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
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.
Recommended Citation
Snaza, Nathan. “Biocentrism: Sexuality, Coloniality, and Constructing the Human.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals, edited by Derek Ryan, 236–51. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009300032.016