Frida Purdon, Co-Senior Editor
Though ecocriticism has become more prevalent in recent years, thinking about animals or contending with them as moral subjects remains, for the most part, beyond the pale. Even those who are aligned with environmentalism tend to think of animal rights as a politically unserious, frivolous sort of fixation, as a misdirection of political energy, or as the prerogative of privileged Westerners, a notion which erases the fact that for centuries Western intellectual traditions have expressed profound contempt for the nonhuman. When I express concern for animals, people usually demand that I focus on humanity instead, as if by sympathizing with the nonhuman I were somehow failing to attend to the suffering of human beings all over the world.
Not only is this thinking predicated on a kind of scarcity model of care—as if animal rights and human rights were mutually exclusive—it’s also discordant with many of the principles of decolonization. Coding animal rights as politically inane or meaningless is the result of the age-old colonial tendency to totally devalue animals, to conceive of them as resources or “automata,” and it can bleed into a kind of epistemic racism; if caring for animals is frivolous, then any cultural tradition concerned with animals, like many Indigenous epistemologies, is inherently unserious and unrigorous. Simpson and Hogan, both of whom have worked to dismantle the typical binary between the natural and the cultural, have argued that rethinking our assumptions about the value of the nonhuman is integral to any decolonial project. Simpson has written extensively about animals as teachers and relatives; Hogan has described animals as Elders and ancestors. Indigenous thinkers have always espoused conceptions of personhood that enfold the nonhuman and allow for difference and unintelligibility. They have forged these sorts of connections often, I would argue, at the cost of forfeiting intellectual legitimacy in the eyes of European hegemony; rather than seeking transcendence or escape from the so-called material realm, many Indigenous epistemologies are geared towards establishing a deeper intimacy with one’s surroundings, including with animals.
Indigenous thinkers are not the only ones establishing these sorts of connections, however. In Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, Joshua Bennett explores how various Black writers, from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright to Jasmyn Ward to Toni Morrison, express a complex sense of kinship with animals and, in so doing, “claim a vision of personhood rooted not in ownership but rather in the desire for recognition and care.” Aware of the mutability of a term like “personhood” and writing against “centuries of dehumanizing discourse made material in law, literature, and everyday instances of inequality,” these authors are, Bennett writes, “able to articulate a set of ethics, and what is more, a philosophy of mind, that is instructive for those of us interested in thinking toward a more robust vision” of human and nonhuman life.
Camille Dungy does something similar in her book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, or in her anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, which demonstrates how the Black aesthetic tradition has always been alive to alternative forms of personhood. Black Nature reinterprets the natural; nature is “too often defined as wilderness” when “in fact, nature is wherever we are.” In doing so, it challenges not only the whiteness of canonical nature writing but conceptions of nature which associate it strictly with whiteness and imply that appreciating the natural world, however it may manifest, is the purview solely of white people. Defining nature as “wilderness” cordons off the natural and renders it inaccessible to the majority of human beings. It also presumes that the human and the natural are discrete and that caring for the natural world, and for animals, is antithetical to caring for themselves.
All of these writers hail from communities historically excluded from the human. Their identifications with animals are therefore not uncomplicated. None of these authors is suggesting that the denigration of animals is in any way equivalent to the dehumanization faced by their communities. Thinking about animals is rather a means of thinking about how our notions about what kinds of lives matter shift and remain limited, and about the possibility of different forms of value and recognition. Above all, these writers refute the old colonial hierarchies of life which remain entrenched, even among progressives. More than that, they challenge the scarcity thinking which dictates that by caring for animals one neglects humanity, as if these projects weren’t entwined.
