Animal Studies

This overview of animal studies scholarship from 2020 covers a diverse range of sites – from escaped primates in IKEA carparks to boar hunting in colonial India – and disciplinary contexts, drawing together research from philosophy, literary theory, the environmental humanities, animal geographies, imperial history, and ecofeminism. What unites these texts is their engagement with one of the most significant themes in animal studies: the politics of anthropocentrism. The first sections of the essay engage with work that has sought to critique anthropocentric logics and practices. Through focusing on research related to the exotic pet trade, avian extinction, and colonial science, I illustrate how anthropocentric hierarchies are being enacted – but also complicated – but particular socio-economic relationships and knowledge-frameworks. In the second sections of the essay, I engage more explicitly with scholarship that has foregrounded the complex relationships between anthropocentrism, colonialism, gendered inequalities, and racialization. Although this research is wide-ranging, what it shares is an insistence on the need to better situate narratives about the intersection of human and animal oppression, in light of the way these relations are shaped by specific national and cultural contexts. The essay culminates by discussing contemporary critiques of animal studies due to the primacy it has given to anthropocentrism over other oppressive social relations, particularly race. At the same time as arguing that the field needs to meaningfully engage with these critiques moving forward, I conclude by suggesting that there is something important about anthropocentrism that means it retains value as a critical concept for animal studies.