Asian American Representation in the Media
Content Warning: This guide contains depictions and descriptions of yellowface, whitewashing, orientalism, and racism again Asian people.
Images: Films (from left to right), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Bitter Melon (2018), PEN15 (2019-), Minari (2020).
Welcome to the Asian American Representation in the Media LibGuide. This guide will discuss the history of Asian American representation in the media—primarily in Hollywood—and examine some common tropes/stereotypes applied to Asian characters in film and television. Here, you will find brief discussions of the Model Minority Myth, the Dragon Lady trope, techno-orientalism, and whitewashing/yellowface, along with a selections of books and films written/created by Asian Americans featuring nuanced characters and portrayals of Asian experiences, including the movies and films in the above images.
In a recent study, “I Am Not a Fetish or Model Minority” (2021) from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, researchers found that Asian and Pacific Islanders (API) actors made up only 4.5% of leads or co-leads in the top 10 grossing domestic films from 2010-2019. In films featuring API characters in the main cast, about a third of API characters "embody at least one common API trope or stereotype (35.2%)" such as the “Martial Artist,” the “Model Minority,” or the “Exotic Woman.” There is a long and continuing history of the whitewashing and stereotyping of Asian characters in Hollywood films. In 1935, MGM refused to consider Anna May Wong for the leading role O-Lan in the The Good Earth—instead casting Luise Rainer to play O-Lan in yellowface. In the 2023 biography Tetris, Taron Egerton, a Welsh actor was been cast to play video game publisher Henk Rogers, who is Dutch-Indonesian.
The guide serves only as an introduction and highlights texts in our collection that focus on Asian American representation in the media. For more information, see our companion guides including our Feminist Media Studies guide which features brief explanations of stereotypes inflicted on women in the media:
- Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (Media Studies)
- Asian American Representation in the Media (Media Studies)
- Korea Remixed (Media Studies)
- Spotlight on Queer & Trans* Asian Literature and Poetics (Gender Studies)
- Asian American and Pacific Islander Philosophies (Philosophy)
- Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Media Resources (Media Services)
- Asian American Artists, Architects, and Designers (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- AAPI Identity - Recommended Reads from the Children's Collection (Education Library)
Video: The History of Asian Representation in Film. VICE News (2021).
Citations: Almost Half of All Asian Roles Serve as a Punchline, Study Finds. Sakshi Venkatraman, NBC News, 5 Aug. 2021.
Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) by Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) explores all aspects of Asian American experiences through original articles detailing new theoretical developments, research results, methodological innovations, public policy concerns, and pedagogical issues. The Journal also publishes book, media, and exhibition reviews. As a much-needed outlet for the increasing volume of scholarship in the field, JAAS provides an avenue for a quick and lively exchange of ideas. Journal of Asian American Studies is the official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS).
Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction by ISBN: 9781503604018Publication Date: 2018-07-17Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability by ISBN: 9781478016359Publication Date: 2022-11-18In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity.
Asian American Media Activism by ISBN: 9781479878192Publication Date: 2016-05-17Among the most well-known YouTubers are a cadre of talented Asian American performers, including comedian Ryan Higa and makeup artist Michelle Phan. Yet beneath the sheen of these online success stories lies a problem—Asian Americans remain sorely underrepresented in mainstream film and television. When they do appear on screen, they are often relegated to demeaning stereotypes such as the comical foreigner, the sexy girlfriend, or the martial arts villain. The story that remains untold is that as long as these inequities have existed, Asian Americans have been fighting back—joining together to protest offensive imagery, support Asian American actors and industry workers, and make their voices heard. Providing a cultural history and ethnography, Asian American Media Activism assesses everything from grassroots collectives in the 1970s up to contemporary engagements by fan groups, advertising agencies, and users on YouTube and Twitter. In linking these different forms of activism, Lori Kido Lopez investigates how Asian American media activism takes place and evaluates what kinds of interventions are most effective. Ultimately, Lopez finds that activists must be understood as fighting for cultural citizenship, a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance within a nation that has long rejected them.
The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media by ISBN: 9781317540847Publication Date: 2017-02-24The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media offers readers a comprehensive examination of the way that Asian Americans have engaged with media, from the long history of Asian American actors and stories that have been featured in mainstream film and television, to the birth and development of a distinctly Asian American cinema, to the ever-shifting frontiers of Asian American digital media. Contributor essays focus on new approaches to the study of Asian American media including explorations of transnational and diasporic media, studies of intersectional identities encompassed by queer or mixed race Asian Americans, and examinations of new media practices that challenge notions of representation, participation, and community. Expertly organized to represent work across disciplines, this companion is an essential reference for the study of Asian American media and cultural studies.
