An Unthinkable Politics for Multispecies Flourishing within and beyond Colonial-Capitalist Ruins

Abstract

Colonial-capitalist animal agriculture is a site of ruin and a process of ruination. Farmed animals at the heart of these agricultural systems become sites of production and capital accumulation, their bodies genetically coded for commoditization and their short lives organized around logics of extraction. Farmed animals in settler states like the United States are simultaneously colonized subjects and settler-descendants and, as such, occupy a complex position in imaginaries of anticolonial futures. This article considers the possibility of flourishing for those farmed species never meant to flourish, explaining first how animal agriculture as a taken-for-granted institution forms part of the fabric of the ruination delivered by colonial-capitalism. And yet, even as animals’ bodies are devastated by production and consumption processes, there exist glimmers of possibility for radically different conceptualizations of farmed animals’ lives in multispecies worlds outside of farming contexts. This article analyzes sanctuaries for formerly farmed animals as one such site of possibility. Sanctuaries mark out geographic spaces as sites of hope that manifest in spite of and actively against colonial-capitalist logics, where human–animal relationships are radically redefined, articulated, and practiced—indeed, where animals’ lives are organized around how they can flourish. As such, this article calls for an unthinkable anticolonial politics of multispecies flourishing beyond colonial-capitalism.