Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought

Billy-Ray Belcourt

doi:10.3390/soc5010001

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions in North America are possible because of and through the erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. That is, we cannot address animal oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming and subsequently dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy as political machinations that require the simultaneous exploitation and/or erasure of animal and Indigenous bodies. I begin by re-framing animality as a politics of space to suggest that animal bodies are made intelligible in the settler imagination on stolen, colonized, and re-settled Indigenous lands. Thinking through Andrea Smith’s logics of white supremacy, I then re-center anthropocentrism as a racialized and speciesist site of settler coloniality to re-orient decolonial thought toward animality. To critique the ways in which Indigenous bodies and epistemologies are at stake in neoliberal re-figurings of animals as settler citizens, I reject the colonial politics of recognition developed in Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s recent monograph, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press 2011) because it militarizes settler-colonial infrastructures of subjecthood and governmentality. I then propose a decolonized animal ethic that finds legitimacy in Indigenous cosmologies to argue that decolonization can only be reified through a totalizing disruption of those power apparatuses (i.e., settler colonialism, anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and neoliberal pluralism) that lend the settler state sovereignty, normalcy, and futurity insofar as animality is a settler-colonial particularity.

Highlights

Critical Animal Studies and Decolonizing DecolonizationIt is my contention that Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and mainstream animal activisms have failed to center an analysis of settler colonialism and operate within “the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state” [2] (p. 10)
If settler colonialism and white supremacy mobilize through anthropocentrism and capitalism requires the acquisition of Indigenous lands for animal agriculture, decolonization is only possible through an animal ethic that disrupts anthropocentrism as a settler-colonial logic
What imaginaries and subjectivities are foreclosed when our politics of decolonization is always already anthropocentric? I propose a re-locating of animal ontologies within decolonial thought that engages critically with the ways in which settler colonialism objectivizes animal bodies as one of many intersecting settler colonial particularities

Summary

Introduction

It is my contention that Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and mainstream animal activisms have failed to center an analysis of settler colonialism and operate within “the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state” [2] (p. 10). To re-figure speciesism and neoliberalized animal subjectivities as vehicles for settler-colonial continuity, I consider the ways in which an animal ethic is important to decolonial thought by re-framing animality as a politics of space and introducing anthropocentrism to Andrea Smith’s theorizations of the logics of white supremacy. Anthropocentrism, I argue, is the anchor of speciesism, capitalism, and settler colonialism This logic holds that settlers (as reifications of whiteness) are always already entitled to domesticated animal bodies as sites of commodity/food production, eroticism, violence, and/or companionship; a reality that is possible because of a history of animal injury and forced human-animal proximity [16] If settler colonialism and white supremacy mobilize through anthropocentrism (and they do) and capitalism requires the acquisition of Indigenous lands for animal agriculture (and it does), decolonization is only possible through an animal ethic that disrupts anthropocentrism as a settler-colonial logic

Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Animal Recognition

Conclusion