Asians Loving Asians by ISBN: 9781433183058Publication Date: 2022-01-11Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics examines media representations and everyday interpersonal intercultural negotiations of vernacular discourses around sticky rice—an "Asian" man building sexual and romantic relationships with other "Asian" men. Specifically, Eguchi interrogates the following elements of sticky rice: the way sticky rice recycles, rethinks, and shifts the settler colonialist logics of whiteness that sustain ongoing histories of anti-Asian racism; the way sticky rice resists and reifies the mundane operation and execution of whiteness that organizes gay sexual cultures; the way sticky rice reproduces, reconstitutes, and challenges intra-regional political rivalries, economic hierarchies, and historical tensions in and across Asia and Asian diasporas; and the way sticky rice suggests alternative mappings of queer sex, desire, intimacy, and relationality. By taking further steps to unpack the complexities and contradictions of sticky rice as a gay vernacular, Eguchi offers an additional and alternative space to question and critique "Asians loving Asians."
A View from the Bottom by ISBN: 9780822376606Publication Date: 2014-07-29A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood—as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form—has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.
Micro Media Industries: Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora by ISBN: 9781978823341Publication Date: 2021-08-13With the rise of digital tools used for media entrepreneurship, media outlets staffed by only one or two individuals and targeted to niche and super-niche audiences are developing across a wide range of platforms. Minority communities such as immigrants and refugees have long been pioneers in this space, operating ethnic media outlets with limited staff and funding to produce content that is relevant and accessible to their specific community. Micro Media Industries explores the specific case of Hmong American media, showing how an extremely small population can maintain a robust and thriving media ecology in spite of resource limitations and an inability to scale up. Based on six years of fieldwork in Hmong American communities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, it analyzes the unique opportunities and challenges facing Hmong newspapers, radio, television, podcasts, YouTube, social media, and other emerging platforms. It argues that micro media industries, rather than being dismissed or trivialized, ought to be held up as models of media innovation that can counter the increasing power of mainstream media.
Making Asian American Film and Video: Histories, Institutions, Movements by ISBN: 9780813565019Publication Date: 2015-03-06The words "Asian American film" might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the "PBS style" unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions. Making Asian American Film and Video explores how the genre has served as a flashpoint for debates about what constitutes Asian American identity. Tracing a history of how Asian American film was initially conceived as a form of public-interest media, part of a broader effort to give voice to underrepresented American minorities, Okada shows why this seemingly well-intentioned project inspired deeply ambivalent responses.
Whitewashing the Movies: Asian erasure and white subjectivity in US film culture by ISBN: 9781978808621Publication Date: 2021-10-15Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha. The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of "whitewashing" in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.
Asian Americans and the Media by ISBN: 9780745642734Publication Date: 2009-01-20Asian Americans and the Media provides a concise, thoughtful, critical and cultural studies analysis of U.S. media representations of Asian Americans. The book also explores ways Asian Americans have resisted, responded to, and conceptualized the terrain of challenge and resistance to those representations, often through their own media productions. In this engaging and accessible book, Ono and Pham summarize key scholarship on Asian American media, as well as lay theoretical groundwork to help students, scholars and other interested readers understand historical and contemporary media representations of Asian Americans in traditional media, including print, film, music, radio, and television, as well as in newer media, primarily internet-situated. Since Asian Americans had little control over their representation in early U.S. media, historically dominant white society largely constructed Asian American media representations. In this context, the book draws attention to recurring patterns in media representation, as well as responses by Asian America. Today, Asian Americans are creating complex, sophisticated, and imaginative self-portraits within U.S. media, often equipped with powerful information and education about Asian Americans.
Video: Why Do We Call Asian Americans The Model Minority? AJ+ (2017).
The Model Minority Myth
The Model Minority Myth is a stereotype of certain minority groups, particularly Asian Americans, as successful, well-adjusted, and therefore requiring little or no social and economic assistance. The phrase "model minority" originated in a 1966 New York Times article by William Peterson who used the phrase to describe the economic prosperity of Japanese Americans after WWII. Since then, the term has been applied to many other groups including Chinese Americans, Indian Americans, and Korean Americans. The model minority stereotype is not only harmful to Asian Americans because it groups them into a monolith but also in that it perpetuates the idea that other minority groups should be able to achieve model minority status not through the removal of systemic barriers but through hard work alone. This stereotype can be found in media, journalism, academia, popular culture, and more. For example, in 1987 TIME published their magazine with a cover photo of "Those Asian-American Whiz Kids."
Images: (Left) Success Story, Japanese-American Style: Success Story, Japanese-American Style. William Peterson, New York Times, (1966). (Right) Those Asian-American Whiz Kids. TIME Magazine (1987).
