This special session panel interrogates how a more inclusive, non-anthropocentric understanding of humanism can be cultivated through a close reading of human subjectivities as interminably linked with nonhuman others, particularly nonhuman animals and ecological landscapes, with whom they share temporal-spatial boundaries and lived experiences. It shows how a scholarship that brings the disciplinary fields of postcolonial narratology, ecocriticism and animality studies into conversation becomes more productive for understanding subjectivity and species life in postcolonial contexts, than that where the cultural significance, perspective, and representation of nonhuman others are not taken into consideration. In investigating how social and ecological environments affect human-nonhuman interactions, and are in turn transformed by interspecies dynamics of cohabitation; how postcolonial literatures confront the questions of justice against the interconnected violences of racism, casteism and speciesism; in what ways nonhuman animals perceive culturally mediated social conditions, ecological loss, and climate changes; and to what extent postcolonial writers have incorporated the perspective of the nonhuman agents in their literary practice through narratological innovations, this panel attempts to answer how interspecies encounter affects postcoloniality. In exploring how social oppression is related to species oppression and ecological imperialism, this panel addresses the questions and concerns revolving around the MLA 2020 Presidential Theme: Being Human. As David Herman points out, developing innovative approaches to the study of fictional narratives that feature nonhuman beings, particularly in their interactions with human characters, has the potential to bridge cultural and scientific understandings of humans’ ties with and responsibilities to broader biotic communities (2). Additionally, critical postcolonial interventions reveal not only how “the very notion “animal” carries mythopoetic, biological-ecological, sociohistorical, and legal-political resonances that are multiplied when human-animal interactions come into view” (Herman 2), but also how human-nonhuman lives are entangled into multispecies assemblages when biopolitical violences are perpetrated through the manipulation of species boundary.

As Tiffin and Huggan point out in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, the very ideology of colonialism was founded and consolidated through a collusion of anthropocentrism with Eurocentrism, and manipulation of species boundary by designating indigenous communities as primitive, animalistic and thus worthy of subordination. As a consequence, the suspicion that interrogating the sufferings and perspectives of the nonhuman animal might trivialize that of the marginalized human subjects has only served, ironically, to proliferate what Neel Ahuja calls the colonial strategy of speciated reason, that is, the conflation of racism and speciesism as interchangeable or mutually replaceable forms of oppression through a naturalization of biological differences (557). Thus, within contemporary postcolonial studies, it becomes imperative to locate the colonial underpinnings in the practices, rituals and customs revolving around nonhuman animals and their shared environment. With the recently emerging transnational turn in species critique[1], postcolonial cultural criticism demonstrates “the centrality of multispecies social formations to modern coloniality and subaltern agencies” (Ahuja 557). In this context, it becomes contingent to look at culturally specific conditions of human-nonhuman entanglements in the Global South and how they are articulated in fictional texts. Understanding human-nonhuman entanglements in postcolonial societies also helps to rethink the scalability of the literary genres in which these transactions, interactions, and conflicts are produced, and open up their cultural particularities to the cosmopolitical frames of enquiry within a world-system.

In this panel which has a time limit of seventy-five minutes, each of the three presenters will speak for approximately fifteen minutes, followed by a discussion and Q & A session of thirty minutes presided by the chair of the session. Mark Deggan’s paper titled “Narrating the Postcolonial Tiger: Interspecies Subjectivity & Ambient Performance in Kurniawan’s Man Tiger” analyzes how the shared interior atmospherics of humans and nonhuman animals are animated narratologically within story-worlds. Deggan compares two Indonesian novels, Mochtar Lubis’s Harimau! Harimau! (Tiger!1975) and Eka Kurniawan’s Lelaki Harimau (Man Tiger,2014), to show how interspecies subjectivity and extra-lingual communications are represented within literary texts as ways of constructing social critique. Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim’s paper titled “Slow-walk as a Human and Nonhuman Entanglement in J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda” critically rethinks slow-walking as a form of engagement with animism and vibrant materiality to envision shared vulnerabilities of humans and nonhuman others. Through a comparative study of J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), the paper explores how the politics of representation of racially segregated towns and dissipated landscapes in post-Apartheid South Africa helps to expand the notions of survival, recognition, and justice. Sreyashi Ray’s paper titled “Violent Spectacles: Interspecies Conflict as a Postcolonial Problematic” explores Indian author C.S. Chellappa’s Tamil novella Vaadivaasaal (The Arena), written in the 1940s, one of the earliest instances of modern regional literatures to be written about the controversial bull-fighting jallikattu festival in rural India. Through close analyses of how the notions of space, interspecies conflict and interpersonal hierarchies are enmeshed with culturally specific codes of honor and sacrifice, the paper shows how gendered as well as caste and class-based social oppression becomes intimately connected with species exploitation within the coercive feudal economy of rural India. All the three papers undertake cross-disciplinary approaches to show how fictional texts help to reimagine the complicated networks of affiliation between human and nonhuman life-worlds in postcolonial contexts.

Works Cited

Ahuja, Neel. “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.” PMLA, Vol. 124, No. 2 (March 2009). pp. 556-563. Print.

Herman, David, ed. Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen, eds. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment.London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

[1]See for instance “Meat: A Short Cultural History of Animal Welfare at the Fin-de-Siècle” in Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006 and Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.