Multispecies Modernity

Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature considers relationships between animals and humans in the iconic spaces of postcolonial India: the wild, the body, the home, and the city. Navigating fiction, journalism, life writing, film, and visual art, this book argues that a uniquely Indian way of being modern is born in these spaces of disorderly multispecies living.

The zones of proximity traversed in Multispecies Modernity link animal-human relations to a politics of postcolonial identity by transgressing the logics of modernity imposed on the postcolonial nation. Disorderly multispecies living is a resistance to the hygiene of modernity and a powerful alliance between human and nonhuman subalterns.

In bringing an animal studies perspective to postcolonial writing and art, this book proposes an ethics of representation and an ethics of reading that have wider implications for the study of relationships between human and nonhuman animals in literature and in life.
Excerpted from the Introduction to Multispecies Modernity, by Sundhya Walther

While I want to stress the possibilities that emerge out of connections between these two fields, it is also true that the stakes of bringing them together are high for both sides. As Fanon demonstrates, the comparison to the animal has been pervasive in constructions of otherness - particularly in terms of race and gender - against which postcolonial thinkers and writers work. What would it mean, then, for these writers to abandon an attachment to the human? Would this also mean the abandonment of the struggle for recognition and equality? As Cary Wolfe observes, "it is understandable . . . that traditionally marginalized peoples would be skeptical about calls by academic intellectuals to surrender the humanist model of subjectivity, with all its privileges, at just the historical moment when they are poised to 'graduate' into it." As Wolfe himself argues, and as I will expose throughout this study, "speciesism" is oppressive to human and nonhuman alike. But this contention is in itself problematic. Theorists in animal studies want to focus attention on the nonhuman animal, in particular on the ethical place of animals in the context of their systemic exploitation and domination by humans. The risk of a postcolonial approach to animal studies is thus to, once again, have the animal abandoned in favour of seemingly more pressing human concerns. The argument that attention to the nonhuman animal also includes attention to human beings who are other to the sovereign concept of the human crops up frequently to provide a commonsense justification for the importance of animal studies. This argument is a valuable one, but it also recentres the concerns of humans by assuming that human issues will be the "hook" that draws readers into the fold of animal studies. What a postcolonial animal studies would demand is attention to the alliances between subaltern human beings and nonhuman animals, as those groups whose positions are most politically and ethically important to postcolonial and animal studies. It would also refuse to abandon either the human or the nonhuman animal, but would rather engage in an intersectional analysis that considers the positions of both groups.

Throughout this study, I am attentive to the human–nonhuman subaltern alliances created by authors, while maintaining a scepticism about the degree to which these authors are able to do justice to the lives of nonhuman animals. I argue that utilizing animals as figures is an instrumentalization that, to a degree, undercuts the anti-colonial thrust of some of these texts (as does the use of disabled, gendered, or subaltern human characters as figures, as will be clear in my discussions of Ghosh and Desai). Yet I am also interested in the ways that the representation of animals can exceed a humanist representational politics. Do nonhuman animal presences in literature i