The Term "Asian American"
Scholars and activists have long critiqued the terms AAPI and Asian American as "masking differences in histories and needs among communities, as well as supporting the myth that Asian Americans are a monolithic group" (Connie Hanzhang Jin, 2021). This monolithic mindset contributes society often overlooking diversity in the Asian American community in terms of ethnic groups, experience, immigration status, and economic circumstances. In fact, contrary to the Model Minority Myth which states that Asian Americans are an economically prosperous demographic that does not require financial assistance or investment, Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group in America:
Graph: Key disparities in income and education among Asian American groups. Connie Hanzhang Jin, NPR (2021).
The perception of Asian Americans being economically and academically successful hides the fact that many Asian American communities experience high rates of poverty and Asian American students often feel intense academic pressure which leads to heightened rates of anxiety and stress. While the release of films and shows such as "Crazy Rich Asians" (the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Chinese descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993) and Netflix's "Bling Empire" have undoubtedly increased Asian American representation in Hollywood, it is important to note that these films do play into stereotypes about the prevalence of extremely rich and successful Asian Americans. Of course, if there were more representation of Asian Americans in Hollywood, this would not be a concern—all communities deserve to be represented in a multitude of nuanced ways—but it is important to consider which portrayals of Asian Americans receive studio/Hollywood funding, win prestigious awards, and draw large audiences.
Video: The Complicated Discussion Surrounding Crazy Rich Asians. Quality Culture (2022).
The model minority myth manifests in television and film characters who are portrayed as one-dimensional nerds, high-achievers, and stoic, diligent workers. To keep learning about this myth, explore some the resources listed below:
- Video: Adam Ruins Everything—How America Created the “Model Minority” Myth (truTV)
- Video: Asian Americans: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
- Video: The Model Minority Trope, Explained (The Take)
- Video: The Origins of the Model Minority Myth (Project Lotus)
- Website: Deconstructing the Model Minority at UM (University of Michigan)
- Confronting Asian-American Stereotypes (Adeel Hassan, The New York Times)
The Color of Success by ISBN: 9780691157825Publication Date: 2013-11-24The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"—peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values—in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity by ISBN: 9780197557488Publication Date: 2022-04-26There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the "model minority." While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists are quick to disprove the model minority as "myth," author Takeo Rivera instead rethinks the model minority as cultural politics. Rather thandisproving the model minority, Rivera instead argues that Asian Americans have formulated their racial and gendered subjectivities in relation to the model minority relation that Rivera terms "model minority masochism." With specific attention to hegemonic masculine Asian American culturalproduction, Rivera details two complementary forms of contemporary racial masochism: a self-subjugating masochism which embraces the model minority, and its opposite, a self-flagellating masochism that punishes oneself for having been associated with the model minority at all.
Citations:
Peterson, W. "Success Story, Japanese-American Style: Success Story, Japanese-American Style." New York Times (1923-), Jan 09, 1966, pp. 180. ProQuest.
“TIME Magazine Cover: Asian-American Whiz Kids - Aug. 31, 1987.” TIME.Com. Accessed 10 May 2023.
The Dragon Lady is a stereotype of Asian women, particularly East Asian women, as strong, deceitful, domineering, mysterious, and sexually alluring. The Dragon Lady might be seen wearing 'traditional' dress when no one else around her is, speaking in cryptic/flowery metaphors, or utilizing Asian fighting styles. The term comes from the U.S. comic strip "Terry and the Pirates," which featured a character called Dragon Lady, also known as Madam Deal.
Image: Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady. Milton Caniff (1975). Featuring the Dragon Lady, a character based on Lai Choi San, a 1900s Chinese pirate.
Inspired by the characters played by actress Anna May Wong, the term is often applied in opposition to the "Lotus Blossom" stereotype of an overly submissive and hyper-sexualized Asian woman. The Dragon Lady has often been used to refer to powerful Asian women—such as Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) and Devika Rani—in a derogatory fashion. The term dragon lady is applied to Asian women and not to their non-Asian counterparts as Lucy Liu highlights in her discussion of Kill Bill: Volume I:
"Kill Bill' features three other female professional killers in addition to Ishii. Why not call Uma Thurman, Vivica A. Fox or Daryl Hannah a dragon lady? I can only conclude that it's because they are not Asian, I could have been wearing a tuxedo and a blond wig, but I still would have been labeled a dragon lady because of my ethnicity.
"Kill Bill," includes many female assassins but shows Liu's character committing her assassinations in traditional Japanese costume.
Images: Poster for Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Anna May Wong as Princess Ling Moy.
