Biocentrism: Sexuality, Coloniality, and Constructing the Human

DOI

10.1017/9781009300032.016

Abstract

This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

10-26-2023

Publisher Statement

© Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023

DOI: 10.1017/9781009300032

TITLE: The Cambridge companion to literature and animals / edited by Derek Ryan.
DESCRIPTION: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge companions to literature.

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