Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Literary Periods
- Part II Contexts and Controversies
- Chapter 8 Religion
- Chapter 9 Anthropomorphism
- Chapter 10 Habitat
- Chapter 11 Captivity
- Chapter 12 Indigeneity
- Chapter 13 Biocentrism
- Chapter 14 Health
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 13 - Biocentrism
Sexuality, Coloniality, and Constructing the Human
from Part II - Contexts and Controversies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Literary Periods
- Part II Contexts and Controversies
- Chapter 8 Religion
- Chapter 9 Anthropomorphism
- Chapter 10 Habitat
- Chapter 11 Captivity
- Chapter 12 Indigeneity
- Chapter 13 Biocentrism
- Chapter 14 Health
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals , pp. 236 - 251Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023