Prefatory Note: On Genre

This essay pairs intimate reflections about my relationship with a dog named Akbar with a reading of Trinidadian-Canadian author André Alexis’s novel, Fifteen Dogs (2015). My fusion of memoir with critical contemplation exemplifies autotheory, the interdisciplinary practice that foregrounds individual experience to shatter hierarchical knowledge-production. For Rea McNamara, autotheory “dismantles vertical pipelines of colonial thinking” and is “a way of thinking through ‘high’ cultural theory via our physical, embodied selves.” bell hooks, a pioneering practitioner of autotheory, describes “the ‘lived’ experience of critical thinking” (2) wherein there is no gap between theory and practice. While self-reflective, hooks emphasizes that theorizing everyday life is ultimately a strategy for collective liberation, for it furnishes the production of a healing, revolutionary space enabling her to “imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently” (2). Recent, notable examples of autotheory within critical animal studies scholarship include Chloë Taylor’s conceptualization of transspecies disability. Taylor’s inquiry into “crip time” is grounded in an analysis of Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s care for a wild snail while bedridden with a neurological disorder as well as Taylor’s own relationships with the abandoned cats she fosters during a period of acute depression. In another instance, blending personal and critical meditations, Kathryn Gillespie ponders her ministrations to an infirm hen and dog to conceptualize what she calls a multispecies doula approach to animal death (“Provocation”). Gillespie demonstrates that nurturing attendance to an animal in their transition, and public display of grief following their death – including the production of her article – speak to a life and death that matter, subverting our mainstay relation to other species.

Autotheory is ideally suited to critical animal studies perspectives since it allows for an exploration of veganism and animal liberation as embodied practices. It is uniquely generative for an exploration of postcolonialism because it is an inherently anticolonial methodology. In this essay, privileging caregiving and grieving for a dog is a strategy for rebuking the hierarchical human/animal relationship and the conceit of dominion that is foundational for postcolonial structures of domination. Piecing together Akbar’s biography redresses nonhuman animals’ erasure from imperial histories and serves specifically as a landing pad for the itinerance of the “stray.”