The Entanglement of Disability, Animality and Humanness in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People in the Light of Sunaura Taylor’s Ethical Theories

Iwona Filipczak

doi:10.18290/rh237111.2

Published : 2023-12-29

Vol. 71 No. 11 (2023)

The Entanglement of Disability, Animality and Humanness in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People in the Light of Sunaura Taylor’s Ethical Theories

Iwona Filipczak

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4033-5521

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh237111.2

Abstract

One recent development in the field of disability studies is its intersection with animal studies, as represented in the work of American artist, writer, disability and animal rights activist Sunaura Taylor. In her art and scholarly works, primarily in her book Beasts of Burden (2017), Taylor examines the porousness of human/nonhuman categories in the context of disability studies. Although Taylor is aware of how various discourses animalized certain populations in the past (the colonized, ethnic minorities, or people with disabilities), she insists on showing resemblance and kinship between disabled people and animals. Taylor’s ideas seem to be reflected in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), which deals with the problem of environmental catastrophe, consequent health issues of the local population, and animalization of people with disabilities. The paper investigates Sinha’s portrayal of entanglements of the human with the nonhuman in the material sphere, and the emergence of a new type of consciousness, based on a redefinition of one’s connection to the world, which involves reclaiming one’s animality.

Keywords:

posthumanism, disability, animality, ableis, toxicity

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

pdf

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

References

Aloi, Giovanni, and Susan McHugh, editors. “Envisioning Posthumanism.” Introduction. Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader, Columbia UP, 2021.

Bartosch, R. “The Postcolonial Picaro in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People: Becoming Posthuman through Animal’s Eyes.” Ecozon@, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, pp. 10–19.

Cao, Shunqing. “Disabled and Vulnerable Bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People: Transcending the Human and Nonhuman World.” Neohelicon, vol. 47, no. 1, 2020, pp. 67–74.

Derrida, Jacque. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 369–418.

Filipczak, Iwona. “The Desiring Subject Vs. the Object of Desire in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007).” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2023, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00111619.2023.2169103.

Fowler, Kate. “Sunaura Taylor.” Unbound Project, 3 Apr. 2022, www.unboundproject.org suna ura-taylor.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009.

Johnston, Justin Omar. “‘A Nother World’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 62, no. 2, 2016, pp. 119–44.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “The Rights of Things.” Foreword. What Is Posthumanism?, by Cary Wolfe, U of Minnesota P, 2010, ix–xiv.

Mukherjee, Pablo. “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us’: Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal’s People”. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth Deloughrey and George Handley, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 216–31.

Nixon, Rob. “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, 2009, pp. 443–67.

Orning, Sara E. S. “Staging Humanimality: Patricia Piccinini and a Genealogy of Species Intermingling.” Animalities. Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, edited by Michael Lundblad, Edinburgh UP, 2017, pp. 80–103.

Parry, Catherine. Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Duke UP, 2018.

Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. Simon & Shuster, 2007.

Taylor, Sunaura. “Age of Disability: On Living Well with Impaired Landscapes.” Orion Magazine, 9 Nov. 2021, www.orionmagazine.org/article/age-of-disability.

Taylor, Sunaura. “Animals, Ableism, Activism.” Journal of Visual Art Practice, vol. 12, no. 3, 2013, pp. 235–44.

Taylor, Sunaura. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. The New Press, 2017.

Taylor, Sunaura. “Witnessing Animals: Paintings and the Politics of Seeing.” Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader, edited by Giovanni Aloi and Susan McHugh, Columbia UP, 2021, pp. 67–72.

Weil, Kari. “The Animal Novel That Therefore This Is Not?” New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 117–35.

Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota P, 2010.