Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts

Animal Studies in Modern Worlds

Wendy Woodward, Susan McHugh, Wendy Woodward, Susan McHugh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319568737
• eBook ISBN: 9783319568744
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

This volume illuminates how creative representations remain sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epistemologies. Traditionally imagined in relation to spiritual realms and the occult, animals have always been more than primitive symbols of human relations. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors, totems, talismans, or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the volume's unique emphasis on Southern Africa and North America – historical loci of the greatest ranges of species and linguistic diversity – help to situate how indigenous knowledges of human-animal relations are being adapted to modern conditions of life shared across species lines.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Editors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories, and Poetry of Bushmen
• Chapter 2 Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-Maloti
• Chapter 3 Kabbo Sings the Animals
• Chapter 4 Interrogating the Sacred Art of Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper
• Part II Indigenous Wisdoms, Animal Aesthetics, and Contemporary Materialities
• Chapter 5 Spirit Guards: A Squad of Ceramic Dogs in South Africa
• Chapter 6 Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities, and Indigenous Wisdoms
• Part III Global Flows of Animal Myths and Allegories
• Chapter 7 The Porosity of Human/Non-human Beings in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys
• Chapter 8 Animated Animals: Allegories of Transformation in Khumba
• Chapter 9 Magic Wells, the Stream and the Flow: The Promise of Literary Animal Studies
• Part IV Creative Interventions in Literary and Art Histories of Indigenous Animal Practices
• Chapter 10 Border Crossings: Animals, Tricksters and Shape-Shifters in Modern Native American Fiction
• Chapter 11 I’m Mad You’re Mad We Are All Mad: The Alice Diaries
• Part V Indigenous Traumas and Recoveries across Species Lines
• Chapter 12 ‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some Contemporary Southern African Texts
• Chapter 13 Cross-Pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges of Extinction and Genocide in Honeybee Fictions
• Index