Rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness

In Animate Planet Kath Weston shows how new intimacies between humans, animals, and their surroundings are emerging as people attempt to understand how the high-tech ecologically damaged world they have made is remaking them, one synthetic chemical, radioactive isotope, and megastorm at a time. Visceral sensations, she finds, are vital to this process, which yields a new animism in which humans and "the environment" become thoroughly entangled. In case studies on food, water, energy, and climate from the United States, India, and Japan, Weston approaches the new animism as both a symptom of our times and an analytic with the potential to open paths to new and forgotten ways of living.

The concept of 'animacy' concerns the fundamental and cognitive question of the extent to which we recognize and express living things as saliently human-like or animal-like. In Animacy and Reference Mutsumi Yamamoto pursues two main objectives: First, to establish a conceptual framework of animacy, and secondly, to explain how the concept of animacy can be reflected in the use of referential expressions. Unlike previous studies on the subject focussing on grammatical manifestations, Animacy and Reference sheds light upon the conceptual properties of animacy itself and its reflection in referential processes. For the research of this study the author focussed on languages that show completely different tendencies. As a result, English and Japanese 'parallel corpora' are analysed yielding salient observations and opening intriguing discussions.

Tranimacies is a neologism that pushes and pulls together transness and animality so as to better germinate unruly, wily, perverse relationships between them, and their spawn. Through tranimacies the book aims at rethinking the linking of liberation struggles amongst former colonized peoples and lands, minoritized genders and sexualities, racially marked persons and non-human animals, and does so in a variety of geopolitical and temporal sites. This rich compendium includes original scholarship and dialogues as well as poetry, comix, bioart, and performance documentation. The composite term of tranimacies enmeshes several everyday and scholarly concepts: transgender, animal, animacy, intimacies. This edited volume’s bundle of theoretical and artistic works insists on the beating heart of embodied experiences and political pulses at the core of these concepts. The authors show that tranimacies are spread throughout what Mel Y. Chen describes as the "animacy hierarchies" that delimit zones of possibility and agency, confounding the vertical order with transversal movements. As an intervention into the burgeoning debates within and across trans, animal, critical race, and posthuman studies this publication seeks to destabilize the logic of "turns" in critical theory, and through sticky intimacies uncover how animality, race, and gender underscore the humanist production of meanings. By taking a decolonial approach (in the main, but not exclusively) the authors hope to shift debates in animal studies towards accounting for and delinking from colonial mentalities. Three poems interweave our selection of chapters, which together forge three lines of inquiry defined by a certain ethos: transhistories of the present, lessons from the bestiary, and #animatingephemera. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

This diverse and compelling collection of contemporary feminist visual art is now available in a paperback edition. Reframings makes visible what has been for too long nearly invisible: contemporary feminist visual art that represents a remarkable range of perspectives, styles, and subject matter. The forty-five women who created these works-artists and writers such as Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, Nan Goldin, and Carm Little Turtle-are connected by a belief that images are political and that today's feminist concerns cannot be separated from such issues as ethnicity, class, age, and sexuality. They share a consciousness that historically women have been "framed" and can now be "reframed." Author note: Diane Neumaier is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

This issue features a group of leading theorists from multiple disciplines who decenter the human in queer theory, exploring what it means to treat "the human" as simply one of many elements in a queer critical assemblage. Contributors examine the queer dimensions of recent moves to think apart from or beyond the human in affect theory, disability studies, critical race theory, animal studies, science studies, ecocriticism, and other new materialisms. Essay topics include race, fabulation, and ecology; parasitology, humans, and mosquitoes; the racialization of advocacy for pit bulls; and queer kinship in Korean films when humans become indistinguishable from weapons. The contributors argue that a nonhuman critical turn in queer theory can and should refocus the field's founding attention to social structures of dehumanization and oppression. They find new critical energies that allow considerations of justice to operate alongside and through their questioning of the human-nonhuman boundary. Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, also published by Duke University Press. Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America and editor, with Ivy G. Wilson, of Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Karen Barad, Jayna Brown, Mel Y. Chen, Jack Halberstam, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra Hird, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Eileen Joy, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Uri McMillan, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong'o, ​Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Stryker, Kimberly Tallbear, Jeanne Vaccaro, Harlan Weaver, Jami Weinstein

This book explores Māori indigenous and non-indigenous scholarship corresponding with the term ‘animism’. In addressing visual, media and performance art, it explores the dualisms of people and things, as well as 'who' or 'what' is credited with 'animacy'. It comprises a diverse array of essays divided into four sections: Indigenous Animacies, Atmospheric Animations, Animacy Hierarchies and Sensational Animisms. Cassandra Barnett discusses artists Terri Te Tau and Bridget Reweti and how personhood and hau (life breath) traverse art-taonga. Artist Natalie Robertson addresses kōrero (talk) with ancestors through photography. Janine Randerson and sound artist Rachel Shearer consider the sun as animate with mauri (life force), while Anna Gibb explores life in the algorithm. Rebecca Schneider and Amelia Jones discuss animacy in queered and raced formations. Stephen Zepke explores Deleuze and Guattari's animist hylozoism and Amelia Barikin examines a mineral ontology of art. This book will appeal to readers interested in indigenous and non-indigenous entanglements and those who seek different approaches to new materialism, the post-human and the anthropocene.

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement—to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more broadly.

What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

The papers in this volume are concerned with the question of how a speaker’s intended referent is interpreted by the addressee. Topics include the interpretation of coreferential vs. disjoint reference, the role of intonation, syntactic form and animacy in reference understanding, and the way in which general principles of utterance interpretation constrain possible interpretations of referring expressions. The collection arises from a workshop on reference and referent accessibility which was held at the 4th International Pragmatics Conference in Kobe, Japan, July 25-30, 1993.