Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Drug Lord ◽  
Organized Crime Groups

This chapter broaches the limits of the human from two entwined angles, examining the intersection of necropolitical violence and nonhuman animal tropes in Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos’s 2010 novella Fiesta en la madriguera. Villalobos’s novella is an influential text from the emerging narconarrative corpus in Mexico. The novella has received criticism from prominent critics and writers such as Oswaldo Zavala and Jorge Volpi who have charged that the text inflates the myths surrounding organized crime groups that have been perpetuated by the Mexican state. Drawing on previously unexplored influences from Latin American literary history, and marshalling theories of bio- and necropolitics, postcolonialism, and critical animal studies, this chapter advances a different reading of Villalobos’s text, averring that the author mobilizes the severed head of a highly symbolic animal (the hippopotamus) to launch a nuanced deconstruction of the figure of the drug lord and to recontextualize drug war violence by calling attention to the ways it is immanent to the drive of capitalism and (biopolitical) modernity (rather than outside of these broader processes).

The Time of the Latinx Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Printed Materials

Abstract The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History (2016), edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán, is a formative volume that, in its capaciousness, reorients nineteenth-century literary history toward a substantial engagement with Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production. Consisting of 15 sections written by leading scholars in the field of nineteenth-century Latinx literary studies, the volume tackles an impressive range of nineteenth-century Latinx thinkers and texts. The essays collected here oscillate seamlessly from macro to micro scales of space, move across the long nineteenth century, and engage with an array of printed materials of the Latinx nineteenth century. This volume is about multiplicity: from Jessie Alemán’s Philadelphia to Juan Poblete’s essay on the close ties between California and Chile in the nineteenth century; from the instances of failed immigration outlined by Robert McKee Irwin to Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s migratory “errancy”; from José Aranda’s essay on Mexican American modernity to Marissa Lopez’s argument about Latino dismodernity. Ultimately, the editors and contributors reveal the numerous nineteenth centuries across the hemisphere, and help us imagine the intersections of US literary history and Latinx studies in the nineteenth century.

Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice, Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 548-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly W. Benston
Keyword(s):  
Animal Models ◽  
Biomedical Research ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Species Boundaries ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because … they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and … are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss.—Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”Heir to the divided aristotelian vision of nonhuman creatures as, alternately, mute foils (Politics 9; BK. 1, Sec. 2) and behavioral mirrors (Parts 138–39, bk. 2, sec. 4) of “man,” the properly “political” animal, animal studies has displayed uncertainty about how and where to draw species boundaries. Among the provinces of this field of inquiry, none is more defined by this tension than laboratory biomedical research, where physiological correspondences underwrite animal models of human maladies, while presupposed ontological distinctions justify the consignment of nonhuman animals to treatment considered improper for human subjects. Conventionally, those distinctions have centered on a cluster of intellectual capabilities—reasoning, speaking, intending, remembering—the dearth or deficiency of which abrogates the nonhuman's right to dissent and legitimates the human claim of priority. “Animal studies” in this sense, designating a wide range of investigative operations employing nonhuman animal bodies, posits material resemblance and metaphysical incompatibility between researcher and the object of research.

scholarly journals Academic “Dirty Work”

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhoda Wilkie
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Dirty Work ◽  
Mixed Species ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Personal Challenges

Human-Animal Studies (has) is an innovative field, tarnished by its politicized mixed-species subject matter. This paper considers how nonhuman animal scholars may also be tainted, for different reasons and to varying degrees, because of the academic “dirty work” they perform withinhas. As the field matures, tensions are emerging among this disparate scholarly group. These tensions are associated with the rise of Critical Animal Studies (cas), the extent to which animal scholars should engage in emancipatory-type scholarship and the appearance of the “animal as such–animal as constructed” axis withinhas. This paper draws on these intrafield tensions to form a potential framework that maps scholarly labor withinhas. As scholars begin to debate what counts as “good” and “bad” human-animal scholarship, this may engender the appearance of academic-moral havens. It is suggested that such enclaves may partly mitigate the personal challenges and professional stigma of working in a tarnished academic field.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

White Writers, Race Matters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Writers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

scholarly journals Including the animal standpoint in critical public relations research

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161
Author(s):  
Núria Almiron ◽  
Laura Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Essential Step ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Theoretical Paper ◽  
Short Explanation

In this paper we argue that adopting critical animal studies perspectives in critical public relations can not only be very fruitful, but that it is also a necessity if the aims of the latter are to be achieved. To this end, this text introduces the challenges and opportunities that the field of critical animal studies brings to critical public relations studies. First, a short explanation of what critical animal studies is and why it can contribute to critical public relations studies is provided. Then the main fields of research where this contribution can be most relevant are discussed, including ethics, discourse studies and political economy. The final aim of this theoretical paper is to expand research within the field of critical public relations by including a critical animal studies approach. Eventually, the authors suggest that embracing the animal standpoint in critical public relations is an essential step to furthering the study of power, hegemony, ideology, propaganda or social change and to accomplishing the emancipatory role of research.

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