Language has traditionally defined what it is to be human and animal (Fudge 117). But what do narratives of interspecies communication suggest? While the animal may be a symbolic “figure” or “allegory” in imaginative literature, it can also be “literal” or “real” (Derrida). Yet engagement with the animal in literary texts is challenging because it “includes the task of developing through language a description of experience that does not yet exist in our current discourse” (Johnson 2).
The panel draws from diverse theoretical fields such as critical animal studies, environmental criticism, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies, and especially the work of Cary Wolfe, Donna J. Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Burno Latour, Georg Lukács, and Marc Beckoff. We hope to further ongoing scholarly efforts of bringing into dialogue literature and other humanities discourses. In this regard, the panel does not simply view “the animal [just] as metaphor for oppressed or colonized humans” because “to draw such a correlation is to rely on a system of thought that refuses to acknowledge the animal as deserving of the same kinds of respect human beings should grant to other humans” (Wright 15-16).
To promote discussion, we have selected only three panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers. The panel begins with Arun Kumar Pokhrel’s paper, “Human-animal Relationships and the Possibility of Interspecies Communication in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller.” Arun analyzes Mda’s 2005 novel to show the relationship between subaltern humans and non-humans, as well as the political implications of this relationship in postcolonial South Africa. The novel brings into focus the Whale Caller’s place-based consciousness and politics by accentuating his deep attachment to the sea-and landscapes, and by highlighting the love between the Whale Caller, Saluni, and the whale. Mda’s narrative fuses romantic, realistic, and naturalistic elements to question the primacy of human subjectivity, highlighting the mysterious connections between the subaltern Whale Caller and the whale. Arun examines this human and animal relationship alongside the material changes that have transformed the landscape of a small village of Hermanus over forty years, commodifying the once idyllic place through global tourism. He argues that a commodity logic of global capitalism lies at the root of the structures of oppression and alienation and pervades perceptions of social relations, identity, history, and nature in post-apartheid South Africa.
Next, Ben Holgate’s paper, “Antipodean Mythology: Dismantling the Species Boundary in Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider,” argues that the New Zealand Māori writer’s 1987 novel invokes an interspecies connection between humans and whales on a mythical level to advocate an ethics of biocentricism and environmentalism. The text critiques the legacies of European colonialism in the Antipodes by challenging the scientific rationalism of the European Enlightenment as well as the binary dualism of humans and animals that underpins economic exploitation of the environment. The novel’s central motif is an eight-year-old Māori girl, named Kahu, who is not only the reincarnation of the mythical whale rider Kahutia Te Rangi but who also communes with an ancient ancestral whale. Ihimaera’s narrative strategy is to foreground traditional Māori beliefs and mythology, and the need to live in harmony with the environment. In turn, the text gives voice to the marginalized on two levels: first, the indigenous Māori who are a minority in Pākehā-dominated New Zealand; and second, the whales who are threatened by whaling and the testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific Ocean. The novel’s dual preoccupation with humans and animals complicates a postcolonial perspective by highlighting an interspecies link and, as a result, subverting postcolonial studies’ conventional anthropological focus.
Finally, Surojit Kayal’s paper, “‘I was one of the goats. Mine was a goat’s life’: Ethical Untranslatability and the Dangers of Anthropomorphism in Benyamin’s Goat Days,” explores the question of anthropomorphism as a technique for addressing the radical alterity of animals. Surojit asks, can anthropomorphism capture this alterity without reducing it within the structures of a speciesist human language? He takes up this question through a reading of Benyamin’s novel Aadu Jeevitham (2008). The novel, originally written in Malayalam and translated into English by Joseph Koyipally as Goat Days (2012), recounts the real-life suffering of an Indian migrant laborer, Najeeb, in a goat-rearing farm in the Gulf desert. Stressing an ethic of untranslatability, Surojit argues that the untranslatable alterity is what compels and at the same time resists anthropomorphic reduction. Cut off from a familiar human universe, Najeeb cultivates anthropomorphic relations with the goats. He violates the ethic of untranslatability through an absolute identification by “becoming” a goat himself.
The above three novels, despite emerging from differing socio-political, cultural, and economic contexts, share a common thematic concern for the possibility of interspecies communication and show how the legacy of colonial ideologies manifests in the form of commodification, which lies at the root of contemporary structures of oppression and alienation in postcolonial societies. These novels show how fictional narratives defy all kinds of closure, and how they inhere narrative power to engage the reader’s imagination to think deeply about real-world problems.
The presentations will be followed by a response from Lin Knutson, a senior scholar whose work on contemporary literary and environmental theory and global literature will make her ideally suited to draw these varied approaches into conversation. We will then generate lively conversations about the novels’ central concern about the possibility of interspecies communication and the cross-pollination of burgeoning fields such as critical animal studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and environmental humanities in the study of literature.