Human-nonhuman boundaries and inter-creatural empathy in Klara and the Sun, Fifteen Dogs, the Wonder that Was Ours and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Engaging with issues of categorisation, human supremacy, and (the lack of) empathy, in this article I read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015), and Alice Hatcher’s The Wonder That Was Ours (2018); novels that I argue are connected by their interrogation of biopolitically produced and policed boundaries between human and nonhuman beings, and by their focus on inter-creatural empathy and care. Through the lens of critical posthumanism, Agambenian biopolitics, and care ethics, I explore how these texts interrogate boundaries between animals, humans and techno-creatures, and I contend that they provide nonhuman and marginalised human characters with a (narrative) voice in order to challenge and undermine anthropocentric conceptions of subjectivity, agency and community. Mapping the novels’ portrayal of inter-creatural care relationships, I argue that affirming vulnerability potentially leads to the recognition of a “strange kinship” between human and nonhuman characters; and it is my ultimate claim that these texts turn proximity and porosity into productive and often transgressive inter-creatural entanglements, thereby disrupting processes of exclusionary differentiation, and opening the way to an imaginative exploration of new ways of being.