The Dragon Lady trope has its roots in the Page Act of 1875, a United States law which prohibited the immigration of “Oriental” laborers brought against their will or for “lewd and immoral purposes.” In practice, this law banned all East Asian women from entering the US. On the perception of Asian women during this time, Nancy Wang Yuen states: “They were characterized as potentially carrying sexual diseases. They were also characterized as being temptations for white men” (qtd. in Pham 2021). The Dragon Lady is a result of centuries of Anti-Asian bias, yellow peril, and racist assumptions about Asian women. It is important to note that until recently, these were some of the only roles that Asian women in Hollywood were allowed to play—actors needed to take these positions lest they not be cast at all. The problem with the Dragon Lady stereotype is not that it depicts Asian women as strong, attractive, and mysterious, but that media would often refuse to show Asian women as anything else (Pham, 2021). For more on the nuanced reality of this stereotype see Sarah Kuhn's article "Enter the Dragon Lady" and explore the resources listed below:
- Hollywood Played a Role in Hypersexualizing Asian Women (India Roby, Teen Vogue)
- Here's how pop culture has perpetuated harmful stereotypes of Asian women (Elise Pham, Today.com)
- Twitter thread (CAPE—Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment)
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene by ISBN: 9780822340331Publication Date: 2007-07-30In The Hypersexuality of Race, Celine Parreñas Shimizu urges a shift in thinking about sexualized depictions of Asian/American women in film, video, and theatrical productions. Shimizu advocates moving beyond denunciations of sexualized representations of Asian/American women as necessarily demeaning or negative. Arguing for a more nuanced approach to the mysterious mix of pleasure, pain, and power in performances of sexuality, she advances a theory of "productive perversity," a theory which allows Asian/American women—and by extension other women of color—to lay claim to their own sexuality and desires as actors, producers, critics, and spectators. She looks at how three Hollywood Asian/American femme fatales—Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and Lucy Liu—negotiate representations of their sexuality; analyzes 1920s and 1930s stag films in which white women perform as sexualized Asian characters; and considers Asian/American women's performances in films ranging from the stag pornography of the 1940s to the Internet and video porn of the 1990s. In her examination of films and videos made by Asian/American feminists, Shimizu describes how female characters in their works reject normative definitions of race, gender, and sexuality, thereby expanding our definitions of racialized sexualities in representation.
Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism by ISBN: 9780813586304Publication Date: 2016-12-12When the 2016 Oscar acting nominations all went to whites for the second consecutive year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending topic. Yet these enduring racial biases afflict not only the Academy Awards, but also Hollywood as a whole. Why do actors of color, despite exhibiting talent and bankability, continue to lag behind white actors in presence and prominence? Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers minority actors face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. The book charts how white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Nancy Wang Yuen interviewed nearly a hundred working actors and drew on published interviews with celebrities, such as Viola Davis, Chris Rock, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac, Lucy Liu, and Ken Jeong, to explore how racial stereotypes categorize and constrain actors. Their stories reveal the day-to-day racism actors of color experience in talent agents' offices, at auditions, and on sets. Yuen also exposes sexist hiring and programming practices, highlighting the structural inequalities that actors of color, particularly women, continue to face in Hollywood.
Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words by Publication Date: 2011Anna May Wong knew she wanted to be a movie star from the time she was a young girl—and by 17 she became one. A third generation Chinese-American, she went on to make dozens of films in Hollywood and Europe. She was one of the few actors to successfully transition from silent to sound cinema, co-starring with Marlene Dietrich, Anthony Quinn and Douglas Fairbanks along the way. She was glamorous, talented and cosmopolitan—yet she spent most of her career typecast either as a painted doll or a scheming dragon lady. For years, older generations of Chinese-Americans frowned upon the types of roles she played; but today a younger generation of Asian Americans sees her as a pioneering artist, who succeeded in a hostile environment that hasn't altogether changed. Yunah Hong's engrossing documentary is an entertaining and imaginative survey of Wong's career, exploring the impact Wong had on images of Asian American women in Hollywood, both then and now. Excerpts from Wong's films, archival photographs and interviews enhance this richly detailed picture of a woman and her extraordinary life.
Slaying the Dragon by Publication Date: 1987, 2011Describes racial and gender stereotyping of Asian women in U.S. motion pictures as well as other filmic media, with "Reloaded" updating the original documentary by noting the effects of globalization and a changing population within the past 25 years. Includes interviews with actresses and other Asian American women who describe their experiences of such stereotyping.
Video: Virtually Asian (English subtitles). Astria Suparak, Berkeley Art Center (2021).
In 2020, Astria Suparak launched the "Asian futures, without Asians" series, a "a visual analysis of over half a century of American science fiction cinema. A multipart research project, it draws from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, and weaponry." In this series, Suparak analyzes how science fiction utilizes stereotypical Asian signifiers that serve as the backdrop for an almost exclusively white cast.
“The piece is part of a larger project examining 40 years of sci-fi films and how white filmmakers envision a future that is inflected by Asian culture but devoid of actual Asian people."
