What does it mean to be—or not to be—animal? In the wake of a long tradition of defining humans in contrast to animals, posthumanist thinkers press for revision of this foundational binary. As Laurie Shannon points out in The Accommodated Animal, the word rarely appears before the seventeenth-century, yet, as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben suggest, the animal became the ultimate other against which the identity of the enlightenment subject coalesced. In connection to the 2020 MLA presidential theme “Being Human,” this special session will contribute to urgent conversations about the situation of creatures within what could now be called the humanimalities. In three papers and a response, it will explore literary representations of nonhuman beings as well as their material realities. It will also examine aesthetic, theoretical and social issues raised by reconsidering the ontological status of animals while uncovering some surprisingly pragmatic precursors to deconstructive theories mobilized in Human Animal Studies (HAS). There will be at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion at the end.

Sarah Giragosian will open the session with “The Bioaesthetics of Kay Ryan” starting from the position: there is not one world, but many. Biological awareness, she argues, begins with this first insight—that the human is one species among others, each with its own particular world. It’s also the lesson of the biophilosopher Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelt. Each organism has a unique “life-world,” its own sensorium, style of communication, timescale, and spatial framework that shapes its relation with the environment. As Giragosian demonstrates, Kay Ryan’s poetic attention to creatures’ material embodiment, her zoological imagination and sensitivity, as well as her biologically informed understanding of the animal sensorium shape her craft. Ryan attunes to the “life-world” of the animal, helping to undermine humanist norms that polarize human and animal worlds. Ryan’s animals participate in a trans-species bioaesthetics that disrupts traditional interpretations of culture as purely within the domain of the human. This biological reality has ethical and social dimensions. Embodiment teaches us about our biological limits and potentialities, as well as the fact that the measure varies from body to body, from species to species. We live in a time of contradiction, Giragosian concludes, one which raises critical questions about our role in the face of the animal extinction crisis, particularly for writers and activists concerned with animal liberation.

Next, in “Animal Pragmatism: Following the Call of the Wild,” Anthony Reynolds will trace Derrida’s acknowledged debt to the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce as an intellectual precursor who challenged the entrenched conceptual divide between animal and human, nature and culture, and instinct and intelligence. Peirce’s radical insight into the irruption of instinctive ideas into the practice of intellectual inquiry enabled several generations of pragmatists to begin, as William James puts it, “shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.” Indeed, Reynolds argues, Peirce’s intuition of what Derrida calls “the animality of writing” informs much of the current theoretical work on the animal that is epitomized by Derrida’s provocative claim that “logocentrism is first of all a thesis concerning the animal.” And Peirce’s early efforts to “situate representation in the workings and logics of a broader nonhuman universe out of which humans come” remain foundational for contemporary attempts to articulate what Eduardo Kohn calls an “anthropology beyond the human.”

Finally, continuing to reach beyond the human, Karalyn Kendall-Morwick will explore animal figures in postcolonial and critical race studies, where they are often dismissed as mere metaphors for marginalized others. Her paper “‘In whose language / Am I’: M. Nourbese Philip’s Dehumanist Poetics” examines HAS scholars’ contention that rejecting human/animal kinship risks reinforcing the humanist disavowal of animality that underwrites racist and imperialist discourses. To illuminate how embracing human animality can instead work to disrupt structures of exclusion, Kendell-Morwick applies Julietta Singh’s formulation of dehumanism to the poetics of Carribean-Canadian poet M. Nourbese Philip. Far from renouncing animality in an attempt to counter white-supremacist constructions, Philip’s polyvocal and formally-experimental poetry depicts figures at once human and animal whose vulnerability and finitude resist humanist delineations that falsely universalize a white, male, imperial subject. Kendell-Morwick closes with a call to scholars in the predominately white field of animal studies (herself included) to attend to sites of resistance from which writers like Philip present modalities that help us imagine ways of being that further dismantle humanist forms of mastery.

These presentations will be followed by a response from Russell Samolsky, a distinguished literary scholar who teaches and publishes regularly on human-animal topics. Drawing on his deep understanding of the theoretical and practical issues at stake in “Being Animal,” Samolsky will provide further insight into all three papers and set the stage for the unstructured discussion to follow.