Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture

Towards a Vegan Theory

Emelia Quinn, Benjamin Westwood, Emelia Quinn, Benjamin Westwood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319733791
• eBook ISBN: 9783319733807
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Literature

This collection explores what the social and philosophical aspects of veganism offer to critical theory. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars working in animal studies and critical animal studies, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture shows how the experience of being vegan, and the conditions of thought fostered by veganism, pose new questions for work across multiple disciplines. Offering accounts of veganism which move beyond contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish dietary preference or set of proscriptions, it explores the messiness and necessary contradictions involved in thinking about or practicing a vegan way of life. By thinking through as well as about veganism, the project establishes the value of a vegan mode of reading, writing, looking, and thinking.

Part IPolitics

© The Author(s) 2018

Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood (eds.)Thinking Veganism in Literature and CulturePalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_2

Begin Abstract

Vegans in the Interregnum: The Cultural Moment of an Enmeshed Theory

Laura Wright¹

(1)

Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, USA

Laura Wright

End Abstract

In her 1982 James Lecture “Living in the Interregnum,” South African novelist and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer situates herself within the transitional space of apartheid era South Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of profound social upheaval. As I have noted previously,¹ Gordimer re-appropriates as applicable to her historical moment Antonio Gramsci’s formulation of the interregnum, a time he characterizes in his Prison Notebooks as a moment during which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”² In 1982, Gordimer spoke from a place of willing abdication, a recognition that in the time that would necessarily follow, white South Africans must learn to listen to black voices and must step out of the role of narrators of history in order to become subjects in the story, authored by black South Africans, that would follow. In this essay, I am choosing to use “interregnum” as Gordimer does as a way of characterizing an uncertain transitional period in a context other than its original meaning—the time between kings—in order to mark such a moment of discontinuity in the West. I am doing so in the service of a vegan theoretical perspective’s situatedness as an emergent voice speaking outside an extant discourse of late capitalism that is straining to maintain its currency as meaningful, sustainable, and viable. In order to do vegan theory, like Gordimer , I situate myself in such a moment, a historical interregnum that is characterized by political, social, and environmental uncertainty writ large. It is within this transitional space that the emergent cultural moment of vegan studies and theory in the West finds itself taking shape and doing work.

In 2013, Roger Cohen declared that the world is once again living in an interregnum. It is poised between inward-looking old powers and reluctant emergent ones. The post-9/11 era is over; it has bequeathed an exhausted USA. Morbid symptoms include a dysfunctional United Nations Security Council, a Syria that bleeds, a US economy squeezing its middle class and a Europe that leaves its youth jobless.³

Since that time, the West has faced a massive influx of refugees from that bleeding Syria. It has seen Brexit, the activism of Black Lives Matter , and the “whitelash” of the US presidential election of Donald Trump . The space of this interregnum is at once a space of profound confusion and uncertainty, and a liminal moment during which productive new narratives can form. In this, the almost but never arriving moment of apocalypse, the cognitive coordinates of a lived and theoretical veganism can deconstruct and challenge the intricate, overlapping, and interconnected politics that enforce certain silencings and displacements, first by explicating the rhetorical practices that undergird them and then by shifting the story in ways that impact lived experiences. At this point in history, the task of the vegan theorist is to disaggregate enmeshed oppressions in order to understand more fully the mechanisms that reinforce them. Because ethical veganism is marked by an awareness of and resistance to the suffering inflicted upon animals, vegan theorists must grapple with, as Gordimer was willing, our responsibility as narrators of history. What we must do is reconstitute animals, as best we can and without attempting to speak for them, as present within narratives—national, personal, social—that have worked actively to omit them.

In this essay, I hope first to trace my historical and personal understanding of vegan theory as it emerged—unnamed—somewhere around 2003, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation on the works of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee , and then to further the trajectory of vegan theory as a mode of politically engaged scholarly inquiry that recognizes veganism as a practice, identity category, and a set of cognitive co-ordinates via a theoretical inquiry into the often overt focus on veganism and tacit fear of politicized eating that played a role in the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump.⁴ In “Awakening to the Politics of Food: Politicized Diet as Social Identity,” Chelsea Chuck, Samantha A. Fernandes, and Lauri L. Hyers examine the reality that food in the USA has “controversial roots in the early global food trade, colonial expansion, and the industrial revolution.”⁵ They recognize that food in the USA is necessarily a political issue that is, as I am asserting, an enmeshed discourse, “tied to the exploitation of food producers, abuse of animals, environmental destruction, serious health care issues, and unfair distribution that at its worst leads to ‘food deserts,’ food scarcity, and mass starvation.”⁶ Based on their study, people who are politicized around food—and their study examines vegans and vegetarians as well as other groups—experience their politicization as relegating them to “a marginal status,” which means that they “go through similar encounter awakenings as do individuals politicized about race and gender, and they perceive this to be part of their identity.”⁷ In other words, food politicization places politicized eaters at willing risk of the kind of marginalization that potentially invites alienation and, at the most extreme, harm.

Further, bodies of actual and rhetorical animals did play a role in Trump’s election, and they did so in ways that are deeply troubling and explicitly linked to an increasingly inflammatory discourse that has advocated violence against women, minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, the disabled, and immigrants. In June 2015, Trump claimed that Mexican immigrants were rapists,⁸ and in November of 2016, mocked disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski.⁹ There are numerous instances of Trump advocating violence against protesters at his rallies,¹⁰ and he encouraged the “second amendment people” to “do something about” Hillary Clinton should she be elected.¹¹ It is clear that the bodies of specific human beings became highly politicized during this campaign—and much of the rhetoric aimed at women was in the service of rendering them animals. A popular pro-Trump bumper sticker read “Trump that bitch,” and along with being caught on tape advocating for sexual assault, claiming that whenever he wants a woman, he “grabs her by the pussy” (an admission that led to millions of women wearing pink cat ears at the women’s marches on January 21),¹² Trump regularly refers to women as pigs , dogs , and “disgusting” animals.¹³ In April 2017, in an editorial in the New York Times, Alex Beam commented on the lack of a Trump White House pet , noting that “by all appearances, Mr. Trump doesn’t like animals,” and he points out the amount of good will that is extended to presidents who have companion animals, encouraging Trump to consider faking liking animals. He quips, “what is that great line? Once you’ve learned to fake sincerity, the rest is easy. Once Donald Trump learns to pretend to love animals, he can move on to pretending to love the human race.” ¹⁴

A Minor Manifesto

I want to clarify a few points about how I do vegan theory. I am aware of the various reasons that practicing vegans choose to become vegan, including health, religious dictates, and ethical considerations, as well as the myriad reasons why most people are not, or are not able, to be vegan. Further, I understand that there are complex and complicated gendered, racial, ethnic, regional and socio-economic structures that impact and shape access to food and food choices. I likewise fully recognize the position of privilege that affords me the luxury of being able to think about what I eat and to be able to react politically (via my consumer choices) in an effort to address and counter the instrumentalization of animals in the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Thinking Through Veganism
• Part I. Politics
• Part II. Visual Culture
• Part III. Literature
• Part IV. Definitions
• Back Matter