Toward an Understanding of Human Violence: Cultural Studies, Animal Studies, and the Promise of Posthumanism

On January 3, 2012, the "New York Times" featured an article announcing the emergence of the new interdisciplinary field of animal studies, which is spreading across college campuses in new course offerings, new majors, and new undergraduate and graduate programs. This new field grows out of, on the one hand, a long history of scientific research on animals whose cumulative results (animal cognition, animal emotions, animal communication, animal morality) have now decisively blurred the "once-sharp distinction" between human and nonhuman animals, and, on the other hand, the field of cultural studies, which has been focused on "ignored and marginalized humans"--for example, women and minorities who were once considered "outsiders," not quite fully human, and often closer to animals. In the context of violence and trauma, the field of animal studies emerges in recent years not as the latest academic curiosity to be reported, somewhat smugly, in the "New York Times" or as the most recent challenge from within the university to business-as-usual in the crisis-prone humanities. The interdisciplinary field of animal studies emerges as a call to relinquish the habit and the hubris of anthropocentrism and humanism and to broaden the sense of "our time" to include the catastrophe that is the systematic and relentless and ongoing exploitation, abuse, and killing of nonhuman animals. Moreover, the author points out that animal studies calls on individuals to see the deep and abiding connection between how they interact with and treat each other and how they interact with and treat nonhuman others. In this article, the author talks about understanding the problem of human violence by focusing on cultural studies, animal studies, and the promise of posthumanism. (Contains 29 notes.)