Perspectives on the Non Human in Literature and Culture Outside Anthropological Machine

This book is to free the humanities from their anthropocentric frame and explore how they might instead deepen our understanding of animals’ lives and points of view. By decentering human concerns and foregrounding animals’ perceptual and cognitive worlds, it urges us to "unlearn" no more and no less than our species’ arrogance. In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.