitian literature is often studied (Ménard 8–9), has meant that much Laferrière scholarship privileges a limited set of thematics, as the ­author ­himself has lamented (Mathis-Moser 9). This may be why so many critics have

Beyond Bare Life  167 brushed up against the question of the animal in his texts ­without ever addressing it. Second, these difficulties inform my ­decision to consider Laferrière’s corpus as a whole: given his rewritings, a  chronological ­division between texts is impractical, and the a­ mbiguities and ­contradictions from one work to another mean that isolating any ­specific text is ­potentially misleading. While critics often consider ­Laferrière’s ­“American autobiography” as a set of ten novels, Laferrière himself views his entire corpus of novels, essays, and interviews as a single work (Académie française). I am opting for a middle ground: my analysis relies on the book-length works, but I deliberately eschew the interviews—not least to avoid the vexed question of the (dis)continuity between ­Laferrière and his narrators. My reading unabashedly flits between texts, referring frequently to several and intermittently others, as drawing on a constellation of texts is appropriate to what Ursula Mathis-Moser has described in Deleuzoguattarian terms as the “rhizomatic character of [Laferrière’s] work” (8). My goal is to highlight a network of references to and interactions with ­animals that, I argue, serve to dehierarchize the human/animal ­relationship without assimilating the animal to the human. Ultimately, I  suggest, the reascription of value to the animal allows for a parallel ­reclamation of the animality of the human, breaking with the Western philosophical tradition that maintains the superiority of the “human” mind to the “animal” body, and with the attendant firm distinction ­between zoe and bios. In revaluing the physical, Laferrière’s work ­restores the possibility of a generative subject position even, or perhaps especially, from a state of bare life.

Allegorical Animals In his excellent analysis of Disgrace, Philip Armstrong describes J.M. ­ oetzee’s animal figures as progressing from “dead metaphors,” ­deployed C only for their symbolic value, to real, corporeal entities (185). But are metaphors dead? Allegorical figures do relegate the animal to a nonsubjective, non-individuated position, yet the preponderance of meaning generated by animal figures suggests a form of power. Mel Chen has elaborated the useful a notion of “animacy” that allows for d ­ isruptions of ontologically predetermined ideas of what it means to act, and who or what may do so. As Chen highlights, animacy—which regroups concepts of “agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness” and “sentience … ­faciality, speech, and action upon something else” (2, 229)—often ­underpins hegemonic orderings of the world. Animacy ­hierarchies can be used to police boundaries, as they are “about which things can or cannot affect—or be affected by—which other things” and thus “political, shaped by what or who counts as human, and what or who does not” (30). Chen’s work focuses on the slippages of animacy hierarchies, places

168  Rebecca Krasner where the dominant ordering breaks down and invests the nonhuman with animacy. I want to propose here that Laferrière’s animal allegories constitute such a slippage as the textual value of the animal-as-figure lies in its capacity to affect both reader and narrator, and to animate varying configurations of power. This is especially true of Laferrière’s recurrent usage of animal allegories to describe various moments in the Haitian political situation; these figures establish terms that render oppressive power structures legible, and also suggest ways in which those structures might be undermined. Power dynamics are frequently considered through the language of predation with the enforcers of the Duvalier dictatorships cast as predators and the Haitian population at large as their prey. In Dining with the Dictator, the adolescent Laferrière/narrator is on the run after witnessing his friend Gégé’s castration of a tonton macoute; the narrator spends most of the novel holed up in a house full of young, sexually charged women while (he believes) the government tries to track him down. Dining, the first of Laferrière’s novels to directly discuss the Haitian political situation, describes Papa Doc’s thugs as marsouins, which translates to “porpoises” but, in the context, is better rendered as the more evocative “mereswine” or “sea-pigs,” particularly as the tontons macoutes are also referred to as “hogs” (122). While “porpoises” might not connote predation to all r­ eaders, the text emphasizes their aggressive character: “Everyone is afraid of the mereswine. The little mereswine are afraid of the big ones. And the big ones of the bigger. Mereswine eat each other, but first they eat those who aren’t mereswine” (122). It bears noting not only that this p ­ assage depicts violence through an animal metaphor, but that this ­metaphor also serves to naturalize the political situation: while such behavior by humans would be shocking, it fits neatly into the ways in which we are used to thinking about animals—it is, after all, a dogeat-dog world. Although the narrator ultimately discovers that Gégé has in fact faked the entire event, he nonetheless spends several days believing he is being hunted by government agents. The consistent depiction of the tontons macoutes as predatory animals highlights the fact that his belief is rational in this political context. The trope of governmental beastliness is extended in the later The Cry of the Mad Birds, which recounts Laferrière’s/the narrator’s last night in Haiti before he flees to Canada, once again believing—and now ­legitimately—that he is on a government hit list after his friend and ­fellow journalist is assassinated. There has been a regime change between the two texts: Papa Doc is still in power in Dining, while he has been ­succeeded by his son in The Cry. The later text, however, makes explicit the continuity of the two Duvalier governments: the first evocation of the “savage beasts” (49) is in reference to the first Duvalier regime, while subsequent references describe Baby Doc’s enforcers as “leopards” and “jackals” (59, 257). Both regimes thus rely on a carnivorous, predatory

Beyond Bare Life  169 logic that Grégoire Chamayou has described as “cynegetic power”; ­rejecting a beneficent, pastoral politics, this schema depends quite ­literally on the hunting of men, their tracking, c­ onfinement, ­exclusion, or putting to death, to maintain the tyranny of the state (14–18). Remarkably, Laferrière often uses animal imagery to describe government, but rarely to describe its prey; this is significant if we ­consider, with ­ aradoxical, as the confirmaChamayou, that cynegetic power is always p tion of the sovereign’s social supremacy depends on its ability to treat as animals those it knows to not be animals (2). In this sense, Laferrière’s non-animalization of the Duvaliers’ victims highlights the distance that cynegetic power seeks to erase “not theoretically but p ­ ractically” (Chamayou 2) between hunted human and animal; at the same time, it erases theoretically if not practically the distance between predatory human and animal. Laferrière’s inversion of the human–­animal conflation performed by cynegetic power has three significant e­ ffects. First, it confounds the exclusionary logic that allows for the ­killing of certain persons or groups of persons by means of their ­association to the animal. Second, it dehumanizes the perpetrators rather than the ­victims of state terror, which ensures the ­reader’s grasp of, and affective ­response to, the political situation. Third, this ­inversion ­gestures towards a ­weakness of cynegetic power: namely, that “the hunting relationship is always susceptible to a reversal of positions. Prey sometimes band together to become hunters in their turn” (Chamayou 3). Such reversals will be the subject of the last part of this section, but first it is worth considering some other ways in which biopolitical power is animated by way of animal figures. The logic of predation established in Dining and The Cry is both continued and disrupted in The Enigma of the Return, which is thematically appropriate inasmuch as The Enigma hinges on the narrator’s attempt to reconnect with a place and a history to which he both does and does not belong. This 2009 novel is something of a “counterpart narrative” to The Cry (Parker 73): the earlier text stages the narrator’s departure from Haiti and closes with the phone call announcing his father’s death, while the later novel opens with the same phone call and stages his ­return. After such a prolonged absence from his country of origin, the narrator feels disconnected from the sociopolitical landscape. The Duvalier era is distant, yet he does not belong to the new era, either. As in the previous texts, animal allegories help to animate and concretize both situations despite the disjuncture caused by exile, highlighting both the continuities and the distinctions between the Duvalier dictatorship and the democratic Lavalas government.4 The tontons macoutes of the Duvalier era are no longer mereswine or jackals, but now crocodiles. This image maintains the idea of predation, yet it also introduces a new dimension: the reptilian nature of the “crocodile in dark glasses” (93) ascribes it to a different order than the mammalian porpoise or leopard,

170  Rebecca Krasner both of which have, in the cultural imaginary, more positive associations than the ­crocodile, which connotes not only predation but the reptilian coldness of a patient attacker who may hide in plain sight or just ­below the ­surface of things. Indeed, the first reference to the “crocodiles” ­immediately follows the narrator’s memory of the period preceding his exile, during which he and his fellow anti-establishment journalists could only discuss the political situation through veiled references for fear of being denounced by government informants (93–94).5 As before, the association of the political regime with a predatory animal immediately typifies it in the mind of both reader and narrator; as we are accustomed to allegorical readings of animals, the animal as signifier has a particular evocative density, and these animals, while metaphorical, are imbued with animacy in their ability to act upon both reader and text, and to enliven their sociopolitical context. Although the Lavalas regime, in power when The Enigma narrator returns to Haiti, is similarly animated by an animal allegory, this continuity is complicated by the fact the animals in play have changed: A swarm of little black and yellow scooters like bees searching for pollen are circling Saint-Pierre square. So it’s the end of the era of the crocodiles in dark glasses of Papa Doc. New barbarians are in town (169). The passage maintains certain connections—characterization as nonmammalian animals, and as barbaric—but replaces the self-­interested, singular crocodiles and mereswine with a swarm of insects. The text is unclear as to whether these insect hordes are official government ­representatives or simply those who have seized power, but what ­matters here is the choice of insect signifiers. The bee could theoretically ­represent a positive shift towards industriousness and productivity; in the context, however, this is clearly not the case. Given that these ­ barbarians,” we must assume that their search for resources is bees are “ ­exploitative rather than productive. Moreover, the depiction of a group working together indicates that the chaotic violence of the Duvalier era has been replaced by a more organized system. In the subsequent reference, bees have become locusts, evoking the eighth biblical plague and the calamitous consumption locusts portend in both mythology and the real world. Taken together, the bees and locusts speak to the ­systematic and devastating exploitation of resources typical of contemporary ­neoliberalism. It bears noting that communal insects have long been considered templates for the idea of human colonization (Brown, xiv). At this nexus of colony, exploitation, and consumption, it is difficult to read these insect allegories otherwise than as a subtle but evocative critique of

Beyond Bare Life  171 neocolonial capitalist practices. Where the Duvalier regimes deliberately preyed upon their populations, the new biopolitical order is one in which the dominant classes simply consume all available resources, leaving the poor to “writhe like sturgeons out of water…” (171). Both systems reduce the population at large to an Agambenian state of bare life, the first by putting to death and the latter by leaving to die, a point I will return to later. Nonetheless, just as Laferrière’s predator ­metaphors allowed for a certain inversion of the cynegetic power structure, the insect figures also represent a reversal of the logic according to which they are most often deployed. As Christopher Hollingsworth notes, the othering of populations—as preparation for exclusion, ­persecution, and genocide—has often used instrumentalized metaphors that dehumanize groups by categorizing them as lice, cockroaches, or other pernicious insects (262–66). In Laferrière’s usage, however, it is once again not the oppressed but the oppressor who is dehumanized by these metaphors, suggesting that this polarity is unstable, and that being in a state of bare life need not imply a lack of agency—or, better, of animacy. Indeed, while zoe is generally understood as reductive, it also constitutes the base condition for the continuation of life in deathly conditions, the innermost core resource around which life may retrench itself while waiting to live better. Drawing on Derrida’s articulation of the dual understanding of “survivance” as not only a living-on but also a more-than-living or overlife, Bonnie Honig has described this simultaneous striving for both continued aliveness and something greater than simple aliveness in terms of “mere life” and “more life” (21). Honig ­underscores in her discussion the notion that the demands of mere life for its own continuation need not be mutually exclusive with the drive for something more, for the overlife beyond that simple continuation. This potential simultaneity of mere and more life helps to explain the overturning of cynegetic polarity in Laferrière: the hunted do not ­always simply cling to life but in fact attain more life by turning around, ­reversing the direction of the manhunt. As such, the needs of mere life are not incompatible with, but may in fact animate, a striving towards more life. In Laferrière, this role reversal is most fully realized in terms of sexual politics. Much ink has been spilt debating sexuality in Laferrière’s works, but I wish to briefly discuss sexuality here because the animal metaphors that often describe sexual relationships have not been considered within the broader logics of animality that run throughout Laferrière’s corpus. In Dining, we find an instance in which the polarity of roles is inverted specifically within the context of sexual relationships between governmental agents and subjects. As the narrator hides out at the home of several young Haitian women, waiting for the (nonexistent) heat to die down, he becomes privy to their relationships with a group of tontons macoutes. Here, the women are the “tigresses” who hunt down powerful men; although the men remain alive, the women destroy the

172  Rebecca Krasner violent, virile image that the tontons macoutes seek to project, reducing them to the roles of chauffeur and bankroller, and deliberately making them jealous in order to consolidate power. The men cease entirely to be hunters: as Miki, one of the women, puts it: “[Frank] won’t hurt a fly unless I ask him” (152). The women self-identify as predators, in need of “fresh meat” (209), while the men become harmless lapdogs. The narrator notes this reversal of power: “I’m … afraid of Frank. You just have to see his face. A real killer. A ferocious mereswine. And yet, he’s Pasqualine’s dog” (257). Dining clearly depicts the regime in terms of cynegetic power, but it also stages the reversal of the subject positions established by that power. In doing so, it demonstrates not only the political power of sexuality but more significantly the inherent reversibility of cynegetic logic. Moreover, by deploying sexuality as a means of access to power and overlife, Laferrière again emphasizes the generative potential of bare life. Miki and Pasqualine may be pure body—functioning on a decidedly animal level—but therein lies their ability to affect the other and lay claim to their subjecticity.

Living with Animals While the animal figures we have examined animate economies of power and affect in Laferrière’s texts, such metaphors also limit the role of ­animals themselves by relegating them to the order of the signifier, privileging their evocative density rather than their embodied life. Specifically, metaphors rely on the weight of the animal or a particular ­category of animal as a unified concept, rather than on animals as distinct and individuated beings. However, Laferrière’s texts contain many such individual animals, and it is to these actual animals that I now want to turn. Laferrière emphasizes the validity of animals as unique subjects, worthy of textual space and attention, and capable of accessing knowledge, acting on their own behalf, and affecting humans. As we have seen, Laferrière uses metaphorical insects to depict human behaviors, but he also devotes considerable attention to insects themselves: in particular, ants are the subject of sustained observations. In I am Tired, Laferrière revisits the life events portrayed in his previous works as he tries to explain his decision to stop writing.6 Discussing his childhood years in the care of his grandmother in Petit-Goâve, he writes: “I learned to observe, people and animals alike … I spent my precious time watching the ants live and trying to understand their code of conduct. From time to time, I looked up to watch the movement of people in the street” (197). This reflection recalls several passages, most notably in the childhood-focused text An Aroma of Coffee, in which the narrator observes the behaviors of different types of ants, watches them consume other bugs, and wonders whether they have names—that most human of identifiers (22, 56, 28); he also remarks upon the ways in which human behavior resembles that of the insects (38, 56). Critics

Beyond Bare Life  173 have tended to read these moments as political allegories,7 but while such interpretations have their merits, they necessarily “omit consideration of the ­material impact of non-human animals, and of the vexed question of their potential for agency” (Armstrong 101). And this is a consideration that Laferrière’s work requires. The ants are not significant only insofar as they are recuperable into an anthropocentric system of meaning; rather, the textual attention allotted to them and the suggestion that they have their own codes of behavior different from, but no less of interest than, the human destabilize the hierarchical relationship between man and animal. Animals’ subordinate position in the animacy hierarchy is also called into question by A Drifting Year, the fictionalized account of Laferrière’s first year in Montreal, in which the narrator develops a relationship with a mouse that lives in his apartment. Cast together by chance, animal and human develop a mutual complicity and understanding: when the weather is bad and the narrator of ill humor, the mouse knows “that she must not speak/ a word/ to [him] on any pretext” (114). The mouse’s comprehension of human emotion, as well as Laferrière’s reference to linguistic interaction, establishes the mouse’s validity as an interlocutor. The equivalency of human and animal is reinforced when, after the narrator’s Canadian girlfriend and the mouse are frightened by one another, he spends equal time comforting them both (134), emphasizing his equal emotional investment in each relationship. Importantly, this scene also suggests that as a non-Western subject, the narrator respects, and understands his imbrication in, animal life in a way that the white, Canadian girlfriend does not. Indeed, when the mouse dies, the narrator explicitly remarks on their shared animality: The fly, gone. The mouse, dead. I am thus the last representative of the animal kingdom… (168) This final remark confirms what the narrator’s relationship with her has always suggested: a common language or species is not necessary for mutual respect and complicity. From insect to rodent to human, the shared continuum of animality unites, while the reciprocal affective ­relationship between human and animal demonstrates their shared awareness of, and ability to act upon, one another.

