Critique, Climate, and Crisis

The project “Critique, Climate, and Crisis” stages an intervention in three different theoretical areas of focus: animal studies, critical theories of climate change, and minority discourse, with a particular emphasis on racialization, gender oppression, and the construction of the sexual minority. The type of intervention my project stages is a kind of three-way dialogue between these different theoretical areas in order to rethink the Anthropocene. Ultimately, my project works as an analytic or optic of reading that can zero in on the central role of the non-human as well as be attentive to race, gender, and sexuality.

The possibility of this undertaking is shaped by its fundamental impossibility within a single monograph. It presses up against the limits of both the sub-disciplines of literary and cultural studies as well as what can be achieved within the structuring (and often limiting) rhythms of the contemporary academy. By impossibility, I mean to register the excess that such a project represents within literary studies. In a more quotidian sense, such projects are unlikely to get approved by funding agencies and departmental committees when viewed as a potential monograph. The impossibility here is the impossibility of such a project to be made possible in its form as a completed monograph. The genre of the possibility is a formal affordance to think and write beyond such institutional constraints and habitual entrainments. The generic form of the possibility affords something like a return to the searching and expansive spirit of critical theory of the twentieth century, which gave a vibrancy to fields and modes of inquiry that had been blunted by codification and institutionalization (Szeman 25). Ultimately, to think this vast theoretical archive together is to think nothing less than the promise of critical theory itself: a way to understand and intervene in permanent existential and political crisis.

In the mid-decades of the twentieth century the central political struggle of literary studies was to correct the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of people under the yoke of racism, sexism, and homophobia. These goals were achieved both by the development of new theoretical modes of reading and in a dialectic with social movements that “seized the time” and “crapped on the table” of literary and cultural studies, as Stuart Hall puts it (104). Kari Weil registers the difficulty with applying a similar model to animal studies, and I would add eco-criticism, since the questions of representation and inclusion are different and so must be thought of on different grounds (4–5). This project thinks together their connections in order to stage a comparative analytic on different grounds and lay the groundwork for different modes of reading.

More broadly, my research challenges the anthropocentric investments of traditional conceptions of the Anthropocene in order to think better about how to build a just future for all beings on this planet. While animal studies challenges the dogmatic centrality of the human in theoretical discourse, it often does not address the closeness of racialized, sexualized, and gendered alterity with animality. The inverse problem persists in minority discourse that is often reluctant to engage with animal studies despite the close proximity between forms of “human” oppression and animal alterity. Finally, critical scholarship on climate change is not typically attentive to work in animal studies and places an insufficient emphasis on questions of race, gender, and sexuality, often proceeding from a falsely singular conception of the human.

Cultural studies and critical theory in the twenty-first century makes some of these connections. The work of Mel Y. Chen and Jasbir K. Puar thinks together animality with queer, trans, and racialized forms of alterity. Benedicte Boisseron thinks through the fraught, aborted encounters and missed connections between Black critical theory and animal studies. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson reminds us that the critique of Man first emerged as anti-colonial revolt and brings into view the anti-humanist potential of Black aesthetic production. Kari Weil and Kelly Oliver both engage in feminist readings and critiques of central poststructuralist thinkers of animality like Derrida and Agamben. The resuscitations of eco-feminism by theorists like Susan Fraiman and Greta Gaard further...