Animals in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature and Culture

Dear Colleagues,

In this Special Issue of Humanities, we invite contributions on the theme of “Animals in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature and Culture”. We favor an interdisciplinary approach and invite scholars, writers, artists from fields as varied as literary studies, sociology, philosophy, history of science as well as poetry, fiction, visual arts, and digital culture. The issue focuses on recent and multiple reorientations of thought, representations, and practices regarding animals in recent French and Francophone thought. For a few decades now, the field of animal studies has undergone multiple rebirths starting with the philosophical queries of Elisabeth de Fontenay, Derrida or Jean-Christophe Bailly and culminating more recently with the recent neo-naturalist practices of Vinciane Despret and Baptiste Morizot. From essays questioning the status of the human (Dominique Lestel) to histories and anthropologies that question the modern natural–cultural apartheid (Philippe Descola, Eric Baratay), the pace and depth of these thought innovations have been remarkable. New hybrid epistemologies have also profoundly altered and broadened the way we understand our nonhuman knowledge (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers) and paved the way for new readings of science but also art and literature. Similar upheavals can also be witnessed in popular and digital cultures where enlightened amateurs blog about interspecies friendships or Corvid’s gift economies. What is happening, in short, is a remarkable diversification and complication of animal knowledge: contemporary animal approaches, in France and abroad, decompartmentalize official ways of knowing and open thinking as well as practices to new ecologies and relationships.

Although we welcome contributions on any aspect of these revolutionary changes in thought, representations, and practices, we are particularly interested in recent explorations of what Baptiste Morizot has named the “woven animal”, i.e., attempts to think of nonhumans beyond the modern nature–culture divide and within a “diplomacy of interdependences” (a way of considering living beings not in terms of specific and essential differences but as a web of mutual dependences between nonhuman beings and things). These are approaches that no longer focus on whether it is possible to know an animal in itself (“know what it is to be a bat”) but focus on the relationships and practices allowing humans and nonhumans to know each other within local and geopolitical entanglements.

We suggest contributors investigate and expand on the following themes:

• Rethinking the “unknown” in animal philosophy;
• The “woven animal”: relational practices in animal knowledge;
• Hybrid communities and practices (tracking, hunting, domestic relationships, human and nonhuman working practices, training);
• Animals and contaminated ecologies;
• Social media (blogs to YouTube) and the building of interspecies relationships;
• Epistemological debates and changes: How to ask animals the right questions in the sciences and philosophy;
• Geopolitics vs. animal ethics;
• Amateur contributions and anecdotal knowledge.

Dr. Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield
Guest Editor

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• hybrid communities
• the “woven” animal
• nonhumans
• geopolitics and interspecies diplomacy
• relational epistemologies
• animal practices
• contaminated ecologies
• digital animal culture
• animal practices (training, tracking, etc.)