Suffering and Sympathy In Dining and The Cry, Laferrière draws attention to a critical element of this shared animality: the capacity for suffering. Both anti-speciesist and anti-racist logics have long proposed that the capacity for suffering

174  Rebecca Krasner be the essential criterion in determining which beings deserve rights (Spiegel 31–32); suffering’s ethical counterpart, sympathy, has similarly been mobilized to garner support for both animal and human rights. The sympathetic relationship to animals in Laferrière is particular inasmuch as it eschews the intellectual in favor of the affective: rather than suggesting that one ought to feel sympathy for animals because they can, like us, suffer, Laferrière confronts the reader and narrator with a graphic display of animal suffering. This specificity is significant because it does not constitute an appeal to reason, which would subordinate the animal to an anthropocentric system of ethics: humans should feel sympathy for animals because of their similarity to us, and this sympathy further confirms the supremacy of the human whose humanity is reinforced through the sympathetic relationship. Intellectual sympathy relies on the de-othering of the animal and on the human’s ability to animate the sympathetic relationship. In Laferrière, however, we see that animals can both retain their difference and also generate an affective response in humans. This animal-animated model for sympathy echoes the “sympathetic imagination” that Armstrong suggests via Coetzee: rather than relying on intellectual abstraction, this sympathy hinges on a direct identification of humans with animals—not via similarity, but instead underpinned by the affective knowledge of a shared embodied aliveness (222). This type of sympathy is most evident in Dining, which contains perhaps the only unprovoked instance of animal cruelty to be found in ­Laferrière’s corpus. The narrator accompanies a hooligan friend, Gégé, as he breaks into their school to steal the next day’s algebra exam; in order to incapacitate the school’s guard dog, Gégé offers him a meatball laced with shards of glass. To the narrator’s objections, Gégé ­responds that if the dog does not want to die, he should simply not eat the meatball, suggesting that the dog’s inability to rationally respond to the s­ ituation means he deserves what he gets. The narrator witnesses the dog’s suffering and death: “Lying on his back, his eyes wide open. ­Magnificent black eyes. Very bright. His belly was trembling slightly. You can see a lot of things in two seconds. Death, for example. Gégé didn’t even come for the algebra test the next day” (62). It is possible to read this scene as political allegory, but the passage itself, through its attention to detail, forces the reader to visualize the dog’s body, which is both in an uncannily human posture and unmistakably not human. The dog may be a figure, but he is also a literal dog. As the narrator says of his observation of a different dog in The Cry, I’ve always been afraid of passing next to suffering without noticing it. As much as words about misery (political discourse in general) leave me cold, misery itself touches me deeply … But I’m not only interested in human suffering. The private life of animals interests me too. (176)

Beyond Bare Life  175 The narrator’s remarks in the later text support a non-allegorical reading of the earlier; they also emphasize the fact that the sympathetic mechanism at play here does not rely on an assimilation of the animal to the human. The unknowability of animals’ private lives does not establish a hierarchical divide between human and animal. Rather, even in their otherness, animals can act upon humans. The attention to bodily detail in the death of the guard dog and the explicit acknowledgment of sympathy despite difference in the second passage serve to underscore the dehierarchizing shared condition of being materially alive in the world.

Opacity and Agency The dehierarchizing effect of sympathy is extended by Laferrière’s disruption of strategies that have been used to enforce the human/animal divide. I will focus here on three: observation, language, and access to knowledge. The notion of being looked at by animals can scarcely be raised without summoning the specter of Derrida, even if revisiting the reference feels a bit like beating a dead horse (cat?). What bears mentioning here, however, is not what Derrida’s discussion of his cat does, but rather what it fails to do: the essay has been critiqued for its ironic effacement of the cat itself, subsumed as it is into Derrida’s interrogation of the category of the animal. The human once again becomes the subject, reestablishing at least to a degree the hierarchy of man as observer and animal as observed, and reiterating the role of the animal as the “abyssal limit” of humanity. Laferrière’s animal gazes, however, refuse to be reassimilated into a human point of view. Though the narrator notices he is being watched, he simply relates the encounters and occasionally wonders what the ­animals see in looking at him. Yet it is precisely in their treatment as ­unremarkable that these encounters are significant, as the narrator’s lack of perturbation at being the object of an animal gaze affirms his perception of the animal’s validity as subject. Theoretical elaborations conceive of the gaze as a power structure establishing viewer as subject and viewed as object, but the subject position of the gazer is not equally available to all. Laferrière’s animal observers, however, are clearly a­ ttributed the status of subject. Where Derrida’s cat watches him “just to see” (2002, 372), Laferrière’s animals are seen as active, thoughtful observers. Down among the Dead Men, the magical-realist account of a fictional return to Haiti, provides a particularly striking example. Wandering the streets at night, the narrator encounters a cow: “What is a cow doing at this hour of the night, in the middle of the city? There she is, watching me … What is going through her head? How does she see me?” (241) The cow is not simply seeing the narrator but is ­watching him, which implies an intentionality behind the gaze. Moreover, the cow is assumed to have an interiority: the narrator wonders about her thoughts and her perception

176  Rebecca Krasner of him, imagining that she interprets and engages with what she sees rather than simply witnessing it. Her ­interiority ­remains inaccessible to the narrator, who does not attribute to the cow a specific point of view but nonetheless assumes that she has one; this opacity affirms the cow’s status as an animal subject whose otherness, unlike that of Derrida’s cat, is not simply a pretext for an interrogation of the human or a screen onto which anthropocentric anxieties may be projected. Although the narrator’s normalization of objectification by the animal confirms the  animal’s ability to occupy a subject position normally reserved to the human, the passage also forestalls a conflation of the two. After her encounter with the narrator, the cow goes on her way: “Finally, the ­enormous mass of meat decides to move” (241–42). Referring to the cow as “meat” reminds the reader in no uncertain terms that the cow is not only animal but a food animal, once again suggesting the compatibility of bare life and subjectivity, of mere life and more life. Much like the subject–object positions implied by the gaze, language is often used to police the barrier between actor and acted upon; ­although developments in cognitive and zoological sciences have troubled the ­issue of animal language, the linguistic boundary has historically been, and largely remains, a significant marker between human and animal. In Laferrière’s work, however, this delimitation is not only blurred but inverted. The first example comes from Diary of a Writer in Pajamas, a series of 182 pieces of advice for aspiring writers. In entry 161, “Do you speak cat?” the author advises writers to spend a day observing a cat, trying to understand him, and even imitating his movements. The cat, he says, is indignant that not everyone speaks his language: for him, it is universal. This inability creates a lack on the part of the writer: “You don’t speak cat? You’re in the wrong, because that would have made you a better writer” (290). The cat’s belief that his own ­language is universal parodically inverts the anthropologocentric belief that ­human communication is the only form of language possible, while the notion that the writer would do well to mimic the cat’s gestures and learn his language undermines both the idea of human superiority and the ­distinction ­between human and animal. Similarly, in The Charm of Endless ­Afternoons, a duck matriarch quacks at the narrator’s grandmother, Da, so insistently as to imply that she wishes to communicate something important, as the narrator points out. In response Da tells him, “…she knows the date of my death, so every morning, she repeats it to me in the hopes that one day I’ll be able to understand her language” (56). Once again, it is the frustrated animal who is confronted by human linguistic ineptitude. To be certain, these examples are tongue in cheek. Yet both gesture towards the idea of a knowledge possessed by animals that is outside human understanding. The association between animals and knowledge of death is particularly noteworthy, as Laferrière’s work is obsessed with

Beyond Bare Life  177 the “monde invisible,” the invisible world of death, dream, and divinity that is rejected by Western epistemologies but is, in vodou ­tradition, present enough to bleed into daily life. Largely unknowable to humans, this invisible world seems more accessible to animals. Also in The Charm, a friend of Da’s explains that his horse is able to detect spirits: on his way to a neighboring town, he encounters a group of farmers who appear ­human, but his horse’s nose is not fooled. As he says, “You can lie to us, to us humans, but it’s always hard to fool an animal, Da” (171). This ability to identify deception contests the Lacanian distinction between animal and human as predicated on man’s unique ability to be duplicitous (Derrida, 2003, 123), not by suggesting the opposite but by emphasizing the ability to identify disingenuousness rather than perform it. Elsewhere in the same text, the same horse refuses to travel and throws its rider, forcing him to return home—and likely saving him from being arrested in a roundup of all the local men by the tontons macoutes—and the narrator is warned of impending danger by the call of a bird. The animals’ ability to detect deception and predict danger resembles what we might commonly think of as a “sixth sense,” an intuitive or instinctual awareness of the interconnectedness of things and disturbances in the force. Laferrière’s valorization of such extra-rational intelligence disrupts the Western philosophical canonization of man as the rational, thinking animal; it opens the door to what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have referred to as “alternative knowledges and knowledge-systems”—ways of understanding the world not against, but outside of, Northern modes of thinking (77–78).

Human(s and) Animals: Reclaiming the Body As we have seen, the rhizomatic consideration of the animal that s­ ubtends Laferrière’s works mobilizes ways of thinking with animals, thinking about animals, and animals’ thinking that, when taken together, serve to restore value to the animal by troubling the strategies that affirm the hierarchical division between man and beast. This redemption of the animal sets the stage for an analogous redemption of man’s ­animality: as Marjorie Spiegel has pointed out, “in our society, comparison to an animal has become a slur,” but the efficacy of a­ nimal-based insults ­depends on our belief in the animal’s inferiority. Indeed, the power of injurious language relies on preexisting hierarchies; animal comparisons dehumanize by effectively shifting their target to a lower rung on the animacy ladder (Chen 40). Through his disruption of an ordering that maintains animals’ inferiority, Laferrière evacuates the negative connotation of proximity to the animal, setting the stage for a reclamation of the human’s abandoned animality—that is to say in this context, the body and its needs and passions (Armstrong 7). Writing on the reclamation of slurs, Chen discusses how such terms and ideas may “cast

178  Rebecca Krasner off” their dehumanizing connotations and become “reanimated” (57, emphasis original). Having discussed how Laferrière casts off the dehumanizing aspect of animality, it is with the reanimation of the animal in the human that I now want to conclude. The question of what separates the human—and especially the ­racialized, colonized, or otherwise othered human—from the animal is explicitly raised multiple times in Laferrière’s work, but such interrogations are overshadowed by indications that, for better and for worse, ­animal and human are inextricably entwined. Haitian human and ­animal populations are victimized by both political powers and Western ideologies: they are caught up in a cycle of deprivation and violence in which each victim in turns abuses whomever is weaker than they “up to the last one who’ll kick the dog” (The Charm 106). They are both ­exploited as commodities, as in the tannery in How to Make Love where black and animal bodies are exploited for profit. And they are both robbed of individuality by authoritarian and humanitarian logics alike, which view them only as groups: “…no one ever talks about a particular tiger. We talk about the tiger. It’s the same for Blacks. We talk about the Blacks. It’s a species. There’s no individual” (How to Make Love 150). Yet this proximity to the animal is not only negative. Freida Ekotto has shown how Laferrière plays upon the stereotype of the black man’s animal sexuality to “stand the dehumanizing category of the Nègre on its head” (77); this undoing of categorical reasoning erodes the ontological category of the Black upon which the construction of ­W hiteness ­relies, much as undermining the category of the animal also ­deconstructs the human. I would suggest that the excessive, animal, “carnivorous” ­sexuality of How to Make Love also has two additional effects: first, it represents emancipation from the biopolitical order in which, under Papa Doc, extramarital sex was heavily policed (Fatigué 90), as well as from the neoliberal biopolitics of the developed world that views black ­bodies as producers of expropriated labor rather than individual ­pleasure. ­Second, the focus on the “lower” bodily function of ­sexuality—not eroticism or romance—constitutes a rejection of the Western epistemological tradition that has canonized an ideal of civilization based on the privileging of the mind over the body, a repression of the “primary instincts” (Dining 202–03). And indeed, Laferrière’s corpus is in many ways the story of an ­attempt to overcome the loss of the body: the loss of the narrator’s own bodily connection to his country of birth, the loss of the bodies of his father and other exilés, and the more general loss of the “devaluation of the body at the expense of an abstract notion of intellectual transcendence,” which Armstrong has described as the “disease of modern humanity” (9). ­ aferrière’s works, While corporeality is a recurrent theme throughout L it is most fully explored in The Enigma. Upon returning to Haiti for the first time, the narrator is aware that the physical comfort he enjoys as a

Beyond Bare Life  179 successful intellectual residing in the Global North constitutes a rupture within his narrative: how can he relate to the population of a country where the needs of the body are constantly and oppressively lived? It is not until he is stricken with a severe case of diarrhea that this gap begins to close. In the comically, but not ironically, titled chapter “In Praise of Diarrhea,” the narrator suffers the material consequences of his return from exile when a glass of fruit juice purchased from a street vendor wreaks havoc on his digestive system. Yet rather than lamenting his situation or reading it as a sign that he is truly no longer Haitian, he sees this bodily effect as his “only implication/ in Haitian reality” (178). His abjection results in a clearer sense of self rather than desubjectivation. Although this positive outcome of abjection differs drastically from Kristeva’s theorization of the trauma of the abject encounter, two aspects of Kristeva’s explication remain valuable here: first, that one of the boundaries established through the exclusion of the abject is the one between human and animal (12–13), and second, that the confrontation with the abject is traumatic because it forcibly reminds the subject of their own materiality. In Laferrière’s narrative, abjection undermines the species divide, asserting the animality within the human and setting the stage for a further conflation that occurs over the course of The Enigma. The narrator is made acutely aware of the facticity of his own body, but this experience of his own existence as zoe is affirming, allowing him to recover a lost element of his overlife. Unburying his materiality renders the narrator more connected to himself and his past, reinscribing his body into the landscape from which it has been exiled. His father’s body, however, is unrecoverable. The narrator’s return to Haiti is, in a sense, “a funeral without a body,” but the father’s p ­ hysical presence was lost to exile long before his death (262). He feels so far ­removed that when the narrator examines the only photo he has of his father, what he notices most is a hen who also appears in the photo: “a hen is so alive that she moves even in a photo. Next to her, everything seems dead” (36). The sheer material vivacity of the animal body allows her presence to reinforce the father’s absence. However, this hen anticipates ­another that appears at the end of the text, when the narrator inadvertently arrives at a cemetery and finally realizes that his journey has always been a symbolic funeral. Although the father’s body is absent, the text has already suggested the possibility of the living animal body standing in for that of the missing, as the narrator’s mother has named the lizards in her garden for her vanished siblings (203). Similarly, the narrator is given a black hen resembling the one he has always associated with his father, and the concreteness of her animal body anchors the abstracted human. As much as a reinvestment in his own animality is essential to the narrator’s ability to reestablish continuity between his present self and the country of his past, the restitution of the father’s embodied self—represented here by a literal animal—is necessary if the narrator is to make sense of his death.

180  Rebecca Krasner

“La frontière entre les hommes et les animaux semble bien mince” Laferrière’s work is complicated, ambivalent, and at times contradictory, yet there are gestures it consistently makes. One of these is the p ­ erpetual blurring and destruction of boundaries and distinctions—­between the visible and invisible worlds, between life and death, ­between races, and between man and animal. As J. Michael Dash puts it, “[i]n his own manic way, Laferrière sets out to defy the imposition of any binary s­ ystem of ­interpreting culture” (159). In this sense, Laferrière’s exploration of ­animals and animality is in keeping with his predominant ­sensibility; rather than contesting the conflation of animals and subjugated populations, he embraces the porosity of the boundary while ­simultaneously rewriting the metanarrative of animality such that it loses its ­capacity to sustain racist or colonialist discourses. While he ­acknowledges the ­suffering and disenfranchisement that result from the fact that a ­majority of Haitians are forced into a bare life existence, Laferrière also suggests that living as zoe rather than bios is not exclusively negative, as it inhibits the loss of the body and the valuing of the rational human over the human animal. In her work on posthumanism, Rosi Braidotti emphasizes the need to recapture the positive aspect of zoe as “the generative power that flows across all species” (529). In situating vigor and vitality at the simultaneously fragile site of the oppressed body, Laferrière frustrates two interpretative vistas: on the one hand, racist tropes of the strong, “resilient” Black body, and on the other, articulations of a kinship or solidarity rooted in the fragility of the body.8 Instead, it is a universalizing and lifeaffirming force such as Braidotti describes, a power shared by all embodied beings, that Laferrière’s ­portrait of animality valorizes; without effacing the differences between animals, human and non, this understanding of zoe nonetheless ­establishes material aliveness as the most significant characteristic in defining both man and animal, and a locus of strength both in and instead of vulnerability. In Laferrière’s universe, mere life is not only not ­opposed to more life but in fact one of its necessary conditions. ­Laferrière’s ­reclamation of the positive valances of zoe forestalls a view of Haitian destitution as exclusively tragic and thus inhibits a narrative that would reconsecrate the value system of the Global North. In celebrating the ­vitality of, and engendered by proximity to, the animal, ­Laferrière ­affirms that “the Haitian word is not only a lamentation” (cited in Nicolas 196).

Notes 1 Many of Laferrière’s texts have been translated into English, thanks largely to the excellent work of David Homel; however, in the interest of both consistency and a privileging of the literal over the literary, all translations are my own. I have, however, adopted Homel’s English titles when available.

Beyond Bare Life  181 2 See Tontongi. 3 See Saint-Martin. 4 While the new political regime is not specifically named, context allows the reader to identify the period in question. 5 I personally am inclined to also read this moment as Laferrière’s pushing back against critics who claim he is apolitical, suggesting that they are ­simply not reading his works closely enough. 6 Laferrière, quite obviously, failed to remain in retirement. 7 See Hardwick, Ndiaye. 8 See Pick, especially “Creaturely Bodies.”

Works Cited Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Routledge, 2008. Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA 124.2, March 2009, pp. 526–32. Jstor: doi:10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.526. Brown, Eric C. editor. Insect Poetics. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. “Introduction.” In Brown, pp. ix–xxiii. Chamayou, Grégoire. Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton University Press, 2012. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, 2012. “Dany Laferrière.” Académie française, 2013, www.academie-francaise.fr/ les-immortels/dany-laferriere#. Accessed 3 April 2016. Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. Macmillan, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2, Winter 2002, pp. 369–418. Jstor, doi:10.1086/449046. ———. “And Say the Animal Responded.” Translated by David Wills. In ­Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Edited by Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 121–46. Ekotto, Freida. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic. Lexington Books, 2011. Hardwick, Louise. Childhood, Autobiography, and the Francophone Caribbean. Liverpool University Press, 2013. Hollingsworth, Christopher. “The Force of the Entomological Other: Insects as Instruments of Intolerant Thought and Oppressive Action.” In Brown, pp. 262–77. Homel, David. “Introduction.” In How to Make Love to a Negro [without Getting Tired], translated by David Homel, Coach House, 1987, pp. 7–10. Honig, Bonnie. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton ­University Press, 2009. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, ­Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982. Laferrière, Dany. Chronique de la dérive douce [A Drifting Year]. Grasset/Livre de Poche, 2012.

