Nonhuman-Inhuman: Readings on the Boundaries of Humanity

Catalog description

With the aim of tracing and troubling the inner and outer contours of human agency, history, and meaning, this course puts writings on the nonhuman (nature-animal-technology) and the inhuman (culture-power-technique) in relation to each other to explore where and when boundaries of the human are exposed, strained, riddled, or put in crisis. Readings will prompt a reflection on histories of environment and inequity, “natural” disasters, situations of human-animal cohabitation or “conflict,” entanglements of human stories with those of extractions and flows of matter, and technology’s place in the production of contemporary (inter)species lives and deaths. Reading Mahasweta Devi, John Bellamy Foster, Judith Butler, Partha Chatterjee, Mariane Hirsch, Omer Bartov, Amitav Ghosh, Saidiya Hartman, Nasser Abourrahme, Richard Powers, and others, we will strive to cross and connect the disciplines of history, literature, environmental history, anthropology, and critical-cultural theory.