—Astria Suparak qtd, in "Asian-American Artists, Now Activists, Push Back Against Hate"
Learn more about Suparak's ongoing project and explore additional resources below:
- How Sci-Fi Films Use Asian Characters to Telegraph the Future While Also Dehumanizing Them (Evan Nicole Brown, The Hollywood Reporter).
- Orientalism, Cyberpunk 2077, and Yellow Peril in Science Fiction (George Yang, Wired). Cyberpunk as a genre, and Cyberpunk 2077 the game, are both rooted in a type of other-ization that can’t be ignored—but it can be examined.
- After Yang (Anna Maitland)
- Video: Techno-Orientalism with Dr. Terry K. Park (IU East)
Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema by ISBN: 9780816649792Publication Date: 2010-10-05Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style. Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility. Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.
Techno-Orientalism by ISBN: 9780813570631Publication Date: 2015-04-17What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. The collection's fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly. Techno-Orientalism is the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia.
Video: Yellowface is a bad look, Hollywood. Vox (2016).
Whitewashing is a casting practice in the film industry in which white actors are cast in non-white roles. Yellowface is a form of whitewashing where non-Asian actors are cast to play Asian characters. The practice of yellowface extends from the beginning of Hollywood to today. Famous early examples include Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan in "Charlie Chan Carries On" (1931) and Dr. Fu Manchu in "The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu" (1929). In the 1960s, Mickey Rooney wore yellowface to portray I. Y. Yunioshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961). More recently, you might recall Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, and Michael Pitt playing Japanese animated characters in "Ghost in the Shell" (2017), Emma Stone as Allison Ng in "Aloha" (2015), and white actors playing Asian and Inuit characters in the film adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Images: (Left to right) Scarlett Johansson in "Ghost in a Shell", Emma Stone in "Aloha", and the cast of "The Last Airbender"
Whitewashing is prominent in Hollywood for Asian characters as well as any non-white characters. For an extensive list, check out this Wikipedia page. Many directors and producers are pressured by Hollywood executives to cast non-Asian actors in Asian roles. For example. Lulu Wang, the director of The Farewell (a film about here Chinese American family), has stated that many American financiers wanted to include a "prominent white character into the narrative, and punch up the nuanced drama to turn it into a broad comedy."
To learn more about the history of whitewashing and yellowface, explore the resources below:
- Is a Disappointing Ghost in the Shell the Nail in the Coffin of Hollywood Whitewashing? (Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair)
- When white actors play other races (Tom Brook, BBC)
- Yellowface, Whitewashing, and the History of White People Playing Asian Characters (Jenn Fang, TeenVogue)
- Video: The History of Yellowface (Teen Vogue)
Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood by
The history of Asian American roles and the casting of those roles in Hollywood are documented through archival footage and interviews with contemporary critics.
Project Yellow by Publication Date: 2015A documentary by an Asian guy about Asian guys and the stigma they often face. Yellow is a documentary about the Asian male phenomena perceived in the media and gay culture and how it reflects from their childhood.
Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era by ISBN: 9780472055432Publication Date: 2022-07-11Made-Up Asians traces the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. Using specific case studies from European and U.S. theater, race science, and early film, Esther Kim Lee traces the development of yellowface in the U.S. context during the Exclusion Era (1862-1940), when Asians faced legal and cultural exclusion from immigration and citizenship. These caricatured, distorted, and misrepresented versions of Asians took the place of excluded Asians on theatrical stages and cinema screens. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary sources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the 21st century.
Off-White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American culture by ISBN: 9781501352201Publication Date: 2019-11-14How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later.
Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American popular music and performance, 1850s-1920s by ISBN: 0813535069Publication Date: 2005-01-31Krystyn R. Moon explores the contributions of writers, performers, producers, and consumers in order to demonstrate how popular music and performance has played an important role in constructing Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes. The book brings to life the rich musical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The following are films by and featuring Asian directors, writers, and actors. For additional lists, see below:
- 11 Films by Asian American and Pacific Islander Directors to Fill Your May Days (Sundance Institute)
- Five AAPI Directors Who Are Refiguring American Cinema (Focus Features)
- 57 Asian Actors and Actresses in Hollywood You Should Know (Isis Briones, Tommy Taso, Kristi Kellogg, and Sara Li, Teen Vogue)
Saving Face by
Publication Date: 2004Wilhelmina is a Chinese-American lesbian and a young surgeon who has kept her sexual orientation secret from her conservative Chinese community in New York. But when her widowed mother becomes pregnant and is kicked out by her own parents, Wil suddenly has to juggle her mother's secrets with her own.