182  Rebecca Krasner ———. Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer [How to Make Love to a Negro {without Getting Tired}]. 2015 edition. In Mythologies Américaines, pp. 39–154. ———. Eroshima. 2nd ed. TYPO, 1998. ———. Je suis fatigué [I am Tired]. 2nd ed. TYPO, 2005. ———. Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama [Diary of a Writer in Pajamas]. ­Grasset/Livre de poche, 2013. ———. Le Charme des après-midi sans fin [The Charm of Endless Afternoons]. Zulma, 2016. ———. Le Cri des oiseaux fous [The Cry of the Mad Birds]. Zulma, 2015. ———. L’Enigme du retour [The Enigma of the Return]. Grasset/Livre de Poche, 2009. ———. Le Goût des jeunes filles [Dining with the Dictator]. 2nd ed. Gallimard Folio, 2005. ———. Le Zoo Kama-sutra [Kama Sutra Zoo]. In Mythologies américaines, pp. 503–57. ———. L’Odeur du café [An Aroma of Coffee]. 2nd ed. Le Serpent à Plumes, 2011. ———. Mythologies américaines. Grasset, 2016. ———. Pays sans chapeau [Down among the Dead Men]. 3rd ed., Privat/Le Rocher, 2007. Mathis-Moser, Ursula. Dany Laferrière: La Dérive américaine. VLB Éditeur, 2003.Ménard, Nadève, editor. Ecrits d’Haïti: Perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne contemporaine (1986–2006). Karthala, 2011. Ndiaye, Christiane. Comprendre l’énigme littéraire de Dany Laferrière. Université d’Etat d’Haïti, 2010. Nicolas, Lucienne. Espaces urbains dans le roman de la diaspora haïtienne. L’Harmattan, 2002. Parker, Gabrielle. “‘Returns to the Native Land’: Dany Laferrière’s Unresolved Dilemma.” In Dany Laferrière: Essays on His Works. Edited by Lee Skallerup Bessette Guernica, 2013, pp. 72–93. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animals in Literature and Film. Columbia ­University Press, 2011. Saint-Martin, Lori. “Une oppression peut en cacher une autre: antiracisme et sexisme dans Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer de Dany Laferrière.” Voix et images 36.2, Winter 2011, pp. 53–67, url: id.erudit.org/ iderudit/1002442ar.Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. 2nd ed. Mirror Books, 1996. Tontongi. La Parole indomptée: Pawol en mawonnaj suivi de Memwa Baboukèt: Mémoire de la muselière. L’Harmattan, 2015.

10 Breaking Down Borders Animal Bodies in Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City Madeleine Wilson The figure of the animal has a particularly strong valence in South ­A frican fiction. This is to a large extent a result of the dehumanizing racialized discourses of the colonial and apartheid periods. In postcolonial literature, animals have frequently been employed as an allegory for the colonized subject: both have been viewed by the colonial power as belonging to organic life and available as a resource for labor, though lacking the rights that come with a full subscription to humanity. “That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness,” Achille Mbembe concludes, …stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. In the eyes of the conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension. (‘Necropolitics’ 24) Mbembe insightfully refers to the placement of the colonized on an animal spectrum, where the mark of the animal acts as a symbol of otherness. However, in recent postcolonial literatures, some writers are moving to represent the animal in its own right: as an opaque subject of study in itself, rather than as a window onto aspects of the human condition. In this chapter, I will discuss the emphasis on animal life in the work of contemporary South African writer Lauren Beukes, who c­ onsistently ­effaces the border between human and nonhuman worlds—and, in ­doing so, destabilizes the human form. Her fictions are riddled with ­animal ­familiars, genetic upgrade programs, the fused corpses of ­animals and humans, and animal analogies to critique the enduring ­impact of apartheid in the twenty-first century. This chapter focuses on her postapartheid dystopias Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010) to highlight Beukes’s engagement with the animal as a litmus test for rights. In her fiction, she interrogates the continuing legacies of human rights violations by herself violating the structural integrity of the human. In doing so, she reveals a critical engagement with the animal not merely as a shorthand for the dehumanized Other but as a life in its own

184  Madeleine Wilson right, with “different epistemologies and ways of relating, desiring, and ­thinking” that may serve “to challenge the hegemony of Western habits of thought” (Price 41–42). South African writers’ recent interventions take as their base point the long history of association by colonial powers between animals and ­colonial subjects. Europe’s imperial project forged an ­unpalatable ­parallel between the laboring body of the colonial subject and the ­laboring body of the beast, both of which were harnessed by the ­sovereign power. The securing of labor and the violent acquisition of resources was ­partially concealed behind a “‘public script’ that emphasized ­modernity’s ­ability to overcome all obstacles to human progress and promised ­emancipation, civilization and development” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 19). If, in this ­“public script,” Europeans stood for true rational humanity, the colonized s­ ubject was written into a narrative of the animal. Mbembe maintains that As an animal, the native is supposed to belong to the family of e­ minently mechanical, almost physical things, without language […] Placed at the margins of the human, the native, with the animal, belongs to the register of imperfection, error, deviation, approximation, corruption, and monstrosity. (On the Postcolony 236) Enlightenment thinking cast both non-Europeans and animals as the “body” in the Cartesian mind–body dualism, with ­Europe ­constituting the mind or soul. This formulation separated the e­ xperience of ­a nimal or colonial life from that of “humans” into two rigidly separate spheres. Biological theories of race sought to ­construct evidence that difference was genetically predetermined, imagined as a ­spectrum on which at one end stood the white man, at the other, the ape, and all other humans in a hierarchy somewhere in between. Using ­a nimals as a precedent, nineteenth-century racial t­ heorists ­i nterpreted non-­ Europeans’ differences in physical appearance, ­c ulture, and ­language as evidence that they belonged lower down in the “great chain of ­b eing.” Human exceptionalism was thus imbricated with racial ­exceptionalism, and the colonized subject and animals were both viewed in terms of the use value of their bodies. “From this point of view,” Mbembe concludes, “the whole e­ pistemology of colonialism is based on a very simple equation: there is hardly any difference between the native principle and the animal principle. This is what justifies the domestication of the colonized individual” (On the Postcolony 236). The specter of the animal continues to lurk beneath the surface of contemporary racial discourses—as in ethnic pejoratives, the association of the industrial slaughter of animals with the victims of genocide, and the notorious so-called animal bars of Australia’s Alice Springs, to name a few.

Breaking Down Borders  185 The shift towards portraying the animal for its own sake in l­iterature has activated a critical rethinking about representing animal experience. The animal represents the ethical project of empathy as a living ­organism whose “thoughts,” feelings and existence present a challenge to ­human imaginations. Such an “entanglement of human and nonhuman […] is not a denial of difference, by any means, but rather an ­attention to the construction of difference at the very foundation of the ethical” (Weil 22). The animal is used to allegorize the encounter with the Other and the colonizer’s apparent inability to produce an e­ mpathetic connection with the colonized. However, the animal is also scrutinized for less ­anthropocentric means, viewing animal life as an experience in ­itself—and reading into its exploitation not simply an ­allegory for the colonized experience but also a warning that mistreatment of animals constitutes the first step towards the dystopian use of humans. In his critical work, Jason Price extends the focus of animal studies towards the “instrumentalization” of animals and humans that continues into ­postapartheid South African ecocritical fiction (3), while Wendy Woodward ­observes that South African literature’s traditional centering on “human ­identities” has “[i]n the last decade or so […been] extended ­ orousness of in particular in post-apartheid fiction to the fluidity and p ­human ­identities in relation to those of the nonhuman” (Woodward, “Embodying the Feral” 220). Moreover, in South African writers’ flexible and strong figuring of the animal, which often straddles both allegorical and literal representations, animals may “also embody intermediaries between traditional indigenous knowledges and a violent m ­ odernity” (Woodward, “The Only Facts Are Supernatural Ones” 231). The marriage of approaches between postcolonial literature and ­animal studies carries a risk that either the animal or the colonized subject will be submerged under the weight of the other. Nonetheless, in Beukes’s fiction, we see a fine balance between allegory and “reality” as she destabilizes the human–animal binary, rendering murky divisions that had been clear-cut and questioning the sanctity of borders between human and animal life.

“The Thing”: The Animal in the Twenty-First Century The question of the animal is memorably foregrounded in the ­tortured bio-artwork on display at an art gallery in Beukes’s first novel, ­Moxyland. The “audio animal installation” (Moxyland 69) by fictional artist ­K hanyi Nkosi is “gruesome, red and meaty, like something dead turned inside out and mangled, half-collapsed in on itself with spines and ridges and fleshy strings and some kind of built-in speakers, which makes the name even more disturbing: Woof & Tweet” (Moxyland 161). The artwork has been constructed using the latest advances in ­biotechnology and reproduces through its speakers “sounds from around

186  Madeleine Wilson us, remixing ambient audio, conversation, footsteps, glasses clinking, ­rustling ­clothing, through the systems of its body, disjointed parts of it inflating, like it’s breathing, spines quivering” (Moxyland 162). Nkosi’s lump of flesh embodies the animal in the twenty-first century: reduced to a product that is factory farmed and hooked into machines to produce meat. The installation lacks a face, denying the viewers a recognizable encounter between human and nonhuman sentience. The animal is unable to return the viewers’ gaze, echoing John Berger’s ­indictment that “[t]hat look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men have always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished” (28). Berger argues that with the industrial revolution and the shift from agrarian societies to urban centers largely devoid of livestock, meaningful human–animal encounters have become lost. With violence against animals increasingly hidden from the view of consumers, and meat appearing in sanitized packets in the grocery store, Beukes by contrast places the animal on display. The artwork, crucially, reproduces the crux of the problem of ­relating with the animal: that is, the crisis of understanding what the animal thinks and feels when it has no recourse to a language that is ­recognizable to humans. Weil asks how we may “access” the animal (6), observing that We might teach chimpanzees and gorillas to use sign language, but will that language enable them to speak of their animal lives or ­simply bring them to mimic (or ape) human values and viewpoints? Indeed, if they learn our language, will they still be animals? (6) The question of animal intelligence and whether they may be taught ­language is a longstanding debate. Weil’s more probing question of whether the successful acquisition of a human language would equip an animal to “express [its] thoughts or whether it replace[s] those thoughts with available and communicable signs” (Weil 8) takes the ­discussion a step further, acknowledging the enigma of animal experience and ­questioning whether language constitutes a bridge or, ultimately, a false path to mutual comprehension. In Moxyland, Beukes exploits the bloody spectacle of Nkosi’s artwork to extend the question of what constitutes an animal and how its experience may be understood or expressed. ­Listening to it, Kendra muses: sometimes it’s like words, almost recognisable. But mostly it’s just noise, a fractured music undercut with jarring sounds that seem to come randomly. Sometimes it sounds like pain. It is an animal. Or alive at any rate […] but not enough to hurt, apparently, if you ­believe the info blurb. (Moxyland 162)

Breaking Down Borders  187 The installation forms an echo chamber, simply rehashing what the ­gallery patrons say in “reverb” and projecting it back to them. It ­provides an audio “mirror,” but one in which humans are incapable of reading any data they did not input themselves, finding only a distorted self-­image in the work. The machine’s own experience remains ­unknowable. It has been artificially produced in a laboratory rather than organically, and yet Kendra is forced to conclude that it “is an animal.” The ­characters discuss the artwork’s experience, reproducing debates about animal sentience in scientific circles, particularly those perceived as lower life forms (such as fish or crustaceans) or manufactured for the purposes of e­ xperiment, and their capacity to experience pain. The patrons’ ­language around “the thing” is reminiscent of Mbembe’s ­description of the “thingification” of the colonial body, where “the colonized could only be envisaged as the property and thing of power” (On the ­Postcolony 26), a “tool” belonging, like animals, to “the sphere of objects” (27) (original emphases). The question of whether “the thing” can feel pain is apposite because the “animal” artwork is destroyed by terrorist-activists, whose actions are initially misunderstood as performance art (Moxyland 171). They start shredding into the artwork’s flesh with panga blades: The machine responds with a high-hat backbeat for the ­melody ­assembled from the screams and skitters of nervous laughter. It doesn’t die quietly, transmuting the ruckus, the frantic calls to the SAPS, and Khanyi wailing, clawing, held back by a throng of ­people. It’s like it’s screaming through our voices, the background noise, the context. The bright sprays of blood make it real, spattering the walls, ­people’s faces, my prints, as the blades thwack down again and again. The police sirens in the distance are echoed and distorted as Woof & Tweet finally collapses in on itself, rattling with wet ­smacking sounds. (173) The animal, unable to speak, resorts to “screaming through our voices.” Nkosi’s artwork has been produced as a curiosity in the bright lights of a commercial art hub; and yet, in a novel that places pressure on reality— where genetic identity is compromised at the ‘nano’ level, surveillance and corporal punishment are delivered through mobile phones, and ­citizen resistance is planned through the imaginary world of an online roleplaying game—the artwork paradoxically represents the animal itself, made “real” by its “bright sprays of blood […] spattering the walls.” Nkosi’s animal on display is a graphically destroyed pastiche of the body as object: “the thing” out of context. After the intruders leave, only its “mangled corpse” (173) is left behind—raising the question of what it had been before, when it was “alive.”

188  Madeleine Wilson

Porous borders: Destabilizing the Human–Animal Binary In Moxyland, the border between animals and humans is rendered p ­ orous through biological accidents brought about through experiments in technology. Animals in the novel are surgically “upgraded” to increase their use factor to humans, the prime example of which is to be found in the genetically modified “Aito” police dogs. The dogs, bearing serial numbers such as /379 (Moxyland 28) rather than anthropomorphizing names, have been hardwired to increase their discipline and efficiency: the dogs can now detect “incriminating” odors such as adrenaline or police mace ­residue (Moxyland 9), rendering every passer-by a potential suspect. However, it is not only animal bodies and genetic codes that have become subject to invasion, for the human form is also “upgraded.” ­Kendra, the novel’s main protagonist, has volunteered as a ­“sponsorbaby” (27) to a soft drink company called Ghost. The company’s ­evocative brand ­underlines the spectralization of human life at its interface with technology. The specter, Derrida suggests in his introduction to Spectres of Marx, “is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit” (5). We may ask, given Ghost’s genetics program, whether this “carnality” and feeding on test subjects will lead to an expansion of what it means to be human or, u ­ ltimately, a  negation of the human subject. Kendra is marked out as corporate property by the glowing Ghost logo in her arm. Her cells have been recoded to render her invulnerable to sickness, simultaneously making her ­appear more attractive to support her role as a brand a­ mbassador. As a side ­effect, however, she becomes addicted to the Ghost soft drink, downing up to a dozen per day (168) and experiencing withdrawal symptoms if unable to procure a fix. Even in this “corporate dystopia,” Kendra’s apparent disregard for the borders of her body is far from the norm. On meeting her and ­recognizing the logo, Tendeka screams: “You’re a fucking lab rat. A  corporate ­bitchmonkey! You make me sick!” (Moxyland 26). Kendra has effectively disabled the barriers protecting the human subject from animal treatment by willingly signing up for genetic experimentation. Her new status may only be understood in animal terms such as “lab rat” and, confusingly, “bitchmonkey.” Contrasting Foucault’s concept of biopower as the state’s right to kill, Mbembe describes the increase in nonstate actors taking part in the ­establishment of “death-worlds,” positing necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead. (“Necropolitics” 40)

Breaking Down Borders  189 Megan Glick associates Mbembe’s necropolitics with the contemporary status of the animal, in which the animal is always able to be killed and therefore already existing as the “living dead”: Because animal death never properly enters the realm of murder in ­ ormalizable, the eyes of the law, it is always somehow allowable, n and widely distributable. For this reason, animal death always ­already belongs to the realm of the necropolitical. This is s­ ignificant because it is not the death itself but the management of death that ­becomes the issue at stake. Even certain advocates of animal rights and ­welfare, such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of ­A nimals) and the Humane Society, do not allege that animals should never be killed. Rather, it is suggested that animals be killed ­‘humanely,’ in proper contexts and for proper reasons. (644–45) Events in recent years, such as the killing in captivity of gorilla Harambe in 2016, have brought into stark light the debates around animals and by what authority their right to life may be terminated. Beukes positions the laboratory as a new space for the body, trailblazed by ­nonhuman subjects and opened up, in her dystopian world, to humans. In her formulation, the laboratory is functionally similar to the concentration camps as theorized by Arendt and Agamben, in that the laboratory space functions as a state of exception outside of the normal distribution of ­individual rights over bodies, and in which the management of life or death is industrialized by the corporation or state. This space is usually reserved for viruses and lab-tested animals. In his work casting light on the relationship between viral epidemics and racial fears, Neel Ahuja describes how “disease interventions […] deployed models of territorial warfare to defend the body in space, but also transformed the body’s actual ­biological processes into a site of management and optimization using advanced biosciences and animal research subjects” (Ahuja 5). Having consented to forego the sanctity of the sovereign borders of her body, Kendra has become just such a “site of management and ­optimization” and is now seen as nothing but a “freakshow prototype” (Moxyland 27) of a new species. Tendeka’s instinctive placing of Kendra on an animal spectrum is, however insultingly intended, astute. Kendra’s new skills operate through nanotechnology which the genetic technician assures her has been well trialed in state-owned animals (Moxyland 12). Kendra’s fate rehearses a potent fear that the mistreatment of mammals, and, in this case, the hacking into their genetic codes, paves the way for the same treatment in vulnerable humans as test subjects (a scenario already ­familiar in paid clinical trials). (Black male) Tendeka’s placement of (white female) Kendra within an animal discourse activates a critical inversion of race thinking—one that is immediately undercut when a police officer ­enters the bar and deploys a high-voltage electro-shock “defuser”

190  Madeleine Wilson device against him. Tendeka is sent into spasms of pain on the floor. “You want some more, boy?” (28), the police officer sneers. The use of the highly fraught “boy” in relation to a grown African man situates the animal–human discussion within a larger narrative of South African ­ nequal access to power and speaks to broader continuing histories of u crises ­regarding police use of excessive force and racial profiling in both the postcolony (in countries such as South Africa and Australia) and the colonial and neocolonial powers (in Europe and the United States). One unexpected result of the genetic upgrades to animal and h ­ uman bodies is a connection forged between Kendra and the Aito dogs. Not only do the dogs start behaving in a more humanlike way, their ­animal instincts having been reprogrammed to closer accord to police ­discipline, but conversely Kendra starts to behave more like the dogs, responding to the same triggers as the Aitos. In one scene, a woman who has been defused has a seizure outside a bottle store, and Kendra feels “compelled” (Moxyland 132) to be near her. An unsupervised Aito is also present, placing its paw on the woman’s chest. The dog initially snarls at Kendra before seeming to acknowledge her. Kendra begins cataloguing the smells of the woman and her surroundings, just like the dog. The woman, meanwhile, makes “horrible little whiny sounds, her eyes still squeezed shut” (133), reduced to the mute level of the animal in the face of the violence deployed by authority. Kendra, perplexed, can’t understand why she feels compelled to be at the scene, laying her hand on the woman just as the Aito had done with its paw. At this, the Aito removes its paw, “scans” (134) the street, and starts biting at fleas—with Kendra observing wryly that the animal may have caught the fleas from vulnerable humans, rather than the other way around (134). The dog exhibits a peculiar mix of synthetic and natural qualities, “scanning” like a computer (apparently reading Kendra as a complementary software component) before scratching recognizably like a dog. This scene destabilizes the boundary between animals and humans by syncing their behaviors through the corporate upgrade program, further suggesting that humans’ casual complicity in animal testing may lead to the ­undermining of human exceptionalism. The “compulsion” (135) does not leave Kendra until the dog is out of sight. In this futuristic Cape Town, both animals and humans have been subjected to genetic upgrades, losing their bodily integrity and, more disturbingly, their control over their own bodies in the process. In the face of the dehumanizing behaviors of the police, the citizen loses rights and shares qualities with animal life: both become merely the property of a higher authority. Discourse around the animal remains a potent trigger in South Africa. In her second novel, Beukes moves to the animal as metaphor as a means of commenting on the daily dehumanization of black Africans.

