This volume takes ending the oppression of other animals seriously and confronts the question ‘What would happen to all the animals?’ by showcasing real, promissory, and imagined counter-sites or heterotopia, where animals ‘happen’ in different ways, free of anthropocentric orders of value and purpose.
Rejecting persistent understandings of the oppression of nonhuman animals, across the entire breadth of the Animal-Industrial Complex (A-IC), as either non-existent, unproblematic, and/or fundamentally unalterable – open to merely being reduced in scale or made less harmful – the collection offers readers a variety of pathways towards radically ‘disordered’ ways of thinking about and relating to other animals. Over 14 chapters, authors describe more liberatory relational reconfigurations playing out in the present and undertake conceptual, imaginative, and embodied explorations of liberatory futures. The chapters are united by a common commitment to heterotopic disturbance – to contesting and subverting the anthropo-capitalo-centric space in which we live. Each chapter approaches this subversion in its own way, using prefiguration, restorying, speculation, radical imagination, and combinations thereof, to disturb or shatter orders, explore the kinds of liberation and resistance their disturbance demonstrates, demands, or embodies, and ultimately illustrate exactly what would or could happen to all the animals.
Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders will appeal to scholars, students, and individuals interested not only in challenging normalised binaries, hierarchies, and orders of value, both human and nonhuman, but in creating and realising liberatory alternatives. Scholar-activists, activists, professionals working in animal advocacy, and anyone undertaking activities aimed at radically changing how other animals are understood and used will also find inspiration, new insights, and information that enhance their current methods and approaches. Some readers may also find simply confirmation and comfort in the knowledge that so many others are working in solidarity with the ‘disordered’ belief that shattering the A-IC is possible.
Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Section 1. Relational reconfigurations in present futures
1. Sites of Vegan Placemaking: A Celebration of Multispecies Alliances at the Borderlands
2. Careful Care Towards Animal Liberation for Feral Pigeons and Beyond
3. Unveiling Shared Histories: Crafting Sanctuary and the Work of Care in Troubled Domestic Domains
4. Non-ridden horses, implanted chickens, and vegan sanctuaries: The liberatory promises and limits of animal heterotopias.
Section 2. Conceptual and political re-ordering
5. The Magpies: Reflections on Liminality, Domestication, and Animal Agency
6. Dog Proposals: Participatory Design, Playfulness, and Multispecies Futures
7. The Radical Praxis of Equity: Mutual Interdependence and an Ethic of Responsibility
Section 3. Subversion through radical storytelling and restorying
8. Opening Aquaria
9. Beyond the Farm – Towards Multispecies Anarcho-Communities
10. The Post-human Ontology of Gothic Enviro-toons: Defying Anthropo-denial in Watership Down, The Plague Dogs and Padak
11. Laugh to Liberate: Futurabilities of Posthumanist Comedy
Section 4. Personal shifts and transformations
12. Love Beyond the Species Divide in Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and Majnun
13. Choosing Snakes: Towards unhampered hospitality
14. A New Pedagogy of Sharing Multispecies Sentience: Coexisting in Spaces of Love and Compassion
Afterword: A methodological side-note
About the Author :
Paula Arcari is an independent scholar living in Melbourne Australia, and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2019-2022) hosted by the Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS), Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’ published in 2019.
Review :
'To create a future where humans and other animals are free, we need inspiring visions to guide us. After all, we can only create what we can imagine. Over 14 chapters, this collection offers much needed examples and visions of more liberatory ways of seeing and relating to our animal cousins, providing glimpses of what this promises, and helping us uncover pathways to create these alternative futures.'
Dr Laila Kassam, Animal Think Tank, UK
'How may genuinely enduring post-liberatory scenarios for (other) animals be realised in the wake of upending human relations of power, violence, and exploitation over them? This essential pragmatic question is startlingly missing in much scholarly and activist work for multispecies liberatory praxis. Conceiving and transcending a visionary manifesto, Arcari’s curation of ‘heretotopia’ takes us across sanctuaries, neighbourhood trees, dovecotes, and design projects to show why and how noticings and imaginings of possibilities otherwise, arising from the ashes of singular knowing, is imperative for liberatory politics to be conceivable, and hence actionable. Each chapter exuding care, this groundbreaking collection, heralding a momentous generational shift in animal studies, composes nothing less than conceptual insurrection, a new political grammar, and critically, a tangible cartography for radicalising human-to-animal alliances.'
Associate Professor Yamini Narayanan, Deakin University, Australia