The Namesake by Publication Date: 2007After moving from Calcutta to New York, members of the Ganguli family maintain a delicate balancing act between honoring the traditions of their native India and blending into American culture. Although parents Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) are proud of the sacrifices they make to give their offspring opportunities, their son Gogol (Kal Penn) strives to forge his own identity without forgetting his heritage.Bitter Melon by
Publication Date: 2018The story of a Filipino-American family who reunites for a Christmas party at the family home in San Francisco only to find out that Troy, the second oldest child, has been ruling the house with fear.Every Day in Kaimuki by
Publication Date: 2022A young man is determined to give his life meaning outside of Kaimuki, the small Hawaiian town where he grew up, even if it means leaving everything he's ever known and loved behind.
Everything Everywhere All At Once by Publication Date: 2022When an interdimensional rupture unravels reality, an unlikely hero must channel her newfound powers to fight bizarre and bewildering dangers from the multiverse as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.Blue Bayou by
Publication Date: 2021As a Korean-American man raised in the Louisiana bayou works hard to make a life for his family, he must confront the ghosts of his past as he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home.
Minari by Publication Date: 2021A tender and sweeping story about what roots people that follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, this film shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
Better Luck Tomorrow by ISBN: 9780792194019Publication Date: 2003A group of seemingly "perfect" high-school buddies lead double lives. They fly high in a world of petty crime and material excess - a free-wheeling lifestyle that soon takes a downward spiral, leading to an unexpected, violent end.
Performing Girl by Publication Date: 2013A look at the early life of D'Lo: a queer, transgender, Tamil Sir Lankan American writer, actor, director, comedian, activist and music producer who grew up in Lancaster, CA. This film is available to rent on Prime Video.
The Joy Luck Club by Publication Date: 1993In San Francisco, a group of aging Chinese women (Kiều Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, Lisa Lu) meet regularly to trade familial stories while playing Mahjong. In a series of sixteen vignettes that spans generations and continents, this adaptation of Amy Tan's bestselling novel explores cultural conflict and the often-turbulent relationships between four first-generation Chinese-American women (Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom, Rosalind Chao) and their mothers.American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs by
Publication Date: 2013"What does it mean to be an American revolutionary today? Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American writer, activist, and philosopher in Detroit. Rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America's past and its potentially radical future.The Grace Lee Project by
Publication Date: 2005Pursuing the moving target of Asian-American female identity, filmmaker Grace Lee, in a clever, highly unscientific investigation visits with Asian American women named "Grace Lee," from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school. With wit and charm, the film puts a hilarious spin on the eternal question "What's in a name?"
Content Warning: Gore
Video: Happy (Official Music Video). Mitski (2016).
Asian Americans have been exploring media representation through their writing, music, cinema, and essays. Below is a small selection of books written by Asian Americans about the Asian American experience.
Interior Chinatown by ISBN: 9780307907196Publication Date: 2020-01-28Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by ISBN: 9781984820372Publication Date: 2020-02-25Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.Bin ding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.
Stay True by ISBN: 9780385547772Publication Date: 2022-09-27In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
Sigh, Gone: A misfit's memoir of great books, punk rock, and the fight to fit in by ISBN: 9781250194718Publication Date: 2020-04-21In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man's bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the '80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.
Sour Heart by ISBN: 9780399589386Publication Date: 2017-08-01A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.
A Burning by ISBN: 9780525658696Publication Date: 2020-06-02Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear. Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning is an electrifying debut.
The Making of Asian America: A History by ISBN: 9781476739403Publication Date: 2015-09-01The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States.
The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM)
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences to the broadest audience possible. We do this by funding, producing, distributing and exhibiting works in film, television and digital media. For 40 years, CAAM has exposed audiences to new voices and communities, advancing our collective understanding of the American experience through programs specifically designed to engage the Asian American community and the public at large. CAAM has put together a collection titled "Memories to Light," a project to collect and digitize home movies and to share them–and the stories they tell—to a broad public.
Video: Memories to Light 2.0: The Bohulano Family. CAAMChannel (2014).
Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ)
"Asian Americans have been part of the American story since its earliest days, and are now the U.S.'s fastest-growing racial group with the potential and power to shape our nation and the policies that affect us. Our mission is to advance civil and human rights for Asian Americans and to build and promote a fair and equitable society for all." Explore their Media Diversity Page.
Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA): located in Chinatown, NYC. Explore their website and MOJO, the online journal of MOCA, a museum for all, anywhere.
Asian Film Archive: The Asian Film Archive was founded in January 2005 as a non-profit organisation to preserve the rich film heritage of Singapore and Asian Cinema, to encourage scholarly research on film, and to promote a wider critical appreciation of this art form.
Human/Non-Human Relationships in Media
Introduction
During April, we celebrate both Earth Month and Earth Day (April 26th). Earth Day has been celebrated since 1970 and marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement. In celebration of this month and day, we have developed a guide focusing on human relationships with the non-human world. This feature will center on representation of animals in the media, literature, and culture. You will find poetry, nonfiction, and novels that allow you to witness how writers and creatives are thinking, and have been thinking, about human/non-human relations.