Breaking Down Borders  191

“The Animalled” as Apartheid Allegory: Zoo City In Zoo City, Beukes fashions a potent apartheid allegory from “animalled” bodies. In this dystopian Johannesburg, when a person commits a violent crime, he or she receives an animal familiar. The highly visible body of the animal marks out such people as offenders, referred to as “zoos” or “aposymbiots.” The animal is the literal embodiment of criminality, which must be borne as a physical burden of guilt. As such, the experience of the “animalled” is one of everyday discrimination, living under the threat of violence motivated by hatred and fear. The animalled live in an area of Johannesburg referred to locally as “Zoo City,” a place of “changeable boundaries between human and non-human” (Roos 58) contained within the urban margin of the ghetto. It is difficult for zoos to find employment or adequate housing outside the ghetto, with most inhabiting insecure tenements and relying on illegal electricity hookups (Zoo City 64). Many establishments across the city bear signs that read “No Zoos,” and outside of Zoo City, the animalled are looked upon with suspicion and loathing, forcibly barred from the “gated communities fortified like privatised citadels” (Zoo City 97) designed to protect “middle-class paranoia” (97). The discrimination, casual hatred, and violence against zoos, including their segregation and shop owners’ rights to refuse service, present a sharp analogy for the experience of black Africans under apartheid. “If animal studies have come of age,” comments Weil, “it is perhaps because nonhuman animals have become a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power” (Weil 5). The animal provides a ready symbol for otherness and political disempowerment in Beukes’s narrative. Zoo’s containment within the ghetto is significant, for their bodies are marked by the animals they bear. Radhika Mohanram observes that in colonial thinking there is an embodiment of blackness with a simultaneous disembodiment of whiteness, a disembodiment accompanied by two other tropes at the level of discourse. First, whiteness has the ability to move; second, the ability to move results in the unmarking of the body. In contrast, blackness is signified through a marking that is always static and immobilizing. (Mohanram 4) The black–white binary has been transmuted into a new social coding in this postapartheid novel: namely, that between zoos and non-zoos. The animal body, by its very visibility, restricts movement. Where nonzoos may move through the different social layers of Johannesburg with ease, zoo bodies are marked with the animal other: for most it is an immobilizing state, leading to containment within the ghetto. Zoos’ ­descriptions of being stared at in the wealthier parts of the urban

192  Madeleine Wilson dystopia of Johannesburg explicitly recall the dangerous and unheimlich situation of black Africans living in South Africa under apartheid. Zinzi, the protagonist, is able to move through different areas of the city despite being animalled—her transit, though fraught, authorized by her wealthy employers. However, “Zinzi’s very mobility,” Shane Graham contends, “only underscores the usual impermeability of the compartments that separate, for instance, the comfortable interior of the Gautrain from the storm drains and underground homeless camps that connect with the train tunnels” (73). Each of the animalled has, by virtue of bearing the animal body, cosmically been found guilty of a serious crime. Beukes places pressure on racist associations of criminality and animality with blackness in the Enlightenment discourses that persisted through colonialism. This is complicated by the fact that despite the strong “zoo” c­ ulture developed in the ghetto, anyone may become a zoo (rather than ­b eing born into that state). The majority of race-identified zoos in the novel are black Africans or of South Asian heritage, ­h ighlighting the ­p ersistence of poor outcomes for historically disenfranchised groups. To further complicate matters, zoos have actually committed the crimes of which they are suspected, often out of desperation. The animal is associated with savagery and less-than-human intelligence. It has particular symbolic resonance in postcolonial South Africa ­a fter decades of dehumanizing and ­explicitly animalizing discourses directed against black Africans. Former Prime Minister P.W. Botha, who championed the establishment of ethnic “homelands” or Bantustans under the Separate Development Policy, is widely quoted as ­having said of anti-apartheid resistance: “This uprising will bring out the beast in us” (later serving as inspiration for Fela Kuti’s 1989 ­a lbum Beasts of No Nation). The animal forms an externalized expression of guilt, with Zinzi’s Sloth being “my own personal scarlet letter” (Zoo City 60). When ­under police investigation for a murder she did not commit, the inspector interrogates Zinzi on the basis of her apparent criminality: All I’m saying is that you’ve murdered before. The court said accessory to. That’s not what the thing on your back says. He’s a Sloth. He’s guilt. (Zoo City 33) Contrary to due process, the inspector views the animal as a blanket admission of guilt for all crimes committed in the vicinity: visibility of the animal is used as grounds for making arrests, just as blackness has been (and in some contexts, still is) viewed as reasonable evidence of criminal intent.

Breaking Down Borders  193 Zoos’ bodies provoke profound anxiety in Johannesburg because they disrupt boundaries. Their problematic form elides the border ­between human and animal, self and other, and provides the focus for discourses of social unease in the text. Such an “assault on the human body,” as Roos contends, “conventionally regarded as a complete and separate ­entity, becomes through this coexistence of human and animal perhaps the most vivid example of the blurring and eventual erasure of boundary markers in Zoo City” (Roos 59). The animal is viewed as a metonymic extension of the criminal body, a marker of the subhuman. “Aren’t you afraid,” one of the characters asks, “to be in here with all us animals?” (Zoo City 63). Zoos—and in particular, zoo sex workers, many of whom have been forced by job shortages into an exploitative local sex tourism for curious non-zoos—are perceived as deviant and ­challenging ­ uman and to heteronormative bodies. The slippery border between h beast is written onto their form. Such “[e]xtending [of] human body space to ­incorporate the nonhuman in these novels,” Woodward argues, ­“generally suggests a sincere attempt to augment the epistemology of being human” (‘Embodying’ 221). Beukes rewrites a history of racism in terms of a malignant pseudo-speciesism: for “[i]ndividual a­ utonomy,” Lynn Hunt explains in her work on human rights, “hinges on an ­increasing sense of the separation and sacredness of human bodies: your body is yours and my body is mine, and we should both respect the boundaries between each other’s bodies” (29). Zoo bodies respect no such boundaries and threaten to collapse distinctions between self and other, human and nonhuman. Their bodies perhaps remind non-zoos that, as in the cases of other social problems such as homelessness, anyone may fall from grace into the category of the abject—from which, in this case, there may be no hope of return.

Violating Human Rights: The Disintegrating Body The violation of human rights is taken to its extreme in the utter desecration of the human form. In Moxyland, despite the profusion of corporate upgrades, the body is at its most visible and vulnerable at its ­intersection with the disciplinary apparatus of the state. The novel portrays a world in which the state enjoys total control over the citizen body, a control that is tantamount to the management of life. For Foucault, it is this administration of citizen life that underpins modern articulations of ­sovereignty. He explains that At stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. (The History of Sexuality 137)

194  Madeleine Wilson A more nuanced reading of biopolitics and race is offered by Mbembe’s work on “necropolitics,” where he locates the ideologies and technologies that led to the concentration camp as having been trialed in the c­ olonies and on slave plantations in the New World (“­Necropolitics”  23). In her ­ lacing pressure apartheid allegories, Beukes draws on these histories by p on the slippage between “race” as ethnicity and “the human race” as species. She critiques the erosion of human rights by literally eroding the human form. This is explicitly foregrounded in Moxyland in the police reaction to civil disobedience and a feared terrorist attack. The presumed ­terrorists and a large number of civilians are corralled in an underground train station. Police forces and the bio-enhanced Aito dogs withdraw, ­following which a fine spray is unleashed from the ceiling. The intercom ­advises that “the SAPS have had no alternative but to make use of statute 41b, Extreme Measures, of the National Security Act” (213), and that In accordance with this statute, activated for your protection, you have all been exposed to the M7N1 virus, a lab-coded variation of the Marburg strain. Do not panic. (213) The intercom proceeds to list the symptoms of the virus that will take hold if citizens do not report to an immunization center for ­vaccination—on the implicit understanding that those guilty of the crime will be arrested upon registration at the facility. Symptoms range from inflammation and sneezing early on to a progression of much more serious effects, culminating in the virus decimating the subject’s soft cell structures: “After 48 hours, your organs will start to liquefy and collapse” (Moxyland 214). In this case, the virus, another form of nonhuman life, exhibits a strange and parasitic intimacy with the human citizen on whom it is inflicted. As Deleuze and Guattari contend in their influential A Thousand Plateaus, “[w]e form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to ­ ncanny form a rhizome with other animals” (10). The virus creates an u bridge between human and animal life, and is beloved of horror genres for its position as a hidden enemy that highlights the plasticity (and ­corrupts the sanctity) of the human body. This passage sees the state unleash a bioweapon against its own ­citizens as a method of catching suspected criminals, forcing terrorists to choose between imprisonment or a grisly death—and attacking the “bare life” of the community in the process. Through this process, the individual’s “bodily vulnerability is transmuted into political urgency” (Ahuja xi). The state seeks to neutralize the threat to its sovereignty performed by the disobedient body within its borders—similar, in the language of pathology, to white blood cells attacking a virus. In this dystopian Cape Town, the state literally collapses the threatening body in order to safeguard its own sovereignty.

Breaking Down Borders  195 The result of this action is that the human form—and specifically, the black African body—is undermined and reduced to waste. Tendeka, a Zimbabwean-born resistance worker in the novel, lies dying from the virus, testifying before a video camera: “This is human rights v­ iolation taken to its worst. They are wilfully killing their citizens” (Moxyland 282). The “violation” of his human rights is manifested, crucially, through the violation of his human form. Toby describes how Tendeka “starts bleeding from every exit point […] It’s like someone turned on a liquidiser inside him” (294). The isolation of waste products from the body politic is considered one of the prime functions of the state, which is charged with maintaining order within its boundaries. In his writing on waste, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observes that Throughout the era of modernity, the nation-state has claimed the right to preside over the distinction between order and chaos, law and lawlessness, citizen and homo sacer, belonging and exclusion, useful (= legitimate) product and waste […] sifting out, segregating and disposing of the waste of order-building combined into the main preoccupation and metafunction of the state, as well as providing the foundation for its claims to authority. (Bauman 33) Tendeka’s “liquidization” into a waste product signals the disintegration of his political existence. As punishment for his noncompliance, his form has been dissolved, rendering him unrecognizable as a human. Moreover, to return to the language of pathology, Tendeka represents a social contaminant who threatens to infect other members of the body politic: he is no longer a useful product, merely waste to be disposed of. The liquidization of his body is particularly graphic, during which a horrified Toby vomits into the pooling blood, gasping that he “can’t ­handle him pooled around me, can’t handle how I’ve violated his remains” (295). Kelly Hurley, writing on the Gothic body and its desecration in literature, has observed that slime is disturbing not only in its anomaly; it also constitutes a threat to the integrity of the human subject. If the distinction ­between liquid and solid can be effaced, then other, more crucial ­oppositions—between human consciousness and the material body, for instance—threaten to collapse as well. (Hurley 35) It is, of course, precisely this distinction that is effaced in the scene of Tendeka’s death: not only is his political consciousness extinguished, but as punishment his very form as a human is attacked. The dissolution of his human rights can therefore be read through his dissolving body. Beukes’s ruination of the body, leaving Tendeka reduced to a liquid mess on the floor, dissolves the structures on which Tendeka rests his claim

196  Madeleine Wilson to humanity. Ahuja explains that “[t]he body’s transitional form—its ­plasticity that may be accelerated by disease and other forms of interspecies contact—is a significant cause of concern for securitizing states” (Ahuja 9). In this case, the state has increased the plasticity of ­Tendeka’s body in order to neutralize him as a threat. If Tendeka’s rebellious ­activism functions like a virus within the pathology of the social body, the state responds by deploying a weaponized virus in order to liquefy his claim to rights. It is telling that Tendeka’s death is prefaced earlier in the novel by an offhand comment from Kendra describing the smell of the defused homeless woman outside the bottle shop. She claims: It’s like the rat that died in our ceiling in Durban and lay there for three weeks before my brother finally climbed up there, swearing at my dad for using the cheap poison—the kind that doesn’t auto-­ dissolve the bodies. (133) Thus, the violation of Tendeka’s humanity on the lonely rooftop finds its echo in the death of a rat in the ceiling, reinforcing an architectural view of the state as a house from which undesirable bodies must be expelled. In the context of the particularly complex postcolony of South Africa, it is tempting to view Tendeka’s disintegrating black body as providing a map of the failed union of the postapartheid state. However, as Cheryl Stobie has pointed out in her reading of Beukes’s work: “Despite the grimness of the worlds described, critical dystopias allow for some hope, or ‘social dreaming’ within the reader” (Stobie 368), and its open-ended conclusion sets itself firmly against “Afro-pessimism” (Stobie 379). Kendra’s own death is similarly expressed in animal terms, ­explicitly mirroring those of the Aito dogs with whom she shares the new nanotech programming. At the novel’s conclusion, the geneticists lead her past rows of empty cages. Kendra wonders where “everybody” is, before correcting herself to wonder about the whereabouts of the dogs (290). She hops onto the bench for what she believes will be an i­noculation, and probes the doctor about the fate of the dogs who are no longer ­operational. When she learns the animals are put down, she asks whether they could be reused as pets or guide dogs: “Impossible,” says the doctor. “It’s our intellectual property. It’s very closely guarded. They put the dogs down.” She sees my face. “But don’t worry, they don’t feel anything. Just a prick. Then it’s over.” (Moxyland 393) The doctor euthanizes Kendra by injecting her with poison, repeating what she had described about the dogs: “‘See’, she says, ‘just a little prick’.” (393). Like the dogs that are “prisoners” on reprieve (although,

Breaking Down Borders  197 in her case, having volunteered for the treatment), Kendra’s body is now the intellectual property of the company and has to be “put down.” Ultimately, Beukes’s political use of the animal in Moxyland serves to rupture the boundary between human and animal life, commenting on the mutual vulnerability of their rights to “bare life” in the face of government and corporate structures of power.

