The Nonhuman Animal and Levinasian Otherness: Contemporary Narratives and Criticism

Abstract

This essay discusses literary Human Animal Studies in South Africa since 2000 with its implicit contradiction of Levinasian notions of nonhuman animals as faceless others. Literary Human Animal Studies foregrounds the representation of nonhuman animals, whether they are developed as subjects or have points of view and to what extent humans and animals inhabit a ‘shared’ world. I argue, citing examples, for some sense of an ethical shift in recent South African writing since JM Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller (2005), Michiel Heyns’s The Reluctant Passenger (2003) and Njabulo S Ndebele’s essay “The Year of the Dog” (2007) variously acknowledge nonhuman animals as ethical subjects. Yet no recent South African literary narrative focuses on dogs like Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (2006) which satirises Cameroonian politics as it contradicts conventional human-animal hierarchies. Finally, the essay briefly considers the substantial ethical attention paid to animals in global English fiction.