Image: Still from Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (1988).
If you are looking to learn more about the history of a specific animal, look into The Animal Series from Reaktion Books which explores the natural history of animals alongside their historical and cultural impact on humankind. Each short book is a wonderful introduction to an animal with which you are probably familiar and maybe even encounter daily!
Image: The Animal Series from Reaktion Books. Moth, Hare, Nightingale, Lizard.
Next Steps
Check out our companion feature in the Philosophy guide for more information on the scholarly fields of Animal Studies and Critical Animal Studies, as well as other philosophies of the non-human.
If you'd like to explore more thematic content relevant to climate change, environmental justice, and nature, try the Environmental Justice & Earth Day feature, which includes music, novels, feature films, and documentaries on these topics, and the highlight on Environmental Ethics & Aesthetics at the Philosophy Research Guide.
The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies by ISBN: 9780199927142Publication Date: 2017-03-01Intellectual struggles with the "animal question"—how humans can rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals—first began to take hold in the 1970s. Over the next forty years, scholars from a wide range of fields would make sweeping reevaluations of the relationship between humans and other animals. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies brings these diverse evaluations together for the first time, paying special attention to the commodification of animals, the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction, and the increasing need for humans to coexist with other animals in urban, rural and natural contexts. Linda Kalof maps these themes into the five major categories that structure this volume: Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics and Public Policy; Animal Intentionality, Agency and Reflexive Thinking; Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle and Sport; Animals in Cultural Representations; and Animals in Ecosystems. Written by international scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy, the thirty chapters in this handbook investigate key issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.
Critical Terms for Animal Studies by ISBN: 9780226355399Publication Date: 2018-10-23Animal Studies is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex relationships between humans and other animals. Scholarship in Animal Studies draws on a variety of methodologies to explore these multi-faceted relationships in order to help us understand the ways in which other animals figure in our lives and we in theirs. Bringing together the work of a group of internationally distinguished scholars, the contribution in Critical Terms for Animal Studies offers distinct voices and diverse perspectives, exploring significant concepts and asking important questions. How do we take non-human animals seriously, not simply as metaphors for human endeavors, but as subjects themselves? What do we mean by anthropocentrism, captivity, empathy, sanctuary, and vulnerability, and what work do these and other critical terms do in Animal Studies? Sure to become an indispensable reference for the field, Critical Terms for Animal Studies not only provides a framework for thinking about animals as subjects of their own experiences, but also serves as a touchstone to help us think differently about our conceptions of what it means to be human, and the impact human activities have on the more than human world.
Animal Liberation by ISBN: 0380713330Publication Date: 1991-04-01The Australian philosopher Peter Singer's 1975 work, Animal Liberation, is often cited as a founding document in animal studies. Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the shocking abuse of animals everywhere—inspiring a worldwide movement to eliminate much of the cruel and unnecessary laboratory animal experimentation of years past. In this newly revised and expanded edition, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's "factory forms" and product-testing procedures—offering sound, humane solutions to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency and justice, Animal Liberation is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.
Humans and Animals: A Geography of Coexistence by ISBN: 9781440838354Publication Date: 2017-01-26There is an urgent need to understand human-animal interactions and relations as we become increasingly aware of our devastating impact on the natural resources needed for the survival of all animal species. This timely reference explores such topics as climate change and biodiversity, the impact of animal domestication and industrial farming on local and global ecosystems, and the impact of human consumption of wild species for food, entertainment, medicine, and social status. This volume also explores the role of pets in our lives, advocacy movements on behalf of animals, and the role of animals in art and media culture. Authors Julie Urbanik and Connie L. Johnston introduce the concept of animal geography, present different aspects of human-animal relationships worldwide, and highlight the importance of examining these interconnections.
Anthropocentrism by ISBN: 9789004187948Publication Date: 2011-07-14Anthropocentrism is a charge of human chauvinism and an acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries. Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans' understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. This collection explores the assumptions behind the label 'anthropocentrism', critically enquiring into the meaning of 'human'. It addresses the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, questioning whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric. In addition, it examines the potential scope for objective, empathetic, relational, or 'other' views that trump anthropocentrism. With a principal focus on ethical questions concerning animals, the environment and the social, the essays ultimately cohere around the question of the non-human, be it animal, ecosystem, god, or machine.
Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice by ISBN: 9783631845011Publication Date: 2023-03-16Through the burgeoning fields of Posthumanities and Environmental Humanities, this edition examines the changing conception of human subjectivity, agency, and citizenship as shaped by the dynamic interplays between nature, technology, science, and culture. The proposed 'symbiotic turn', (the awareness of the multitude of interactions and mutual interdependencies among humans, non-humans and their environment) aspires to explore the complex recompositions of the "human" in the 21st century. By organizing and promoting interdisciplinary dialogue at multiple levels, both in theory and practice, Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies is suggested as a new narrative about the biosphere and technosphere, which is embodied literarily, philosophically, and artistically.
