Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies

In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.

Chiara Mengozzi is a researcher at Charles University in Prague (Faculty of Arts), where she teaches literary theory, as well as Italian and French contemporary literatures. She is also Associated Researcher at CEFRES in Prague (French Research Center in Social Sciences). Her research focuses on animal studies, ecocriticism, climate fiction, postcolonial and migrant literatures, world literature, and translation and reception theory. She is the author of an Italian monograph entitled Narrazioni contese. Vent’anni di scritture italiane della migrazione (2013). She is currently investigating the relation between science and literature in the context of climate change.