Conclusion In her South African dystopias, Beukes interrogates the pathology of waste, race, and the social body and its intersection with nonhuman life in the forms of animals and viruses. She consistently uses animals to allegorize racial confrontations and comment on the unequal power paradigms at play in South Africa: and yet, she also pays close attention to the animal itself and its resilient expression of animal life. Ingrid de Kok describes how in South Africa “segregation has become the spatial imprint of our cities and the deep structure of our imaginations and memories” (70). Beukes exploits this “deep structure,” contrasting the mobility and containment of her fully human, nonhuman, subhuman, and animalled characters in the segregated dystopias of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Novels such as Beukes’s, Woodward contends, [Engage] with feral embodiment as a potential metonym for the edgy vibrancy of post-apartheid South Africa. Moreover, these contemporary novelists’ deliberate invocations of feral embodiment often respectfully invoke pre-colonial traditions and beliefs on their own terms, suggesting that the so-called magic of shared human-­animal embodiment is a critical means of mapping pathways from fractious pasts to more productively shared futures. (“Embodying” 231) In these novels, moreover, the mistreatment of animals provides a dangerous precedent, for “The slippery slope of dehumanization—from the human to the liminally human to the nonhuman—should indicate that movement in the opposite direction is possible as well” (Glick 642). Through her focus on laboratory testing and bioweapons, Beukes ­highlights the structural similarities between the industrial management of a­ nimal life and the threats for vulnerable humans. It is Beukes’s desecration of the human form that points to the political heart of her fiction: a warning against totalitarian biopolitics and the discourses that attend them. As a coda, it is interesting to observe that Beukes extends her focus on the animal outside of the postcolony in her recent fiction. Broken Monsters (2014) is set in the dilapidated urban sprawl of Detroit against simmering race tensions and high crime following industrial collapse. In this crime-horror novel, a serial killer, Clayton Broom, has been infected by a “dream” that has pushed through

198  Madeleine Wilson One of those border places where the skin of the worlds are ­permeable, exactly like the walls of a cheap motel if the walls of a cheap motel can sometimes turn into a meniscus you can push right through by accident. It only wants to get home, and it doesn’t know how. (111) The dream that has colonized Clayton’s mind and body plans to rupture the barriers between worlds by staging a series of “artworks” around the city that disturb the fundamental order of nature: that is, that cohere human and animal death in an attempt to forge new life. The first victim is a ten-year-old African American boy, leading detectives to suspect a racial hate crime. His torso has been glued “to the lower half of a deer, hooves and all. The white flick of the tail sticks up like a jaunty little flag. The brown fur is bristled with dried blood. The flesh appears melted together at the seam” (3). Clayton/the dream strategically places the boy’s defaced body “close to the physical border between Canada and the United States, in the hopes that borders overlap” (114): It can’t understand what’s wrong, why he won’t get up, maybe ­wobbly at first on his new legs, like a faun, before he begins to bound and leap and fly, and then his very being, the fact of him, will rip through the skin between the worlds, let them slip away, back home. Or bring all of the dreams crashing in on them. (114) Human and animal lives are presented as two mutually incompatible spheres of existence, their fabricated fusion so unnatural as to disturb the boundaries of reality. The dream’s painful naivety leads it to hope that magic will bring the dead boy/deer back to life in a new form, on which “his very being, the fact of him” will puncture a hole in the ­“meniscus” between worlds. By contrast, the detective at the scene is struck by the artwork’s physical matter: “The smell is terrible. She’s guessing the intestines are severed, on both sets of bodies, leaking shit and blood into the conjoined cavities. Plus there’s the gamey reek of the deer’s scent glands. She pities the ME having to open up this mess” (3). The animal fact of both human and animal life is underscored in this scene. Interestingly, it is the failure of the dream’s project, the “reek” of the severed intestines, that brings into focus humans’ and animals’ most poignant similarity: their shared mortality. The dream continues its obscene curation with the murder of an artist and mentor who has been found baked in her own kiln: The shape in the oven is not human. Some kind of insect or sea creature, she thinks. All shiny appendages and sharp ridges. A carapace. A clay exoskeleton arranged around the space where the body should be. There are spindly extra legs protruding outwards from the torso, six on one side, eight on the other. A helmet over the a­ bsence of the skull, caved in over the eyes, sausage tendrils hanging down where

Breaking Down Borders  199 the jaw would be, like on a caterpillar. The breastbone rises to a sharp point in the center. There are fanciful curls around the arms, leaving gaps where the flesh melted away, like dead coral. (251–52) As so often in Beukes’s fiction, in this scene human exceptionalism has been decimated. The woman’s human matter has literally “melted away,” leaving her fused in death in an apparently organic animal form. Nothing recognizable remains of her humanity as distinct from animal life: she has been absorbed into a new “carapace”—but one that has stubbornly refused to draw breath as the dream had hoped. The dream’s stunning violence is activated by its insanity, its hope that “all eyes will look and their seeing will be horror and glory and wonder and it will pierce the skin of the world, collapse dimensions, and open the doors and the work will breathe and dance in his shoes and the dreams will be able to escape” (285). Beukes’s sustained engagement with ­animal ­ frican fiction to life and death translates compellingly from her South A the racialized urban nightmare of Detroit. Where Moxyland and Zoo ­ uman, Broken Monsters City blur the boundaries between animal and h stages the impossibility of human–animal cohesion, with the bodies of the Pan boy and the undersea creature speaking simultaneously to the gulfs between human and animal experience and their depressing likeness in mortality. Beukes’s early novels are set in the future but speak, as dystopias do, to the political urgencies of the present. She has said that Moxyland was born from the legacy of apartheid: the arbitrary and artificially applied divides between people […] Don’t let anyone tell you that apartheid has nothing to do with South Africa now. Those roots run deep and ­tangled and we’ll be tripping over them for many generations to come. (Moxyland 301–02) Through her persistent engagement with human, monstrous, and a­ nimal bodies, Beukes critiques South Africa’s flawed transition from ­apartheid state to postcolonial democracy, blurring the boundaries ­between ­human and animal worlds. Beukes illustrates the erosion of human rights through the literally eroded body, extending ­postcolonial literature’s focus on the body as battleground between state ideology and citizen agency. In these novels, she makes manifest a history of human rights violations by placing stress upon the category of the human.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998. Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Duke University Press, 2016.

200  Madeleine Wilson Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity Press, 2004. Berger, John. About Looking. Bloomsbury, 2009. Beukes, Lauren. Broken Monsters. HarperCollins Publishers, 2014. ———. Moxyland. Angry Robot, 2013. ———. Zoo City. Angry Robot, 2010. de Kok, Ingrid. “Cracked Heirlooms: Memory on Exhibition.’ Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Edited Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee. Oxford University Press, 1999 (1998), pp. 57–71. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand ­Plateaus. Translated Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 3–28. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of ­Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 2006. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated Robert Hurley. Penguin Books, 1990. Glick, Megan H. “Animal Instincts: Race, Criminality, and the Reversal of the ‘Human’.” American Quarterly 65.3 (2013), pp. 639–59. Graham, Shane. “The Entropy of Built Things: Postapartheid Anxiety and the Production of Space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City.” Safundi 16.1 (2015), pp. 64–77. Hunt, Lynn Avery. Inventing Human Rights: A History. W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003), pp. 11–40. ———. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 2001. Mohanram, Radhika. Black Body: Women, Colonialism and Space. Allen & Unwin, 1999. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Genealogies of Coloniality and Implications for Africa’s Development.” Africa Development XL.3 (2015), pp. 13–40. Price, Jason D. Animals and Desire in South African Fiction: Biopolitics and the Resistance to Colonization. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Roos, Henriette. “‘The War of the Worlds’: Relocating the Boundaries between the Human and the Non-Human.” Journal of Literary Studies 27.4 (2011), pp. 50–70. Stobie, Cheryl. “Dystopian Dreams from South Africa: Lauren Beukes’s ­Moxyland and Zoo City.” African Identities 10.4 (2012), pp. 367–80. Weil, Kari. “A Report on the Animal Turn.” Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? Columbia University Press, 2012, pp. 3–24. Woodward, Wendy. “Embodying the Feral.” Routledge Handbook of Human-­ Animal Studies. Routledge, 2014, pp. 220–32. ———. “‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some Contemporary Southern African Texts.” Indigenous ­C reatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts. Edited Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 231–48.

11 Wilder Powers Magical Animality in Tales of War and Terror Jean M. Langford

During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (then Kampuchea), the poet U Sam Oeur was among those who were forced at gunpoint into a rural work camp (Oeur and McCullough, Crossing Three Wildernesses: A Memoir). Some years later, he drew on this experience in a poem entitled Water Buffalo Cobra and the Prisoner of War (Oeur and ­McCullough, “Four Poems” 197). Work, work—hacking at trees, uprooting them, clearing bushes, transplanting rice, no time to rest. At noon, alone, as I cleared the canebrake, a beautiful black cobra opened his hood before me, displaying his power. He thought I was his foe. “He’s beautiful, just like in the Indian movies!” I exclaimed to myself while my knees knocked. “O cobra! Your flesh and blood are truly Buddha’s flesh and blood. I am just a prisoner of war, but I am not your food. You, cobra, are free, and if my flesh is truly your blood, plead my case with the spirits of this swamp to lead me to Buddham, Dhammam, and Sangham” The cobra stared at me with loving kindness then lowered his head. He slithered into the swamp to the south and I went back to my work of surviving. The cobra in this poem strikes a familiar motif. Like other (nonhuman) animals who appear in Southeast Asian literature, folktales, and memoirs, Oeur’s cobra is a figure of imagined rescue, as much as danger. The interspecies encounter recorded here is not simply an ethnographic reference to a rural lifestyle, where the land along with its creatures might be animated

202  Jean M. Langford by intelligence, sentience, and intention. For the cosmopolitan prisoner of the poem, the cobra borrows some of its magical luster from Bollywood movies. Indeed, the mimetic iterations of this poetic animal span several registers: the multitude of cobras living in the Cambodian countryside, who were an unfamiliar threat for Khmer displaced from urban habitats by the coerced relocations of Pol Pot’s regime; the proto-cobra as media icon disseminated around the globe, bearing traces of locally specific extraordinary powers; and not least, a singular cobra appearing to one human in a radiant instant, a cobra that is independent, resplendent, and fiercely itself. Such competing imagery hardly inhibit the prisoner, and may even inspire him, in addressing a fervent prayer to this magnificent, we could even say sovereign, beast, who might possibly intervene in the prisoner’s fate. The image of redemptive animality in Oeur’s poem seems paradoxical, given not only that cobras were among many perils of the forest encountered by Khmer Rouge work teams, but also that in Theravada Buddhism, according to my conversations with Lao and Cambodian monks and elders, the realm of nonhuman animals is one level up from the realm of hungry ghosts, and reincarnation as an animal is a fate reserved for people with an accumulation of very bad karma (Crosby 16, 115, 132; Robinson et al. 12).1 Moreover, in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, associations of humans with certain species of animals can be considered extremely offensive. 2 In stories of war and terror, in particular, two figures of animality are often invoked: those “inhuman” “brutes,” whether bandits or soldiers, who kill indiscriminately like wild predators on a rampage, and the debased “subhuman” creatures who are subjected like livestock to captivity, forced labor, and slaughter.3 “They treated us like animals,” one Kmhmu man told me of his time in a Thai refugee camp. “They did whatever they felt like.” Interestingly, this postcolonial figure of animality as sub-humanity also appears in accounts of North American medicine. One Lao man repeated to me the warning of a friend who worked in a US hospital: “Man, if you don’t have friends or relatives, you’re going to be miserable if you’re dead in this hospital, because they put you in [the morgue] like a pig, like an animal.” As such medical sites serve to remind us, both these figures of animality, the vicious predator and the abject livestock, fit comfortably into a prevalent biopolitical narrative whereby animals (like the sovereign) are understood to exist outside the moral and political order (Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 39, 60). These two figures of beastliness, brute power and absolute lack of power, are aptly united in Giorgio Agamben’s lycological motif for the animality in humanity. The wolf-man, he writes, “is not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the city” (Homo Sacer 105); rather his precise relation to law is that of being neither protected by it nor bound by it. The werewolf is simultaneously killable by everyone and free to kill anyone (Agamben, Homo Sacer 109–11).

Wilder Powers  203 But how then do we understand the figure of magical animality appearing in Oeur’s poem, and in the tales told by Buddhist and animistically inclined emigrants who survived the covert war in Laos or the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia? This third figure is the wild animal as transmigrated ancestor or possibly sympathetic spirit or deity who offers a forceful if unpredictable source of protection when the civil order itself has undergone a terrifying metamorphosis. The appearance in postcolonial narratives of such magical animals, in stark contrast to more expected figures of savagery or abjection, is the conundrum that sparked this essay. What might such animals offer to those who are threatened with a social violence unrestrained by law and “humanitarian” ethics? Furthermore, what possibilities do such fabulous animals offer for rewriting the biopolitical story about humanity and animality that predominates in much social analysis of colonial and postcolonial violence and imprisonment? To contemplate these questions, I turn first to Oeur’s poem and then to other texts from Laos and Cambodia of varied provenance—folktales, memoirs, ethnographies, and conversations with emigrants—which offer insight into the figures of fantastic animality that appear in narratives of political violence. These accounts are derived from Hmong and Kmhmu animists, as well as Lao Loum and Khmer Theravada Buddhists who continue to engage with a pantheon of spirits of the landscape. While the stories recounted here may seem a random collection, emerging from unique political, social, and cultural milieux, they share two common spheres of reference beyond their regional affiliation. First, many refer to recent linked histories and memories of political violence during and following the American wars in Southeast Asia—political violence characterized by war, state terror, and refugee, reeducation, or prison camps, where the biopolitical bestiary of the brute and the abject beast is often invoked. Second, these stories draw on certain common idioms of magical animality rooted in overlapping repertoires of animist philosophy and practice. By assembling these stories, I propose to elaborate an image of ­magicopolitical animality as both critique and alternative to the vision of animality that predominates in biopolitical accounts of violence (often following from Agamben).4 The stories collectively invoke animal subjectivities that undermine the distinction between bios and zoe on which Agambenian theories of biopolitics rest. They also complicate the narrative of the inclusion/exclusion of animal life from the polis, by introducing a plurality of bestial powers, accessed through encounters with nonhumans that magically exceed the power of the biopolitical. I provisionally refer to these powers as zoopolitics. This term has been most often used to refer either to a politics (especially Nazism) that posits certain humans as no different from nonhuman animals, more specifically vermin (Esposito 117; Winthrop-Young 227). My own usage leans

204  Jean M. Langford toward that of Nicole Shukin, for whom zoopolitics denotes not simply the exercise of power over the animality within the human but the power exercised over nonhuman animals (9). It is even closer to the sense of zoopolitics invoked by Brett Buchanan, Jeffrey Bussolini, and Matthew Chrulew when they write of a “zoopolitical task” facing humans: “to build lives in common with other living and non-living beings” (2). Here, however, I enlarge the term to include an imagination of powers exercised by nonhuman animals as posited by animistic cosmologies. This usage of zoopolitics conjures a field of multilaterally political interspecies relationships, a field that is succinctly referenced in Oeur’s poem.5

Between Creaturely Worlds Borrowing Jakob Von Uexküll’s idea of tone, which roughly designates the present, practical significance of a particular creature for another creature (typically from another species) who perceives it (93–98), the cobra takes on many tones for Oeur: danger, marvel, and divine intermediary. Put another way, the poet perceives the cobra through several intermingled moods—fear, admiration, kinship, and worship (Von ­Uexküll 93). Moreover, the poet imagines that the cobra has the capacity to adopt various moods as well—defensiveness, co-creatureliness, divine intercession, and compassion—that enable the snake to perceive the human in tones of enemy, blood relation, or supplicant. Where Oeur’s poem enlarges on Von Uexküll’s science, however, is in supposing that the two creatures might negotiate the mood and tone for their meeting. Here umwelten, the subjective worlds of these creatures, are not self-­ enclosed as Von Uexküll proposed, but overlap, potentially transforming one another, allowing for creative plays and counterplays.6 One Khmer story of a human umwelt that succumbs to radical transformation has been recounted and interpreted by David Chandler. In this folktale, two girls who have been abandoned by their mother in the forest are defended from predatory animals by a sympathetic arak thevada (a local guardian spirit) and manage to survive by eating raw snails, fish, and grain. By increments, the girls become birds; their clothing turns to feathers, their fingers curl into claws, their lips harden to beaks, and their arms unfold into wings. Having lost their ability to speak human language, they communicate with one another in bird song (Edwards 145), while still knowing that they are both human and bird (Chandler, “Songs at the Edge of the Forest” 34). In his analysis of this tale, Chandler notes that the Khmer categories of srok, domesticity or civil order, and prei, wildness, are susceptible to risky yet creative inversions that are sometimes provoked by social violence and chaos. The manuscript in which this tale is found dates from the mid-nineteenth century, toward the end of a period when Cambodia was repeatedly invaded by Thai and

Wilder Powers  205 Vietnamese armies, a time that, as Chandler observes, resembled the 1970s in its extremes of violence (“Songs at the Edge of the Forest” 31). Chandler notes that the girls’ experience in the forest resonates with the fate of many Khmer of that time: driven from their home by the Vietnamese, fleeing into the forest where they lived on lizards dug from the earth and soup made from roots. For Chandler, the tale suggests that in a time of social upheaval, there was “no explanation for suffering that would allow any but the magically endowed to overcome it” (“Songs at the Edge of the Forest” 45). Survival was possible only by trafficking with nonhuman entities, or becoming them, through a willingness to engage in parahuman magic that alone had a chance of prevailing against human violence. As one survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, Sodoeung, put it to me, When we go to the temple we pray to the Buddha. But when we go to the jungle and see the big trees, we pray to these people, these spirits. I sometimes prayed to the trees too during the communist time…. You talk to the tree and then when the wind blows you feel like, “Oh, they answered. I got the answer!”7 Like the girls in the folktale, Sodoeung and many others living in ­Cambodia and Laos during the US-sponsored wars and their aftermath were forced from their villages into the forest. In Cambodia (then Kampuchea), the Khmer Rouge relocated thousands of people from villages into communal farms, forcibly recruited young men into the armed forces, and evacuated Phnom Penh, the principal city, separating families into work teams organized by age that were sent to work in remote areas.8 Even after 1979 when the Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese, displaced Khmer were often unable to return to homes that were now in the possession of other families or had been commandeered by the Vietnamese army. Similarly, in Laos, many Hmong and Kmhmu, particularly those whose villages had been caught up in conflicts between the Pathet Lao, on the one hand, and US-sponsored forces (led by the Central Intelligence Agency) and the Royal Lao Army, on the other, were driven from their villages by bomb raids or military skirmishes.9 Those who abandoned or were recruited from their villages either engaged directly in guerilla warfare or lived precariously at its edges in landscapes that were remapped by war operations. With the destruction of farms and fields, many subsisted on food supplied by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) until the rapid departure of US forces in 1975, when a few thousand locals were airlifted to relative safety, while the vast majority were left behind to continue fighting or flee to Thailand. Meanwhile, Lao Loum or lowland Lao whose family members had fought against the Pathet Lao risked being rounded up into reeducation camps. Thousands chose instead to make their way to Thai refugee camps.

