Abstract
Towards the elaboration of a literary history of loving biopower, I compare two novels from dramatically different historical and geographical settings—Jack London’s White Fang (1906) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). Comparing two stories that bookend the twentieth century, I trace how fictions of human-animal love and the literary productions of animal affect are imbricated in settler-colonialism, particularly the shift in the second half of the century to feeling acts of apology and reconciliation by liberal settler subjects and states. While fictions of animal love run the risk of affectively redeeming settler subjectivities at a moment of historical accounting, they also hold the potential for imagining a form of decolonial love that, by virtue of including animals, may be more unsettling than reconciliation.
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Notes
- 1.
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 352.
- 2.
See Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity and Federici, Revolution At Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle.
- 3.
Berlant, The Female Complaint, 171.
- 4.
See, for instance, Boggs, Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity.
- 5.
Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 3.
- 6.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.
- 7.
Trouillot, “Abortive Rituals,” 173.
- 8.
Kreilkamp, “Petted Things,” 103.
- 9.
Boggs, Animalia Americana, 35.
- 10.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
- 11.
London, White Fang, 206.
- 12.
When truth commissions are Indigenous-led, the politics of truth-telling and of affect are far more unsettling of the liberal subject. See Susan McHugh’s study of the Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission (QTC), which inquired into a massacre of sled dogs by the Canadian Mounted Police. “‘A flash point in Inuit memories’: Endangered Knowledges in the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre,” 149–175.
- 13.
Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 30.
- 14.
Berlant, “A Properly Political Concept of Love,” 683–691.
- 15.
See Lutts, The Nature Fakers, 93.
- 16.
The Letters of Jack London, 18.
- 17.
London, White Fang, 100.
- 18.
Gooder and Jacobs. “‘On The Border Of The Unsayable’: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia,” 232.
- 19.
Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 169.
- 20.
Attwell, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, 58.
- 21.
Coetzee, Disgrace, 52.
- 22.
It is important to note claims by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela that the TRC was also guided by the African philosophy of Ubuntu.
- 23.
Coetzee, Disgrace, 89.
- 24.
Attwell refers to “a struggle for control over the resources of fictionality itself” in relation to Coetzee’sLife & Times of Michael K. See Attwell’s J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, 92.
- 25.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 80.
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———. 2011. A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages. Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 683–691.
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Recommended Further Reading
Ahuja, Neel. 2009. Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World. PMLA 124 (2): 556–563.
Boggs, Colleen Glenney. 2017. Love Triangle With Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds. In Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Chrulew, Matthew, and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, eds. 2016. Foucault and Animals. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Kendall-Morwick, Kara. Spring 2013. Jack London, Nature Fakery, and the Stakes of Animal Narrative. The Evolutionary Review 4 (1): 67–75.
Pettman, Dominic. 2017. Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Woodward, Wendy. 2017. ‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some Contemporary Southern African Texts. In Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds, ed. Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Shukin, N. (2021). The Biopolitics of Animal Love: Two Settler Stories. In: McHugh, S., McKay, R., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9_38
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