Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Three New Books in Critical Animal Studies

There are three important books coming out in Critical Animal Studies that I have pieces in, and they are all awesome collections. There is a chance that later on I might promote each of them more.



The first is Critical Terms in Animal Studies, edited by Lori Gruen (Chicago, forthcoming in November). I have an essay on the concept of matter in animal studies. Exploring both the idea of materialism (including new materialism) in animal studies, as well as how we go about performing what matters to us. Here is the rest of the contributors and table of contents.
Introduction • Lori Gruen
1 Abolition • Claire Jean Kim
2 Activism • Jeff Sebo and Peter Singer
3 Anthropocentrism • Fiona Probyn-Rapsey
4 Behavior • Alexandra Horowitz
5 Biopolitics • Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
6 Captivity • Lori Marino
7 Difference • Kari Weil
8 Emotion • Barbara J. King
9 Empathy • Lori Gruen
10 Ethics • Alice Crary
11 Extinction • Thom van Dooren
12 Kinship • Agustín Fuentes and Natalie Porter
13 Law • Kristen Stilt
14 Life • Eduardo Kohn
15 Matter • James K. Stanescu
16 Mind • Kristin Andrews
17 Pain • Victoria A. Braithwaite
18 Personhood • Colin Dayan
19 Postcolonial • Maneesha Deckha
20 Rationality • Christine M. Korsgaard
21 Representation • Robert R. McKay
22 Rights • Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson
23 Sanctuary • Timothy Pachirat
24 Sentience • Gary Varner
25 Sociality • Cynthia Willett and Malini Suchak
26 Species • Harriet Ritvo
27 Vegan • Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong
28 Vulnerability • Anat Pick
29 Welfare • Clare Palmer and Peter Sandøe

The second volume marks the first official appearance of the Stanescu Brothers! In other words, there is an essay in here co-authored by Vasile and myself. It is a rhetorical genealogy of the concept of orthorexia, and an exploration of the pathologization of veganism. The volume is Animaladies: Gender, Animal and Madness, edited by Lori Gruen and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in November).  Here is the table of contents:
Distillations
Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Part I: Dismember
1. Just Say No to Lobotomy
Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA)
2. Making and Unmaking Mammalian Bodies: Sculptural Practice as Traumatic Testimony
lynn mowson (University of Melbourne, Australia)
3. There's Something About the Blood…: Tactics of Evasion within Narratives of Violence
Nekeisha Alayna Alexis (Independent Scholar, USA)
4. Erupt the Silence
Hayley Singer (University of Melbourne, Australia)
5. The Loneliness and Madness of Witnessing: Reflections from a Vegan Feminist Killjoy
Katie Gillespie (Wesleyan University, USA)
Part II: Disability
6. Ableism, Speciesism, Animals, and Autism: The Devaluation of Interspecies Friendships
Hannah Monroe (Brock University, Canada)
7. Maladies and Metaphors: Against Psychologising Speciesism
Guy Scotton (Independent Scholar, Australia)
8. The Horrific History of Comparisons between Cognitive Disability and Animality (and How to Move Past It)
Alice Crary (New School for Social Research, USA)
9. The Personal Is Political: Orthorexia Nervosa, the Pathogenization of Veganism, and Grief as a Political Act
Vasile Stanescu (Mercer University, USA) and James Stanescu (American University, USA)
10. Women, Anxiety and Companion Animals: Toward a Feminist Animal Studies of Interspecies Care and Solidarity
Heather Fraser (Flinders University, Australia) and Nik Taylor (Flinders University, Australia)
Part III: Dysfunction
11. The 'Crazy Cat Lady'
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia)
12. The Role of Dammed and Damned Desire in Animal Exploitation and Liberation
pattrice jones (VINE Sanctuary, USA) and Cheryl Wylie (VINE Sanctuary, USA)
13. Duck Lake Project: Art Meets Activism in an Anti-hide, Anti-bloke, Antidote to Duck Shooting
Yvette Watt (University of Tasmania, Australia)
14. On Outcast Women, Dog Love, and Abjection between Species
Liz Bowen (Columbia University, USA)
Afterword: Discussion
Carol J. Adams

Lastly, the volume on The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology, that I co-edited with Kevin Cummings, has been released in a paperback version. With that, the digital list price has also decreased, so that is a little over $19 on amazon right now. While I am obviously biased, this is a great collection of essays.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: When Species Invade
James K. Stanescu and Kevin Cummings
1.Beyond the Management of Pe(s)ts: Zoomimicry in an Age of Catastrophic Environmental Change
Matthew Calarco
2.Alien Ecology, Or, How to Make Ontological Pluralism
James K. Stanescu
3.Guests, Pests, or Terrorists? Speciesed Ethics and the Colonial Intelligibility of “Invasive” Others
Rebekah Sinclair and Anna Pringle
4.The Judas Pig: How we Kill “Invasive Species” on the Excuse of “Protecting Nature”
Vasile Stanescu
5.Spectacles of Belonging: (Un)documenting Citizenship in a Multispecies World
Banu Subramaniam
6.Welcoming the Stranger: Coercive Reproduction and Invasive Species
Kelsey Cummings and Kevin Cummings
7.Paradise and Warfare: Aldo Leopold and the Rhetorical Origins of Restoration Ecology
Casey Schmitt
8.Rooting for the Unrooted: Invasive Species and Uncanny Ecosystems in Peter Carey’s “Exotic Pleasures”
Mica Hilson

And the Reviews!

This theoretically nuanced, scientifically informed, and historically and culturally sensitive collection delves into the logics of extermination at a crucial time. As our activities create more and more refugees, both human and nonhuman, the rhetoric of invasion has unprecedented power that calls us to ask critical questions. The essays in this volume, written by philosophers, geographers, environmental humanities scholars and others, provide a necessary intervention that will help us grapple with the complexities of ecological and social harms created by the eradication of individuals and species deemed non-native.
— Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University and author of "Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Other Animals"

This collection refreshingly approaches the issue of invasion ecology from the urgently needed perspectives of ethics and rhetoric. Each of these essays questions the received idea of an "invasive species" as a morally compromised destroyer of a privileged "ecosystem," a category with an inherent moral and aesthetic stamp of approval. The essays expose the rhetorical stances of invasion, migration, and reproductive futurism across species boundaries, indicting the nativist and colonialist discourses that sustain the oppression and abuse of human and nonhuman animals alike. The stories we tell when we separate invaders from the ecology they supposedly invade draw on deeply ingrained discourses of nativism and colonialism. These essays do not simply take those stories apart: each one tells new, more inclusive stories that can structure more inclusive, generous, and ethically engaged ecosystems.
— Robert Stanton, Boston College

This volume introduces a broad set of valuable, insightful and critical interventions into the field of ‘invasion ecology’ that one hopes will be engaged with by both conservation biologists and the wider policy sphere in order to provoke debate and contest current practice.
— Richard Twine, Edge Hill University