206  Jean M. Langford People who were dislocated in these ways often subsisted in landscapes subject to unpredictable episodes of violence, but also to wild animals, weather, and unknown terrain that might hinder, or unexpectedly assist, their survival. They developed new bodily habits incorporating stars, rivers, trees, and animals. Lt. Somsy, an elderly Lao soldier living in the United States, described the weeks he spent in the forest after escaping a prison camp. I walked about sixty kilometers a day. I walked in mud. The mud collected on my shoes and I cut it off with a knife and continued to walk. Sometimes I had to swim across a river. Sometimes I found bananas in the forest; that was good food. Most of the time I ate leaves. Some of them smelled bad, but I didn’t get poisoned. I was hungry and I ate more. I never got lost in the jungle because when you’re in the jungle at night and you want to know the direction you look at the star. There’s one star called a diamond star. It’s always in the north. The diamond star and the edible leaves were not, I suggest, merely technical means of subsistence for Lt. Somsy; any more than the muddy earth and the river were merely obstacles. They were shifting foes and allies in a densely tangled intimacy among human, earth, plant, and sky. They were forcefully interceding, not passive, but active, not simply the background scenery of history, but historical agents themselves, compelling him into new bodily practice. When she was in her mid-teens, Sodoeung spent time on a Khmer Rouge work crew, digging and hauling dirt for a dam. She described sleeping under trees on the bare ground, where scorpions and centipedes found their way into clothing and backpacks. She and the others on her team carried dirt in baskets suspended on bamboo stalks across their shoulders climbing in and out of a six-meter-deep pit on a log ladder slick with rain and sap. Given only a small portion of rice each day, she learned to find other food such as frogs or a species of mushroom that grew underground. “When you open them on the top, the inside comes out all over, just like hair,” she recalled. “You can eat it raw, or you can make soup, but too bad, we could not boil anything!” The baskets of dirt were tied to the bamboo with cowhide. “When it rained the skin got soggy, and became just like meat,” she said. “It smelled. Flies would follow you everywhere you walked. You smelled like death. Sometimes when we didn’t have food to eat, we used those ropes. We just put them in the fire. Or sometimes it was not cooked.” Water was scarce. Once every two months the laborers were taken two or three miles to a place where they could bathe. They walked barefoot over sharp bamboo stalks. “They stuck our feet,” she recalled.

Wilder Powers  207 You could not just walk. You ran. One of the [Khmer Rouge] would ride on a horse wagon in front, and two of them would ride horses behind. It was just like, I don’t know, maybe a dog. Maybe they were just guarding a dog, taking the dog to have a bath. We ran to take a bath, and after that we ran back again. After the Vietnamese invaded, Sodoeung managed to escape her work unit. “I ran fast,” she said. Ten times faster than anyone. No one can run the way I did. I don’t know how…. I ran, and they shot at me, and I didn’t get hurt. It only went through the side of my clothing…. I ran and ran and ran and they shot at me until they used up all their bullets…. I had to cross a creek, and at that time I didn’t know how to swim very well. I remembered that my brother had said that you could use a long bamboo to flip. So I flipped. But my legs were still in the water. By the creek there was a lot of bushy grass. I hung onto that so the water would not take me. It was deep. All the time I kept flipping. Eventually she made it back to her family. Sodoeung’s senses, like Lt. Somsy’s, became differently attuned to life in the forest. She developed new bodily relationships with wildlife: catching frogs for food, digging up hairy mushrooms, catapulting herself across a stream with a bamboo stalk, grasping onto tufts of grass, and sleeping on the ground among scorpions and cobra. As she became alert to the pulling strength of river water and the stickiness of resinous logs, she also learned to speak to trees and to listen for their windy answers. In this world, she was treated like a dog (in ways that invoke the biopolitical figure of abject beast), but also perhaps developed some of the acute senses, hungers, and skills of one, running uncannily fast and chewing on rawhide rope for food. Khmer Rouge terror threatened to drive humans into a nonhuman realm of existence, but this realm also offered unique opportunities for a survival that was different from the “bare life” theorized by Agamben and frequently deployed by scholars to describe the situations of refugees, prisoners, stateless persons, or slaves. Here humanity, rather than being stripped of its political existence and reduced to animality, bares itself to the metamorphic possibilities of animal existence. When villages, farms, and temples are transformed into war zones and torture sites, the forest offers a counter-transformation of human sociality into a world where the ontological barrier between humans and nonhumans partially dissolves. The destruction of and the displacement from domestic life appear to strengthen animistic sensibilities, prompting Sodoeung’s prayers to the trees, and her attention to their windy answers,

208  Jean M. Langford and Oeur’s prayer to the cobra. Such then is the physical submersion into a nonhuman realm during times of war or political terror that sets the scene for encounters with powerful and morally responsive animals.

Magical Animality While Oeur’s cobra is represented as an actual snake rising out of the cane fields, it simultaneously takes on the aura of an enchanted creature, one who can understand human language and intervene in human fate. The appearance of such animals as figures of miraculous intervention in times of political violence depends on and draws from a broader conceptual repertoire of animality evoked in oral texts and materialized in ritual practice. It is the storied existence of such beasts that makes it possible to imagine wild animals as magical allies in times of social turmoil. In Southeast Asian lore, for instance, potentially helpful creatures often take the form of small wild animals who may be embodiments or ambassadors of spirits. In Cambodia, birds who enter a house are said to carry messages from ancestors, while in Kmhmu tales, humans are often assisted by animals such as anteaters or insects (Lindell et al. 17).10 According to Kmhmu folklorist Kam Raw, when birds, squirrels, or rats enter a domestic environment, acting drowsy and allowing themselves to be caught, they are possessed by the soul of a living friend or relative who is close to death. In such a situation, one should tie a string around the animal’s legs, urging the soul of the relative to stay with his family. When the animal is set free, it will also release the captive soul to its human body, giving the dying person a chance to recover (Lindell et al. 17). Kam Raw also refers to ancestors who appear as barking deer to alert their descendants to danger, cautioning them not to cut timber or work in the field that day. Among non-Christian Hmong, the exchangeability of human and animal souls is ceremonially enacted in animal sacrifices when, for instance, the soul of a pig is offered to the spirits as replacement for the soul of an ill human (Symonds). Exchange of animal and human souls may unfold in less ritualized ways as well. One Hmong emigrant, Pheng, recalled to me that as a child in Thailand, he once spontaneously pointed at a bird flying overhead and said “drop dead.” When the bird fell to the ground, he took it home to his father who roasted it and gave it to Pheng to eat. Three months later, when his father fell ill, a txiv neeb (shaman) told them that his father’s soul was being requested in “trade” for the bird. When you touch or injure a wild creature, Pheng told me, it can injure your spirit. Hmong hunters in Southeast Asia have been known to smear blood on their crossbows after a kill in order to placate the spirits of their prey (Livo and Cha 3). Richard Davis describes sukhwan (soul-calling ceremonies) performed for water buffalo in Northern Thailand, in which the animal’s soul is asked to forgive the hard labor and beatings to which it has been subjected,

Wilder Powers  209 praised for its patience, and asked not to wander out of its body and consort with wild animals but rather to stay on the farm and enjoy the sweet grass. As in sukhwan for humans, the buffaloes are offered cigarettes, betel nut, rice, bananas, and cooked chicken (167). Guido Sprenger relates that the Rmeet of Northern Laos practice a similar ritual for their buffalo when they roam too far from the village. In a ceremony modeled after the “wrist-tying” ceremonies that fasten human souls more closely to their body among many Southeast Asian peoples, the Rmeet tie strings to the horns of the buffalo (295).11 Such rituals reimagine livestock as agricultural co-laborers with choices, longings, and loyalties.12 Some tales emphasize the risks of interspecies socialities, which are subject to shifting rules, the violation of which can have devastating consequences. Cheuang, an emigrant Kmhmu healer, told me the story of two sisters who were brushing their hair. After they finished, they decided to brush the dog’s fur as well. That night it rained so hard that by midnight the village was flooded and everyone drowned. Only seven people, away hunting at the time, survived. “I could go now and still look at that hole,” he said. “It’s as big as this room.” Prayong róoy, a dragon spirit who sometimes appears as a snake, had punished them for treating the dog as a human, he explained. Certain Kmhmu stories refer to humans who are possessed by tiger spirits and become fierce and aggressive, killing and eating their neighbors’ water buffalo. In one Hmong tale, a tiger abducts a woman from her family’s field and makes her his wife (Johnson 419–20). She gives birth to a tailless tiger cub. When her visiting sister admires and cuddles the baby, the father grows angry. He stalks the sister, killing and eating her. Her parents then curse their feline son-in-law, as much for his disrespect as for his savagery. Despite the tiger’s attempts to conciliate them by offering gifts of money and paying a friendly visit dressed in human clothes, he and the cub are eventually killed by his father-in-law, who then soaks his daughter in a bath of cow dung to restore her to more domestic human–animal transactions. In Laos, Lt. Somsy told me, an animal spirit was sometimes known to fall in love with a human woman and marry her. At certain phases of the moon, she would leave her husband’s bed to sleep in another room with the animal spirit. He had heard of one woman in southern Laos who married a paya nak, a sea serpent, and gave birth to five human children. “Some curious people wanted to know if she was really married to the paya nak,” he recalled, “so they followed her, and saw her walking down to the river by herself. She would walk under the water, disappear for a few days and then emerge. After her children were born, she put the children on her back and walked down to the river, disappearing and reappearing in the same way. It’s unbelievable to me too!” Lt. Somsy exclaimed. “If the husband was paya nak, an animal, then why were the children human?” For Lt. Somsy, as for other storytellers, such stories

210  Jean M. Langford are told with a mix of fascination and skepticism. The mystery and ­illogic of these interspecies intimacies makes them especially marvelous. In a Khmer story recounted by Anne Hansen (827), a young girl’s mother is murdered by her husband and his minor wife. The mother takes successive rebirths as plant, animal, and spirit, in order to help her daughter, who suffers from the cruelty of her stepmother. Eventually the girl is murdered by her stepmother and reborn as a bird. While such transmigratory figures might simply be taken as humans in animal (and in this case, plant and spirit) disguise, they might better be understood as unstable becomings, metamorphic beings (or moments in the lives of beings) unsettling the borders of human and nonhuman. Such stories suggest the pantheon of magical animality that becomes available to stories of life under conditions of war and state terror. Miraculous human–animal interactions and metamorphoses are powerful means for envisioning rescue or survival. In his memoir of escaping from the Khmer Rouge, Daran Kravanh describes the assistance he received from his maternal grandfather in the form of a reptile. When his grandfather died, his family buried him near a rice field. At the hundredth day mourning feast, they offered him food at the grave. As they prayed, a lizard crawled out from a fruit tree and ate some of the food. Kravanh’s mother cried, “Father you’ve come back to life.” Thereafter, whenever they visited the grave, they called to Kravanh’s grandfather and the lizard appeared. Kravanh describes spending many hours at the gravesite, lying against the trunk of the fruit tree, listening for his grandfather’s advice. “The voice I heard from him,” he said, “was not a human voice but one of nature— of that place where my grandfather had returned” (LaFreniere 10). Much later, when Kravanh was living in the forest, hungry and wounded from a fight with Khmer Rouge soldiers, he saw a lizard and reassured his companions, “It is my grandfather come to help us” (LaFreniere 68). The animal–human encounters within these stories are reminiscent of what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in the context of Amazonian animism, has termed “perspectivism.” Like Von Uexküll’s biology, perspectivism posits that each creature possesses its own point of view, and experiences its own world. Amazonian cosmologies, like the Southeast Asian stories cited here, recognize a potential for humans and nonhumans to metamorphose into one another, whether inadvertently, or, in the case of shamans or others with special powers, deliberately for the purpose of borrowing or stealing one another’s perspective or power. Where the Southeast Asian stories, in my reading of them, diverge from perspectivism is in the possibility of simultaneous co-subjectivity. In perspectivism, as Viveiros de Castro states, “each species or type of being is endowed with a prosopomorphic or anthropomorphic apperception, seeing itself as a ‘person’ while it sees the other components of its own eco-system as non-persons or nonhumans” (33). “Two species” in this system “cannot see each other simultaneously as people,” he continues (34). This impossibility in the Amazonian cosmos seems to be due, at least in part, to the

Wilder Powers  211 way that interspecies relationships are largely organized around predator and prey. As Viveiros de Castro puts it, “perspectival multiplicity is the correlate of the generalized cannibalism that defines the indigenous cosmopolitical economy” (33). In other words, “In a cosmos totally impregnated with subjecthood, the dominant supposition-fear is that what we eat are always, in the final analysis, souls…” (37). Ultimately, therefore, Amazonian animism “takes the form of…enemism” (41). By contrast, the Southeast Asian stories retold here seem to sustain the possibility of a mutual creaturely awareness of co-subjectivity.13 Certainly, the Southeast Asian stories recognize the risk that Viveiros de Castro identifies for Amazonian shamans or Willerslev for Siberian hunters, of becoming irretrievably lost in an animal world—the human girls who turn into birds, the tiger’s human wife who is narrowly restored to her former self through cow excrement. But even then, the birds, we are told, knew in their hearts that they were human; the tiger’s wife never herself became a tiger, despite cohabiting with one; the cub was both tiger and human; and the husband remained a tiger, only awkwardly attempting at times to mimic humanity as when he donned human clothes. Nor does the tiger or Oeur’s cobra seem to embody the “antithesis of kinship” as does, for instance, the Amazonian jaguar, in Viveiros de Castro’s discussion (38). Rather these Southeast Asian animal figures are available for incorporation, however temporary and ambivalent, into human kinship networks. The Southeast Asian stories may in part reflect a different character of interspecies interactions in largely agricultural communities, where hunting is secondary. They may also reflect the entanglement of Southeast Asian animism with a Buddhist ethos of compassion. As in the Amazon, “divinity is distributed under the form of a potential infinity of nonhuman subjects” (40), but the relationship of these subjects to humans is as likely to be amity as enmity. I suggest that stories of animals as magical beings illuminate forms of animal consciousness that otherwise would remain opaque. A turn to fabulous animals or fabulous aspects of “actual” animals facilitates the imagination of animal desires, emotions, and communications that may be otherwise inaccessible. That said, we should be wary of presuming any firm distinction between actual and fabulous animalities. For one thing, it would likely be impossible to establish universal criteria for actuality. Borges’ imaginary Chinese encyclopedia, which prompted Foucault’s laughter at the start of The Order of Things, comes to mind here, with its lack of classificatory divisions between real and represented animals, or between zoological specimens and mythical creatures. In Southeast Asian literature and ritual, actual and fabulous animalities may be merged, as with Oeur’s cobra. At stake in the distinction between the fabulous and the actual are not only historically contingent organizations of categories but also historically contingent measures for reality. What is critical is not to identify animal entities as actual or fabulous, part-human or wholly animal, but rather, as Deleuze

212  Jean M. Langford and Guattari suggest, to focus on the blurred movement of “becoming-­ animal”—or, for the animal, becoming-human—a process of alliance or symbiosis, rather than the production of a stable hybrid; a rhizomatic transformation rather than a classificatory one (238–39). As Willerslev writes of human–animal becomings among the Yukaghir, “There are no fixed entities here, only continuous transformations…” (6).

Zoopower How different the tigers and sea serpents in the stories retold above are from the werewolf in Homo Sacer, the animalized figure for one who is reduced to bare life, exiled from the polis, at the threshold of the law. The werewolf, for Agamben, represents the figure of a human under a medieval ban, killable with impunity, like the Roman homo sacer, but it also, paradoxically, gestures toward the figure of the sovereign. In either configuration, the werewolf is a symbol of extralegal existence. What is missing from this symbolic werewolf is not only subjectivity, longing, and willfulness, but also (and these are not unrelated, as I suggest above) miraculousness and magic. The wolf, Derrida notes, is stealthy (The Beast and the Sovereign 21), too stealthy perhaps to play the role assigned in Agamben’s text. Moreover, Agamben seems to have overlooked how a werewolf (or were-tiger) might smuggle alien powers not simply into the city but into the intimate space of kinship, sparking expectations of reciprocity and hospitality, invoking less biopolitics than zoopolitesse (Haraway 92). The Hmong tiger husband, for instance, is not reducible to an allegory for a banished savagery within the human. As a jealous family member who loses his temper, forgets his manners, seeks forgiveness, feigns humanity, and offers gifts, he exemplifies the difficulties of finding one’s way in the moral thicket of injurious love and comfortable captivity. Similarly, the Lao sea serpent is not only a figure of predation but also a lover and father, seductively attractive to his ­human wife, commanding her loyalty, and demanding to know his human children. These are moral and contradictory creatures who make decisions and mistakes, never entirely caught in a structuralist maze with only one ending, meaning, or moral lesson. Bang fai, the rocket festival that occurs in Laos at the beginning of the rainy season, is a signal for the nak, the phallic bringers of rain, to awaken. The festival is celebrated partly by boat races in which the vessels themselves are crafted to look like sea serpents. These boats are said to drive the nak out of the river so that they can fertilize the fields, returning to the river again at the end of the rains (Davis 217). Nak move stealthily, one might say, between domesticity and wildness, benevolence and aggression. A reporter visiting Thailand for a bang fai festival in 2002 was shown a postcard sporting a photo of a group of American soldiers, supposedly stationed in Laos during the 1970s, holding

