Animal Studies

Abstract

Abstract This review essay explores some key contributions to animal studies in 2023. In Section 1, Humanitarianism Beyond Humanism, I consider how Benjamin Meiches’s Nonhuman Humanitarians tracks animal labour as a form of post-humanitarianism. Section 2, Animalist India, turns to Naisargi N. Davé’s Indifference and Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India, two complementary examinations of human–animal relations in India. Then, in Section 3, Zoological Marx, I compare Leigh Claire La Berge’s Marx for Cats and Dinesh Wadiwel’s Animals and Capital, both fusions of Marxism and animal studies that represent and realize a much-needed synthesis of these two fields. Before I begin, though, a confession and a celebration. A more comprehensive review than this might have discussed Maan Barua’s fine-grained account of Delhi’s macaques and London’s parakeets in Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology; Sharon Patricia Holland’s disruption of the ‘hum/animal’ distinction through the category of Blackness in an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life; Richard O. Prum’s theorization of a queer evolutionary biology in Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference; Sandra Swart’s history of colonialism and animals in The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past; and Robert McKay and Susan McHugh’s collection of essays on parodic literary forms, Animal Satire. A superior essay, written under different circumstances, would have been of more use to its readers by engaging with how each of these texts makes a noteworthy intervention into animal studies. If my review last year was deliberately modest, this year’s has turned out regrettably incomplete. But this incompletion is nonetheless a testament to the breadth and depth of work in the field, to the seriousness of its arguments and the careful attention they demand from the reader. This was brought home to me by the topics and questions that I heard discussed at this year’s British Animal Studies Network, the final meeting of the network after more than a decade of events at the University of Strathclyde, organized brilliantly by Erica Fudge. So: a thank you to Erica, for your hospitality and comradeship.