Lunchtime Talk with Jeremy Chow

  • November 16, 2022
  • 12:00 PM - 1:30 CST
  • Palm Court, Mundelein
  • Katarzyna Lecky, klecky@luc.edu
  • Free
  • Open to the public.
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  • Details

    This talk looks to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) as a case study by which to explore the 'interspecies imaginary'; that is how violent tensions among disparate species are imagined by a colonial archive and how these tensions cohere around representations of blackness, indigeneity, and animality. The interspecies imaginary, rather than defaulting to a discriminatory rhetoric in which these subaltern positions are flattened, maintains a subversive effect in that its documentation produces new constellations of co-constitutive identity while simultaneously locating these triangulated violences as threats to the colonial state. By examining the tiger and eel episodes enmeshed in the novella, I suggest that the interspecies imaginary magnifies textures of violent contact among human and nonhuman species that inform how representations of gender, blackness, and indigeneity are productively tethered to animality.