Wilder Powers  213 an eight-meter-long, silvery, eel-like fish. Locals told him that the nak later escaped these soldiers who were carting it to the United States for ­“scientific study.” In fact, this photo, which has also circulated in Laos, was apparently taken in 1996 by the US Navy to show off a giant oarfish found off the west coast of the Americas. Yet that doesn’t prevent the postcard from drawing on the power of the nak to comment on both US military prowess and laboratory science. At the time of the 2002 rocket festival, locals assured the US journalist that “all of the men in the photo met with messy ends” (Gagliardi). Animals like Oeur’s cobra, Kravanh’s reptilian grandfather, and the sea serpent who outmaneuvered the US military oppose the image of bestialization as violation with a more emancipatory beastliness, gesturing toward a subjectivity that is neither debased nor simply savage. In these stories, the human predation of war, terror, and military or paramilitary violence is answered by a counter-animalization whereby escape, protection, defiance, or rescue is sought from or embodied by fantastic creatures. Those who are threatened with dehumanization, vulnerable to being abused as livestock, or killed as subhuman prey conjure alternative subjectivities through collaborations and fusions with nonhuman creatures. They abandon a seemingly futile insistence on rehumanization, turning instead toward a productive merging of human and other-than-human. Rather than holding out for the restoration of a peacetime morality or becoming resigned to the end of morality ­altogether, they gamble on temporary assistance involving moral beasts. Faced with the non-“humaneness” of human society, they turn to a broader realm of sociality in which humans and nonhumans form risky alliances, speaking, sympathizing, and bargaining with one another, exchanging souls and substance. In these stories, the lawlessness of a society at war is displaced by the lawlessness of animals, who do not so much disobey human law, as supersede it with their own moral assessments. Unlike the animality in many accounts of violence, which signifies an instinctual savagery or abjectness, the animals here take responsibility for their actions and hold humans responsible for theirs. It is as if extraordinary animals talk back to human violence from an interspecies ethos that sidesteps human pretensions to justice, while sporadically practicing and rewarding reciprocity, hospitality, mercy, and courage, but with a capriciousness and spontaneity that mocks human moral logic. Such beasts enter the realm of social relations not as symbols of violence or abjection but as moral arbiters and consubstantial possibilities. In his discussion of interactions with domestic buffalo in a South Indian village, Anand Pandian traces what he identifies as a locally s­ pecific biopolitics whereby thieving or violent humans are compared to disobedient buffalo not only in their lack of self-conduct but also in their determination to remain unyoked. In that setting, the bullish traits of social

214  Jean M. Langford rebels who may be either animal or human are alternately ­governed, excused, and celebrated. What I suggest here is that the animal–human ­interactions in Southeast Asian narratives of violence might be thought of less as an alternative biopolitics than as a zoopolitics newly understood as a politics grounded in animal existence. Zoopolitics in this sense might be taken as a branch of the cosmopolitics evoked by Marisol de la Cadena following Isabelle Stengers (“The Cosmopolitical Proposal”), in which nonhumans are not simply the province of scientific investigation or management but enter agentially into political struggles and questions. Zoopolitics might encompass cross-species interactions that are governed by specific rites, customs, contracts, habits, hierarchies, rules, codes, and expectations. Zoopolitics, in this usage, invokes a political and non-representational human–animal relationship that is based neither in analogy (wherein animals represent humans in a semiotic sense) nor in an election of humans as spokespersons for nonhumans (wherein humans represent animals in a political sense). Rather zoopolitics suggests multiple worlds of “reciprocal capture” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics 1) and interspecies interaction. Zoopolitics, as I envision it, questions the conflation of animality with bare (biological) life (see Sinclair), allowing the imagination of an animality not reducible to either brutality or abjectness, an animality that chases questions of power into cosmological terrains. Tales of magical animals dramatize the possibilities of interspecies reciprocity, negotiation, and indebtedness. The animal desires and values posited in fables and uncanny encounters gesture toward an interspecies polis. It is not so much a question of how stories of magical animals incorporate conceptions of political power, but rather how conceptions of political power might be transformed as they are extrapolated into animal kingdoms and how specific animist imaginations of zoopolis might suggest different understandings of power and morality.

Another Snake, by Way of Conclusion This zoopolitics can be brought into sharper focus through a juxtaposition of Oeur’s poem with the poem Snake by D.H. Lawrence, which received sustained attention in Derrida’s ninth session on “the beast and the sovereign” (236–49). In Snake, the poet comes upon a golden snake drinking at his water trough in Sicily. Like the cobra in Oeur’s poem, this snake is splendid, godlike, and venomous. The European poet passes through several moods resembling those of the Cambodian poet—fear, humility, admiration—but also one other that arises, as he writes, from his “education” and his historically specific, colonial masculinity: a mood of human mastery. “And voices in me said, If you were a man/ You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off….If you were not afraid, you would kill him!” The poet vacillates, but eventually throws a log at the snake, who “convulsed in undignified haste,/Writhed

Wilder Powers  215 like lightning, and was gone…” (Lawrence, quoted in Derrida, 240–41). Immediately the European poet regrets his action as mean and petty. The ethics that is awakened in him, Derrida suggests, is an ethics of hospitality toward one who “had come like a guest in quiet” (Lawrence, quoted in Derrida, 241, 247) to share his world, his water. Yet the snake both resembles and does not resemble the structural guest described in certain anthropologies of hospitality. On the one hand, the interaction epitomizes the long-noted ambivalence of the relationship of host and guest (Candea and Da Col S5; Pitt-Rivers 513). Faced with the snake, the poet vacillates between sensations of admiration and fear, and between postures of honor and hostility. The poet’s imagination of the snake as royalty, more specifically a “king in exile” (Lawrence, quoted in Derrida, 246, 248), might logically exempt the snake from the usual obeisance expected of a guest (Pitt-Rivers 513). On the other hand, as Julian Pitt-Rivers noted, “A host is host only on the territory over which on a particular occasion he claims authority” (514), and it is not at all certain that the snake acknowledges the water trough as the human’s domain. In this poem, territories are implicitly contested, trumped by a deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari) that disrupts the domesticity of the water trough. Who is whose guest on this Sicilian terrace (as in the greater biosphere) is far from clear. By contrast, in Oeur’s poem, the guest, if there is one, is the human, who feels an interloper in a field of cane that is more home to the cobra than to the prisoner. Both poets recognize a subjectivity in the snakes they encounter: the snakes think and muse and gaze; Lawrence “longed to talk to” the golden snake, while Oeur addressed half his poem directly to the cobra. In Oeur’s poem, however, moral choice (to strike or not) belongs to the snake (as well as the human), while in Lawrence’s poem, moral choice belongs only to the white man. For Oeur, the cobra might be said to be “rich in world” rather than “poor” (Agamben, The Open 49–62; Heidegger); it does not just behave, it acts; or in Derrida’s terms, it does not just react, it responds (Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?”). It is not limited to apprehending water, or a dim mammalian scent, or the shadow and crashing blow of a log; it is capable of recognizing other subjectivities, whether spirits or the human trembling before it, and even of feeling “loving kindness” toward them. For Lawrence, on the other hand, the golden snake is imagined to be unaware of the waiting human, rapt and captivated within its own world, a glorious creature, which he belatedly wishes he had honored and not only churlishly chased away. Despite these differences, if in both poems the animal possesses a certain dignified sovereignty, it is the sovereignty of the stranger (Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 244), who makes claims on the poet’s respect. This animal other is simultaneously the one to whom a certain reverence is owed and the one whose presence is a forceful reminder of this debt. Finally, like the were-tiger and the sea serpent, like the grandfather lizard, or the small animals bearing messages and assistance, both snakes

216  Jean M. Langford force an imagination of animal subjectivity and interspecies commerce. Like the animals appearing in the Hindu texts explored by Veena Das, these serpents seem to encourage a recognition that humans owe their lives to the “generosity” of animals. To complete the trio of snakes, recall the Thai nak who guarantees the rains, and yet defies the zoological project of the American soldiers, repaying them with “messy ends.” Such fantastic beasts draw attention to heterogeneous powers that are beyond human governance yet participate in human history. These creatures are political in their engagement with sociality, morality, and domination; metaphysical in their capacity to shed and take on forms like skin; and non-humanist in their indifference to human agendas. One might argue that it is human imagination that ascribes moral and political subjectivity to animals through such stories and encounters. Yet, as Graeber astutely suggests in his discussion of fetishism, the magical entities that humans imagine inevitably have power over the humans who imagine them (143–45). The imagination of magical animality demands, however paradoxically, that animal subjectivity be autonomous of human imagination. These animals do not simply offer a striking alternative to the twin figures of cruelty and abjection within accounts of animality in human violence. They suggest possibilities for conceptualizing moralities and politics that pivot less around rights, justice, or the management of life, than around kinship, generosity, hospitality, reciprocity, and alliance.

Acknowledgments A version of this essay was published under a different title in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2013. Special thanks to Sharon Kaylen, Hoon Song, and Stuart McLean, among others, for their comments on earlier versions. Fieldwork and writing were supported by the Cross-Cultural Health Care Program, Salus Mundi Foundation, School for Advanced Research in the Human Experience, and the University of Minnesota. I’m indebted to the generous research assistance of Sompasong Keohavong, Linda Chulaparn, Rouen Sam, Paularita Seng, and Yakobo Xiong. Some early thoughts related to this chapter appear in Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile.

Notes 1 Conversations referenced in this chapter took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s in a US city, as part of ethnographic research on death, ghosts, and biopolitics as elucidated by the stories of survivors of the covert war in Laos and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. 2 In 2003, for instance, an anti-Thai riot was sparked in Phnom Penh by a Thai actress’ alleged comment that she would rather be reincarnated as a dog than as a Khmer (Hinton, “Khmerness and the Thai ‘Other’: Violence,

Wilder Powers  217 Discourse, and Symbolism in the 2003 Anti-Thai Riots in Cambodia” 445–68). 3 See also Allen Feldman’s thoughtful discussion of the biopolitics of animality (354–410). 4 I assume that Laos and Cambodia compose simply one region of many from which a similar critique might be launched. 5 To some extent, this usage resonates with Derrida’s reference to zoopolitics in a discussion of fabled animals (such as the dove or the wolf) who take on a political character in European thought (The Beast and the Sovereign 4). Elsewhere, however, Derrida suggests zoopolitics as simply another term for biopolitics and the term that Agamben surely would (or should) have preferred (The Beast and the Sovereign 325, 349). 6 On overlapping umwelten, see also Brett Buchanan (15, 25, 164) and Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew (135). 7 The names of emigrants who shared their stories with me are pseudonyms. 8 For accounts of Cambodia in the 1970s and beyond, see David Chandler (A History of Cambodia, Voices from S-21), Ben Kiernan (Genocide and ­Democracy in Cambodia, The Pol Pot Regime), Chanthou Boua, May ­Ebihara (“A Cambodian Village under the Khmer Rouge 1975–1979,” “Memories of the Pol Pot Era in a Cambodian Village”), Kate Frieson, Gregory Stanton, Serge Thion, John Marston, Judy Ledgerwood and John Vijghen, and ­A lexander Hinton (“Purity and Contamination in the ­Cambodian ­G enocide,” Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide), among others. 9 For accounts of the wars and political regimes of late twentieth-century Laos, see Martin Stuart-Fox, Jane Hamilton-Merritt, and Grant Evans (Lao Peasants under Socialism, The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance), among others. 10 See also Robert Wessing’s discussion of lizards in East Java (206). 11 For accounts of soul callings involving tying a string on the wrist to fasten the soul more closely to the body, see Ashley Thompson on Khmer rites and Richard Davis (145) on Lao rites. See also Alan Klima. 12 Vinciane Despret observes that a shepherd’s work is impossible without the cooperation of the sheep (179–81). 13 Such co-subjectivity does not necessarily imply equality or a relationship of peers. See also Rane Willerslev’s discussion of animal personhood in Yukaghir cosmology.

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Notes on Contributors

Yiftach Ashkenazi is a PhD candidate in the Hebrew Literature d ­ epartment, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His PhD d ­ issertation title is “The Year 2008 in Israeli Literature” (the work examines the ­connection between economy, politics, sociology, and poetics in the c­ ontemporary Israeli prose). His articles have been published in Mikan, among others. 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 coeditor (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 a number of edited collections. Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English at Boise State University where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis; p ­ ostcoloniality, and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (Bloomsbury), Lacan and the Nonhuman (Palgrave; coedited), and Postcolonial Lack (SUNY; forthcoming). Omri Grinberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Program for ­Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, Bar-Ilan University. His ­interests in scholarship include the anthropology of post/colonial violence, e­ thnography of state and nongovernmental organizations, human rights, and witnessing/­testimony studies. His articles have been published in Anthropologica, Children and Society, and Dispatches, the website of Cultural Anthropology. Efe Khayyat is assistant professor of Comparative Literature and A ­ frican, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. Rebecca Krasner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. She specializes in ­twentiethand twenty-first-century literature from Francophone Africa and the

222  Notes on Contributors Caribbean. Her dissertation, entitled “Shithole Futures,” focuses on representations of catastrophe and disaster response in extreme contemporary narrative fiction from Haiti, Martinique, and West Africa. Jean M. Langford, professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, is the author of Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance and Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Her book in progress is entitled Animals Undone: Eccentricity and Creativity in Captive Life. Isaac Rooks  is a PhD candidate and graduate school fellow at the ­University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. His ­research centers on media depictions of animals and landscapes, with an emphasis on how popular cinema uses these subjects to process traumas related to environmental catastrophes and colonial violence. Jason Sandhar  is finishing a book manuscript, Everywhere, Animals Appear: Species, Race, and the State from the Raj to Global India, and starting work on another that investigates Indian nature writing in ­English. He completed his PhD in English Literature at Western ­University in 2019, and has recently published an article with Interventions. Suvadip Sinha  is 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. Alexander G. Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke University Press, 2014). Madeleine Wilson is an early career researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her research centers on the political ­symbolism of the human body in postindependence African literatures.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abdülaziz, Sultan of Ottoman Empire 75 Abdülhamid II, Sultan of Ottoman Empire 74–5 Aboriginal 128, 143 Abrams, Susan 38–9 Acampora, Ralph R. 110 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 18n3, 87n7, 114, 120–1, 123n14, 160, 171, 189, 202–3, 207, 212, 217n5; Language and Death 120; The Open 160 Agnon, S.Y. 15, 89, 92, 95, 101–3 Ahuja, Neel 7–10, 20n20, 49, 189 Alice Springs (Australia) 184 allegorical animals 167–72 Amazonian animism 210, 211 Amazonian cosmologies 210 Amazonian shamans 211 American autobiography (Laferrière): humans and animals: reclaiming the body 177–9; “La frontière entre les hommes et les animaux semble bien mince” 180; opacity and agency 175–7; revitalizing animal in 165–80; suffering and sympathy 173–5 American Mythologies 166 Anglophone postcolonial criticism 2 animacy 10, 65n3, 167–8, 170–1 animacy hierarchies 9–10, 50, 57, 167, 173 animal bodies: in Moxyland 183–99; in Zoo City 183–99 “animal geographies” 12 Animalities 3 “animal masks” 49

animals: allegorical 167–72; allegories 168–9; ethical relationality and 50–8; fictions 14; human(s and) animals: reclaiming body 177–9; imagery 16, 169; “La frontière entre les hommes et les animaux semble bien mince” 180; living with 172–3; opacity and agency 175–7; suffering and sympathy 173–5; as surplus in postcolonial literature 29–45; in the twenty-first century 185–7 Animal’s People (Sinha) 13 “animal studies” 1–16, 18n3, 18n4, 31, 185 Anthropocene 6, 7, 19n13; Protean fluctuations 154 anthropocentrism 5, 40; biopolitical limits of 149–57 anthropomorphism 13, 147; anthropos in 20n25; conventional 158, 160; in The Tusk That Did the Damage 147–60 anti-Semitism 92 “aposymbiots” 191 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 5 Arab Jewish identities 92 Armenian genocide of 1915 15, 80 Armstrong, Phillip 8, 167, 174 An Aroma of Coffee (Laferrière) 172 Australian animal horror films 128, 139 Australian crocodiles: in Black Water 127–44; in Dark Age 127–44; different paths 140–4; lay of the land 129–33; in Rogue 127–44 Australian culture 130–1

224 Index Australian human-versus-nature “eco-horror” films 140 Australian swamps: beast and its lair 133–40; in Black Water 127–44; in Dark Age 127–44; different paths 140–4; lay of the land 129–33; in Rogue 127–44 “autopoiesis of being hybridly human” 6 Avedikian, Serge 15, 74, 80–1 Azuélos, Thomas 80 Badiou, Alain 40–1 Baer, Ben Conisbee 35–6 Baiga 148 Baker, Steve 31 bang fai festival 212 Bangladesh Liberation War 39 The Barking Island (Chienne d’histoire) (short film) 15, 74 The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) 15, 48–50, 60–4, 66n17 Battle of Algiers at Fifty (O’Leary) 62 Bauman, Zygmunt 195 Beasts of No Nation (Kuti) 192 Bengal tiger 39, 41 Benjamin, Andrew 87 Berger, John 140, 186 Beukes, Lauren 17, 183–99 Bhattacharya, Nabaraun 15, 108, 116 Big Bang 43 biocentrism 6 biological materialism 76 biological theories of race 184 biopolitical limits of anthropocentrism 149–57 biopolitical technologies 50, 65 biopolitics 5, 216n1; affirmative 49–50; Agambenian theories of 203; alternative 214; neoliberal 178; postcolonial 14; totalitarian 197 biopower 112, 188 bios 7, 16, 122n1, 180, 203 biosemioticians 3 biosociality 112 biotechnology 185 Bird, Deborah 11 The Birds (Hitchcock) 127 The Birth of Jungle (Lundblad) 4 Black Water (film) 128, 131, 132, 134; Australian crocodiles in 127–44; Australian swamps in 127–44;

moral of vulnerability and 141; wilderness spaces in 143 Boisseron, Bénédicte 7 Boitani, Luigi 11 Botha, P.W. 192 Bouchareb, Rachid 64 Boyarin, Daniel 92 Braidotti, Rosi 30, 180 Broken Monsters (Beukes) 197, 199 Brower, Matthew 154 Buchanan, Brett 78, 204 Bussolini, Jeffrey 204 Butler, Judith 114 Byrd, Jodi 141 Calcutta tsunami 42 Cambodia 13–14, 201–5, 208, 217n4 capitalism 41, 49, 153, 157 Caretsian dualism 31 Cartesian mind–body dualism 184 “cartoon revolution” 78 Cecil the Lion 2 Central Intelligence Agency 205 Cesaire, Aime 6 Cevdet, Abdullah 15, 74–7, 81, 83, 86 Chamayou, Grégoire 169 Chandler, David 204–5 The Charm of Endless Afternoons (Laferrière) 176 Chateaubriand 79, 82 Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction) 108, 115 Chen, Mel 9–10, 167, 177 Chienne d’histoire (short film) 15, 74, 80 Christianity 74, 84 Christian theology 31 Chrulew, Matthew 11, 204 Clark, David 48 “classical political cinema” 64 Coetzee, J.M. 13, 100, 167 Cohen, Uri S. 96, 104n4 colonial encounters 92–3 colonialism 11, 15, 29, 51; Enlightenment discourses and 192; in the Hebrew canon 89–103; postcolonial zoocriticism and 30 colonial violence 16, 61, 203 “companion species” 12, 56 The Companion Species Manifesto (Haraway) 12, 111 conservationists 16, 147–9 conservation networks 157

