“A Winged but Grounded Bird”: Morrison’s Mixed Treatment of Animality in The Bluest Eye

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Rachel Warner
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Language History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Mixed Treatment ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
New Models ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal

Abstract This literary analysis of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), answers the call issued by scholars in the growing interdisciplinary field of animal studies to privilege nonhuman animal others as its central analytical focus. It thus examines the productive and harmful overlaps between Black subjects and animality and determines how Morrison speaks to both a history of racist dehumanization as well as manners of ameliorating such oppression. In prioritizing the intersection of human subjectivity and nonhuman others, the article explores new models for human-animal relationships, including animals as sensual partners and animals as looking subjects. Ultimately, this article looks to Morrison’s canonical novel portraying the scapegoating practices that can destroy Black girlhood to unearth the profound significance of nonhuman others to language, history, and communities.

scholarly journals Animal roles and traces in the history of medicine,c.1880–1980

BJHS Themes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 11-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANGELA CASSIDY ◽  
RACHEL MASON DENTINGER ◽  
KATHRYN SCHOEFERT ◽  
ABIGAIL WOODS
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Experimental Medicine ◽  
Human History ◽  
Turn On ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Animal Communities

AbstractThis paper argues for the need to create a more animal-centred history of medicine, in which animals are considered not simply as the backdrop for human history, but as medical subjects important in and of themselves. Drawing on the tools and approaches of animal and human–animal studies, it seeks to demonstrate, via four short historical vignettes, how investigations into the ways that animals shaped and were shaped by medicine enables us to reach new historical understandings of both animals and medicine, and of the relationships between them. This is achieved by turning away from the much-studied fields of experimental medicine and public health, to address four historically neglected contexts in which diseased animals played important roles: zoology/pathology, parasitology/epidemiology, ethology/psychiatry, and wildlife/veterinary medicine. Focusing, in turn, on species that rarely feature in the history of medicine – big cats, tapeworms, marsupials and mustelids – which were studied, respectively, within the zoo, the psychiatric hospital, human–animal communities and the countryside, we reconstruct the histories of these animals using the traces that they left on the medical-historical record.

scholarly journals Re-imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G.W. Kirk ◽  
Neil Pemberton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical History ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Species Identity ◽  
Central Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Do So

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine. Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity. We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech?

scholarly journals On the Fringe: Sheepdogs and Their Status Within Bronze Age Ontologies in Scandinavia

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Kristin Armstrong Oma
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Living Arrangements ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
Depositional Patterns ◽  
Human Animal

This contribution draws mainly on images of dogs, humans and sheep from Nordic Bronze Age rock art sources, but living arrangements within the household and depositional patterns of dog bones on settlements are also considered to extrapolate an understanding of the physical reality and ontological role of sheepdogs within the social aspects of the practice of herding. I use theories from the interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies to understand how socialisation, habituation and trust create a seamless choreography between human, dog and sheep.

Animal Studies and the Early Modern Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Mennell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unique Manner ◽  
Human Animal

The burgeoning field of animal studies has facilitated the exploration of human-animal relations across a variety of disciplines. Following the animal turn in humanities scholarship, a number of studies published in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have demonstrated that animals reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of the early modern period in a unique manner due to a shift in the ways in which animals were viewed and valued. This shift was largely caused by the increasing commodification of animals, the discovery of new creatures through global exploration, a renewed interest in investigating and documenting all earthly beings, and an enhanced concern for animal welfare. A range of early modern texts reflect this shift in the perception of animals through engaged interaction with conceptions of the human-animal divide and interrogation of human exceptionalism. Animals also inhabit a multitude of early modern texts in a less prominent manner because, as is the case in the modern world, animals lived alongside humans and were a fundamental part of everyday life. While these texts may not at first seem to reveal much detail about the lives of animals and how they were viewed in the early modern period, the field of animal studies has provided a method of bringing nonhuman beings to the fore. When analyzing the representation of nonhuman beings in early modern texts through the lens of animal studies a thorough consideration of the context in which such texts were written and investigation of the lived experience of the animals they seek to portray is required in order to capture, what leading animal studies scholar Erica Fudge terms, a holistic history of animals.

