AustLit

‘The rapidly growing field of human-animal studies (HAS) is a vibrant, varied domain of methodological convergences and divergences, united by a shared concern with studying the complex entanglement of human and animal lives. To think seriously about animals on their own terms is to begin to question the co-construction of the categories of the human and the animal that underpins human the animal that underpins human exceptionalism. Unpicking the human/animal binary, however, is no simple matter: not only is this construction unstable but as prisoners of human language we also have a tendency to reinstate it even as we think we challenge it. This paper will provide an analysis of significant developments and preoccupations in the field of literary HAS. Some of the most vexing questions within this area will be contextualised by way of reference to the Bandit and Michael Vick cases in the US and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, in particular scenes depicting David Laurie’s encounter with unwanted dogs at an animal shelter.’ (Publication abstract)

‘J.M. Coetzee’s early novels Dusklands (1974) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) outline the Western imperialist project to colonise and subjugate ‘other’ people, animals and the environment. The masculine colonising subject (in Cartesian terms, res inextensa) has separated itself from the world (res extensa) and seeks to conquer and subjugate in order to subsume it. Dusklands comprises two narratives: one, that of Jacobus Coetzee who hunts human and nonhuman animals and leaves a destructive trail behind him as he blazes a frontier in 1800s South Africa; and two, Eugene Dawn, an American mythographer, who advocates his ‘Vietnam Project’ to win the US war in Vietnam in the early 1970s by defoliating the environment and hunting the Vietcong ‘like animals’. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll deals with the Barbarian ‘threat’ to his Empire by similarly destroying the environment, hunting barbarians, and torturing woman and children. Each character is locked into a Cartesian ‘self’ consciousness that cannot interact with the ‘other’ (female, nonhuman animal, ‘indigenous’) except through violence and destruction. Hunting is a manifestation of this disease and the protagonists make no distinction between human, animal or vegetable in their path of destruction in the name of colonial expansion.' (Publication abstract)

'Cokcraco: A novel in ten cockroaches by Paul Williams is a clever and playful novel that resurrects Kafka's motif of the cockroach. Whereas Kafka uses the cockroach to evoke notions of isolation and disconnection, Williams' cockroaches challenge socially constructed ideological perspectives. Having worked with this soft-spoken author at the University of the Sunshine Coast, I was pleasantly surprised by Williams' evocation of such a satirical voice that is at once scathing and spirited. The voice of the cockroach, evoked through the fictional author Sizwe Bantu, repositions the notion of 'pest' onto the destructive human: 'COCKROACH: Once they [humans] colonise a territory, it can be a real challenge to eliminate them... Their love of turning pristine wildernesses into sterile concrete nests and burrows is well documented' (pg. 21). The cockroach is used to expose the gap between seemingly antithetical standpoints; creator and critic, colonised and coloniser, perception and reality. The innovation of this work resides not only in the multiplicity of the voices presented, but also the structure of the novel.' (Introduction)