Index  225 conventional anthropomorphism 158, 160 “corporate dystopia” 188 cosmopolitan conservation 160 cosmopolitan environmentalism: state corruption and slow violence of 151–7 Cotezee, J.M. 31 “creaturely cinema” 116 “creaturely poetics” 110 crocodile horror films 14 crocodiles 136; as “charismatic” animal 14; gargantuan 41; as monstrous 138; saltwater 128, 131; significance of 138; solitary 137; as unheimlich 138 The Cry of the Mad Birds 168 “cultural schizophrenia” 78 culture: Australian, 130–1; binary system of, 180; environmental attitudes, 142; “genre-specific” narrativization, 6; human, development of, 142; Israeli, 15, 90–2; nature, relationships, 53; Ottoman revolutionary press, 78; pre-national sentiments, 91; print culture boom, 75, 78; United States, 10; Western, 11, 137, 142; “zoo,” 192 “cynegetic power” 169, 171, 172 Daniyal, Shoaib 56 Dark Age (film) 128; Australian crocodiles in 127–44; Australian Swamps in 127–44 Das, Veena 216 Dash, J. Michael 180 Dave, Naisargi 103 Davis, Richard 208 Dayan, Colin 117, 122 Death of a Discipline (Spivak) 31 dehumanization 15, 49, 109, 120, 128, 190, 197, 213 dehumanized anthropocentrism 16, 110 Deleuze, Gilles 18n3, 194, 211 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 30 Dermody, Maeve 133 Derrida, Jacques 11, 15, 58, 73, 140; The Animal That Therefore I am, 15; L’animal que donc je suis, 73; Spectres of Marx, 188 Despret, Vinciane 151

Devi, Mahasweta 13, 32–5, 38, 42, 45 Diary of a Writer in Pajamas (Laferrière) 176 Dining with the Dictator (Laferrière) 168, 171, 174 Discourse on Colonialism (Cesaire) 6 Disgrace (Coetzee) 13, 100, 167 “The Dog of Tetwal” (Manto) 15, 48–53, 100 dogs: as historical and ethical obstacle in WwB 97–100; maddeningly intertextual 100–2; pariah 108–22; postcolonial trauma and 93–5; radicality of not seeing others’ pain 102–3; as radically indeterminate sign in OY 95–7 domestication 10, 53, 122n5 Douglas, Mary 137 Down among the Dead Men (Laferrière) 175 A Drifting Year (Laferrière) 173 Drury, Meghan 62–3 Duvalier, François 168–71 Edelman, Lee 36 Ekotto, Freida 178 elephants 147–60 “English identity” 11 The Enigma of the Return (Laferrière) 169–70, 179 Enlightenment 36; anthropocentrism 14, 40; European identity 29 Enlightenment Man 29 Enlightenment thinking 184 environmentalism: cosmopolitan 151–7; First World 152; messianic 40; Western 152 environmental toxicity 148 environmental violence 16 Eroshima (Laferrière) 166 ethical relationality and animal 50–8 ethics: ethical relationality and the animal 50–8; of postcolonial animalities 48–65; of resistance 30 ethologists 3, 52 Euroamerican animal theory 12 Europe: colonial expansions 29; Enlightenment Man 29; literary traditions 32 European Enlightenment Man 29 European modernity 77, 86 experience of planetarity 33

226 Index Fanon, Frantz 6, 15, 48–50, 58–60, 63–5; Black Skins, White Masks 6; The Wretched of the Earth 6, 15, 48, 58 farming communities 157 First World conservationists 16, 147 First World environmentalism 152 Folman, Ari 15, 89, 97 Fortuny, Kim 12 Foucault, Michel 134, 188, 193; The Order of Things 211 Free Willy (film) 144 Freud, Sigmund 37, 135, 138, 153 Friedberg, Anne 117 Front de Libèration Nationale (FLN) 60 Fu Manchu 10 “gargantuan crocodiles” 41 Gemayel, Bachir 97 genetic experimentation 188 genocide 82, 95, 171, 184 Ghosh, Amitav 2, 13, 32, 39, 45, 150 Giblett, Rod 137, 138 Gibson, Ross 129 Glick, Megan 189 globalised capitalism 41 Global North 147, 150–3, 179–80 Global South 147; interspecies conflict in 148–9 Gonds 148, 153 gorilla Harambe killing 189 Gothic authors 142 Gothic literature 142 Guattari, Felix 18n3, 194, 212, 215 Guha, Ramachandra 148, 151, 153 Haggaig, Brahim 60 Haiti 13–14, 16, 168–71, 175, 178–80 Haraway, Donna 3, 4, 12, 111, 151; The Companion Species Manifesto 12, 111; When Species Meet 12 Hardt, Michael 50, 61 Hayles, N. Katherine 5 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 62 Hebrew canon: colonialism in 89–103; trauma in 89–103 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 120–1 Hegelian master–slave dialectic 121 Heidegger, Martin 87, 121 Heideggerian humanism 121 heimlich 31, 138, 192

Heise, Ursula 150 heterotopias 134–5 Hitchcock, Alfred 104n6, 127 Hochberg, Gil 100 Hollywood 32, 131 Holocaust 15, 94, 98 Holtmeier, Matthew 64 Homel, David 166, 180n1 homo oeconomicus 6, 19n13 homo politicus 6 homo religiosus 6 Homo Sacer 212 Honig, Bonnie 171 How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (Laferriere) 166, 178 Huggan, Graham 2, 9, 29, 177 human–animal conflicts 16, 147 human animals 110, 117, 119 “human–animal studies” 2–3, 9, 18n4, 20n24 human exceptionalism 184, 190, 199 human inequalities 29, 39 human language 16, 52, 111, 120–1, 186, 204, 208 human rights: violating 17, 122n4, 193–7 human sovereignty 41 “human suffering” 5 human symbolization 30 human–wildlife conflict 148–9 The Hungry Tide (Ghosh) 2, 13, 32, 39, 45, 150 Hurley, Kelly 195 hypermasculine nationalism 50 “I am Feeling Fine Now” (“Mein Hun Thik Thak Han”) (Sandhu) 15, 108–11, 115 Ihimaera, Witi 13; The Whale Rider 13 Imaginary Maps (Devi) 35 International Monetary Fund 153 interspecies conflict: in the Global South 148–9; in The Tusk That Did the Damage 147–60 Islam 57, 76 “The Istanbul Society for the Protection of Animals” 79, 86 James, Tania 16, 147–60 Janzen, Daniel 148 Jarratt, John 143 Jaws (Spielberg) 127

Index  227 Jewish history 15, 99, 104n2 Jewish masculinity 93 Jews 92, 94, 100 Johannesburg 191–3, 197 Jung, Carl 109, 120 Kama Sutra Zoo 166 Kam Raw 208 Khalistan movement 16, 110, 115 Khanna, Ranjana 62–3 Khmer Rouge regime 201, 203, 205, 216n1 Kim, Claire Jean 5, 10 Kohn, Eduardo 52 Al-Koni, Ibrahim 1, 8 Korzweil, Baruch 96 Kravanh, Daran 210, 213 Kuti, Fela 192 Lacan, Jacques 37, 43 LaCapra, Dominick 94, 99 Laferrière, Dany 16, 165–80 l’animot 11, 19n19 Laplanche, Jean 37 Lawrence, D.H. 214 Lebanese Civil War 97 Les Chiens d’Istanbul (Pinguet) 15, 74, 81 Levinas, Emmanuel 48, 87 “L’île aux chiens” 79 Lippit, Akira Mizuta 109, 151 The Lives of Animals (Coetzee) 13 Loti, Pierre 81–2 Lubdhak (“The Dog Star”) (Bhattacharya) 15, 108, 116–17, 120–1, 122n7 Lundblad, Michael 3–4, 18n3 Madden, Francine 148 magical animality 208–12; between creaturely worlds 204–8; Snake 214–16; in tales of war and terror 201–16; zoopower 212–14 “magic realism” 1, 2 Mahmud II, Sultan of Ottoman Empire 75 Man–tiger conflict 41 Manto, Saadat Hasan 15, 48, 50–1, 100–1, 113, 122n6 Martin, Jean 60 Marvin, Garry 3 Marxism 85 Mathis-Moser, Ursula 167

Maturana, Humberto 6 Maus (Spiegelman) 95 Mbembe, Achille 5, 17n1, 183–4, 187–9, 194; On the Postcolony 5 McHugh, Susan 1, 3, 8, 109 McLean, Greg 128 Mda, Zakes 13; The Whale Caller 13 messianic environmentalism 40 metaphysics 45 Middle Ages 134 Middle East 81 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 2 Mieth, Hansel 9 Mitchell, Radha 131 modernity 29; European 77, 86; violent 185 Mohanram, Radhika 191 monohumanism 7 Morran, Albert 130 Morton, Timothy 31 Moxyland (Beukes) 17, 183; animal bodies in 183–99; destabilizing human-animal binary 188–90; disintegrating body 193–7; porous borders 188–90; “the thing”: animal in twenty-first century 185–7; violating human rights 193–7 multispecies ethnography 10–11, 151 Muslim Turks 80, 86 Nachträglichkeit (Freud) 37 “National Geographic imaginary” 129, 141 national poetics 92–3 Nazism 94, 203 “necropolitics” 49, 65, 189, 194 Negri, Antonio 61 neoliberal anthropocentrism 14 neoliberal humanism 40 Nerlich, David 128 Nicholson, Arch 128 Nixon, Rob 148 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 157 nonhuman animals 3–4, 12, 108–9, 112, 114, 116–21, 122n1, 127, 150, 159, 201–4 Not Quite Hollywood (documentary film) 129 Numunwari (Webb) 143 Obama, Barack 147 Oeur, U Sam 201–2, 204, 215

228 Index O’Leary, Alan 62 Only Yesterday (Agnon) 15, 89, 101; dogs as radically indeterminate sign in 95–7; radicality of not seeing others’ pain 102–3 ontogeny 6 O’Regan, Tom 129, 141 Orientalism 82, 86 Orientalist imagination 85 Ottoman Empire 74–5 Ottoman revolutionary press 78 Ottoman Turkish 76 “outback stories” 129 Outside the Law (film) 64 “Ozploitation” films 129 Palestinian Nakba 93, 99 Pandian, Anand 213 pariah dogs: barking dog needs to be killed 109–16; canine outcasts 116–20; need to listen to those barking dogs 120–2; precarious cohabitation 108–22 Parrikka, Jussi 59 Pathet Lao 205 Peterson, Jennifer Lynn 136 “petishism” 117 Phalange (Christian-Lebanese militia) 97 phylogeny 6 Pick, Anat 110 Piercian biosemiotics 52 Pinguet, Catherine 15, 74, 81, 82 pinjrapole 118 Platonism 85 Plumwood, Val 140, 142 “political advocacy” 30 political animality: case for 58–65; tapeworm 58–65 politics: does the tapeworm have a head? 58–65; political animality, case for 58–65; of postcolonial animalities 48–65 Pol Pot 202 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 37 Pontecorvo, Gillo 15, 48, 60 postcolonial animal: animal studies, 2; “A Strangeness beyond Reckoning,” 39–45; autobiographical animal, 74; bio/necropolitical trajectory in, 20n26; conceptual framework, 4; discussions of, 13; empirical impossibility of pterodactyl, 33–9;

foundational work of, 9; guiding thread for, 8; human–animal studies, 2–3; project of, 13; question of, 87 postcolonial animal studies 9–10, 13, 20n26 postcolonial cultural texts 2, 3, 13, 50, 51 postcolonial ecocriticism 17, 29 Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Huggan and Tiffin) 9, 29 postcolonial literature 2; animal as surplus in 29–45 postcolonial zoocriticism 14, 29, 30 postcolonial zoopolitics 110 posthumanism 3–5, 16, 49, 180 postmodernism 5 predatory nationalism 51 preindustrial communities 148 Price, Jason 184, 185 pterodactyl 42; empirical impossibility of 33–9 “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha” (Devi) 13, 32, 33 Quammen, David 131, 142, 144 “queer animality” 10 quotidian relationalities 3 Ravikant 55, 66n9 Ray, Sangeeta 35 Remlinger, Paul 76, 80–1 revolutionary politics 79 Rogue (film) 128, 131; Australian crocodiles in 127–44; Australian Swamps in 127–44 Rothberg, Michael 94–5 Roy, Arundhati 153 Royal Lao Army 205 Rushdie, Salman 2 Ryan, Mark David 131 Sabra and Shatila massacre 91, 97 Sandhu, Waryam Singh 15–16, 108–16, 119–21 Sebald, W.G. 159 Shah, Waris 54 Shelton, Allen 135, 138 Shukin, Nicole 5, 110 Simpson, Catherine 139–40 Singer, Peter 7 Singh, Gurvinder 108 Sinha, Indra 13

Index  229 “slow violence” 148 Snake (Lawrence) 214 snake mythologies 14 social violence 203–4 Solinas, Franco 60 Soulé, Michael 148 South African literature 17, 183–5, 190, 197 South Asia: Baiga 148; Gonds 148; preindustrial communities in 148 Southeast Asian animism 211 “species critique” 9 speciesism 2, 3, 5 Spiegel, Marjorie 7, 177 Spiegelman, Art 95 Spielberg, Steven 127 Spivak, Gayatri 31, 34–5 state corruption 151–7 Stav, Shira 99 Steinwand, Jonathan 150 “storied experiences” 11 “A Strangeness beyond Reckoning” 39–45 stray dogs 11–12, 15, 20n22, 53, 60n66, 75, 77, 83, 117, 119, 122 street dogs 116, 118–19 sukhwan (soul-calling ceremonies) 208–9 Sunderbans: crabs 41; deltaic ecology 41 swamps 127–44 Sykes, Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark 15, 74, 81–2, 87n3 Sykes-Picot agreement 81 “sympathetic imagination” 174 Talat Pasha 80 tapeworm 58–65 Tarantino, Quentin 129 Tarun Saint 55 taxonomical hierarchies 10 Thacker, Eugene 44 theocentrism 6 Theravada Buddhism 202 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 194 Tiffin, Helen 2, 9, 29–31, 41, 177 Time Magazine 9, 19n13 T’mol Shilshum 89 tontons macoutes 168, 171–2, 177 transnational capitalism 157 Traucki, Andrew 128

trauma 94; as form of grace 101; in the Hebrew canon 89–103; postcolonial 93–5 “traumatic realism” 95 Tsing, Anna 10–11 Tulloch, John 130 The Tusk That Did the Damage (James) 16, 147; “and say the animal responded?” James’s “strange and methodical” elephant 157–60; anthropomorphism in 147–60; biopolitical limits of anthropocentrism 149–57; intersecting boundaries 149–57; interspecies conflict in 147–60; interspecies conflict in Global South 148–9; overview 147; slow violence of cosmopolitan environmentalism 151–7; state corruption 151–7 Twain, Mark 15, 74, 83 unheimlich 38, 138, 192 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 205 Varela, Francisco 6 Vartan, Michael 132 Vieth, Errol 130 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 210–11 Von Uexküll, Jakob 204, 210 Waltz with Bashir (animated documentary) 15, 89, 101; dog(s) as historical and ethical obstacle in 97–100; radicality of not seeing others’ pain 102–3 Water Buffalo Cobra and the Prisoner of War (poem) 201 Webb, Grahame 143 Weheliye, Alexander 6, 7 Weinstein Company 129 Wenzel, Jennifer 19n15, 34 Western culture 11, 137, 142 Western environmentalism 152 Western epistemological tradition 177, 178 Western humanist orthodoxies 16 Western metaphysical tradition 121 Western traditions of rationality 17 The White Bone (Gowdy) 31 White Man’s Burden 148, 153 “Why Dogs and Puppies” 56 Willerslev, Rane 211, 212

230 Index Wolfe, Cary 3, 4, 7 Woodward, Wendy 9, 185, 193 Worboys, Michael 11, 20n21 Wynter, Sylvia 6 Youcef, Saadi 60 Young Turkish revolution 78 Young Turks 74–5, 77–81, 84 Yusoff, Kathryn 7, 19n13 Zionism 90, 92; new Jew 92–3 Zionist dialogic imagination 90 Zionist histories 15 Zionist movement 96 Zionist semiotic economies 93

Zionist symbolic dialogs 94 Žižek, Slavoj 43 zoe 16, 180, 203 Zoo City (Beukes) 17, 183; animal bodies in 183–99; “The Animalled” as apartheid allegory 191–3 zoomorphism 13 zoonotic diseases 12 zoopolitics 5, 122n1, 214; bio/ necropolitics as version of 108; as branch of cosmopolitics 214; Derrida’s reference to 217n5; postcolonial 14, 110; usage of 204 zoo sex workers 193