Responsibilities of Kinship

Abstract

I consider four works of speculative fiction that demonstrate the shifting ways in which we think of our cousins the apes: Gustave Flaubert’s “Quidquid Volueris” (1837), Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917), The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (2012), and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (2013). Knitting together speculative fiction, primate studies, and ideas of the post-human with the present episteme of seeing the world in Venn diagrams, evaporating genres, and liminal zones, I want to examine how such works, despite their often significant differences, portray our relationships with and obligations to other primates in quite similar ways: by extending the meaning of personhood. The “zone of occult instability” of Franz Fanon, the “contact zone” of Mary Louise Pratt, and the “shatter zone” of Diane Loesch in postcolonial studies thus meet Brooks Landon’s “zone of possibility” and Scott Bukatman’s “contested border zone” in science fiction. These various zones...