2: Animal Studies

In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caught my attention in 2022. I do not pretend to have a robust rationale for my criteria for inclusion. Instead, let me say that these are all publications that excited me in some way, that excited something in me, and that I believe will excite others too. I have divided the chapter into four sections: 1. ‘Living Machines of Imperialism’ examines two postcolonial animal histories, Saheed Aderinto’s Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa and Jonathan Saha’s Colonizing Animals; 2. ‘I Dream of Dogs’ briefly considers Lydia Pyne’s Endlings before focusing on Margret Grebowicz’s short book of cultural critique on dog ownership, Rescue Me; 3. ‘The Gay Frog Is the Opposite of the Gay Penguin’ turns to recent issues of Humanimalia and Green Letters, and a special section of Environmental Humanities, co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Ina Linge; and 4. ‘Inside the Slaughterhouse’ looks at recent publications in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series, concentrating mostly on Sune Borkfelt’s Reading Slaughter. I end the chapter by reflecting on the links between these publications; I introduce my own monograph, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, to tie together the review’s key ideas. In all of this I have tried not to impose a grand narrative on the books reviewed, nor isolate them as symptoms of broader ideological tendencies. Yet if there is an argument here it is this: animal studies continues to remind us that human–animal relations are not natural, timeless, or inevitable. They are historical. They can be transformed.