Religion and Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron S. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Ethics ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal

What do animals have to do with religion? This article answers this broad question with special attention to issues related to animal ethics and animal philosophy. Topics covered include the religious dimension of human-animal relationships; the role of animals in human self-imagination; the formation of religions based on human-animal relationships, especially in responding to the dilemmas and tensions raised by killing animals for food and sacrifice; and central issues in the method and theory of critically studying animals and religion. Working at the intersection of the history of religions and animal studies, this essay provides grounding in the subfield of “animals and religion,” as well as references to a wide range of work on the study of animals. The article also cites studies of the subject in both the religions of traditional peoples, including the Cree, Koyukon, Naxi, Nivkhi, and Tuvan, and the so-called world religions, including Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions; Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions; and Daoist traditions.

Philosophy and Animal Studies: Calarco, Castricano, and Diamond

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Aaltola
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Review Paper ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Animal Life ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Cora Diamond

AbstractRecently, animal studies has started to gain popularity. This interdisciplinary field investigates the human-animal relationship from different perspectives, including philosophy, cultural studies, and biology. In 2008, at least three books explored themes related to animal studies: Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal; Jodey Castricano (Ed.), Animal Subjects: An Ethics Reader in a Posthuman World; and Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, et al. (Eds.) Philosophy and Animal Life. Each volume approaches animal studies from a different viewpoint (Continental philosophy, interdisciplinary, and Wittgensteinian), but they also share many themes. This review paper discusses the differences and similarities between the volumes and highlights the directions in which animal studies is developing. It is argued that an emphasis on "direct" perception or experience of animality and heterogeneity, and an exploration of otherness, are elements that all these books share, and that are relevant to animal studies.

Provincial Life with Animals

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Village Life ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The relationship of peasants and villagers with their animals in the premodern era is a missing chapter in the history of human-animal relations. Works on peasant culture ignore animals, and works on animals neglect their place in rural lives. This article, based on the depiction of premodern peasant and village life in hundreds of local-color novels and stories of the early nineteenth century, begins to fill in this gap in animal studies scholarship. It reveals that many of the defining boundaries between humans and animals introduced in the ideologies of modernity are fuzzy, fluid, or indeed nonexistent in premodernity, where animals are seen as subjects, companions, and, often, parts of the family.

Kiwi chicken advocate talks with Californian dog companion

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Potts ◽  
Donna Haraway
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Laboratory Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Companion Species ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The University

An influential feminist scholar in the field of human-animal studies, Donna Haraway (Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz) has over the past couple of decades provided ground-breaking critiques of such subjects as twentieth century primatology (and its links to race, gender and first-world/third-world politics), the place of nonhuman animals in laboratory science, and the phenomenon of pedigree dog breeding. Her most recent work focuses on our relationships with ‘companion species’, a term Haraway employs in her analysis of the diverse forms of human-animal interactions and exchanges that are part of everyday life. Drawing from ecological developmental biology, she suggests that companion species are the fruit of ‘multispecies reciprocal inductions’. In the following interview with Annie Potts (Co-Director, the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies), Donna Haraway discusses her views on, amongst other things, feminism and multispecies issues, human exceptionalism and posthumanism, and the pleasures of ‘becoming with’ our companion species.

scholarly journals Human-Animal Studies: Remembering the Past, Celebrating the Present, Troubling the Future

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-833
Author(s):  
Kenneth Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
State Of The Field

Abstract This is the third in a series of reports on the state of the field of Human-Animal Studies. In the introductory section, major terms in the prevailing definition of the field—Human-Animal Studies is the interdisciplinary study of human-animal relationships—are unpacked and critically analyzed. Subsequent sections deal with the field’s past, present, and possible futures. A schematic history of the field considers both scholarly contributions and programmatic inroads in the academy. The current state of the field section describes its breadth in terms of publication venues, disciplines that interface with it, and the variety of methods employed. It also offers a description of several common strategies that critique the received view of the categorical divide between human and other animal beings. The final section highlights both the potential of and anticipated roadblocks to each of several future trajectories.

Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy C. Owens ◽  
Durell M. Callier ◽  
Jessica L. Robinson ◽  
Porshé R. Garner
Keyword(s):  
Black Girls ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girlhood Studies

Scholarly interest in the experiences of Black girls has grown significantly. Although many scholars, activists, and artists have completed substantial scholarship and creative works that constitute the foundation of Black girlhood studies, their body of work and names are oftentimes omitted from recent scholarship on Black girlhood. In this collectively authored essay, scholars, artists, and activists present an annotated bibliography of historical and contemporary texts, as well as cultural works, that center the voices and experiences of Black girls. This annotated bibliography serves as a resource for activists and scholars alike who are interested in Black girlhood.

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