Animal Studies: An Introduction by ISBN: 9780199968398Publication Date: 2013-01-01Animal studies is a growing interdisciplinary field that incorporates scholarship from public policy, sociology, religion, philosophy, and many other areas. In essence, it seeks to understand how humans study and conceive of other-than-human animals, and how these conceptions have changed over time, across cultures, and across different ways of thinking. This interdisciplinary introduction to the field boldly and creatively foregrounds the realities of nonhuman animals, as well as the imaginative and ethical faculties that humans must engage to consider our intersection with living beings outside of our species. It also compellingly demonstrates that the breadth and depth of thinking and humility needed to grasp the human-nonhuman intersection has the potential to expand the dualism that currently divides the sciences and humanities.As the first holistic survey of the field, Animal Studies is essential reading for any student of human-animal relationships and for all people who care about the role nonhuman animals play in our society.
Introduction
From Winnie the Pooh to Moby Dick, animals can be found in a wide variety of novels, children's stories, folktales, and other writings from the medieval to contemporary eras. Literary animal studies explores the figurative significance of animals in literature, offering critical insight into the portrayal of animals in literature. Scholars discuss how writers represent animal experience in human language, whether it is truly possible to develop a non-anthropocentric mode of writing, and how representations of nonhuman subjects might affect our perception of certain species.
When exploring literary animal studies in IUCAT, try looking under the following subject headings: "Human animal relationships in literature" and "Animals in literature." See also: "Palgrave studies in animals and literature" series.
Images: (Left) The Cricket in Times Square. George Selden (1960). (Right): Author: Zakariya ibn Muhammad Qazwini (ca. 1203-1283), Scribe: Muhammad ibn Muhammad Shakir Ruzmah-'i Nathani. Illustration: A Wild Cat and an Animal Called Sirayis. 1121 AH/AD 1717 (Ottoman). Artstor.
Books
The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature by ISBN: 9783030397722Publication Date: 2020-11-26This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field's conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.
Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern by ISBN: 9781138093782Publication Date: 2019-09-18Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.
Animals, Animality, and Literature by ISBN: 9781108429825Publication Date: 2018-09-20Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.
Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction by ISBN: 9781648430206Publication Date: 2022-10-11As defined by conservation biologist Thomas Fleishner, natural history is "a practice of intentional, focused receptivity to the more-than-human world...one of the oldest continuous human traditions." Seldom is this idea so clearly reflected as in classic works of American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Cullen Gruesser's edited volume Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction features essays by prominent literary scholars that showcase natural history and the multifaceted role of animals in well-known works of fiction, from Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century to Cormac McCarthy in the late twentieth century, and including short stories and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and Harper Lee. As an introduction to or a new way of thinking about some of the best-known and most beloved literary texts this nation has produced, Animals in the American Classics considers fundamental questions of ethics and animal intelligence as well as similarities among racism, ageism, misogyny, and speciesism. With their awareness of Poe's "more-than-casual knowledge of natural science," Mark Twain's proto-animal rights sensibilities, and Hurston's training as an anthropologist, the contributors show that by drawing attention to and thinking like an animal, fiction tests the limits of humanity.
Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal by ISBN: 9780231145060Publication Date: 2008-11-05Human and animal subjectivity converge in a historically unprecedented way within modernism, as evolutionary theory, imperialism, antirationalism, and psychoanalysis all grapple with the place of the human in relation to the animal. Drawing on the thought of Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille, Carrie Rohman outlines the complex philosophical and ethical stakes involved in theorizing the animal in humanism, including the difficulty in determining an ontological place for the animal, the question of animal consciousness and language, and the paradoxical status of the human as both a primate body and a "human" mind abstracting itself from the physical and material world. Rohman then turns to the work of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes, authors who were deeply invested in the relationship between animality and identity. The Island of Dr. Moreau embodies a Darwinian nightmare of the evolutionary continuum; The Croquet Player thematizes the dialectic between evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis; and Women in Love, St. Mawr, and Nightwood all refuse to project animality onto others, inverting the traditional humanist position by valuing animal consciousness. A novel treatment of the animal in literature, Stalking the Subject provides vital perspective on modernism's most compelling intellectual and philosophical issues.
Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture by ISBN: 9780754655114Publication Date: 2007-09-26The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.
Writing on Sheep: Ecology, the animal turn and sheep in poetry by ISBN: 9781526156570Publication Date: 2021-05-25Sheep are marginalised in literary criticism and in discussion of pastoral literature. This book brings an animal studies approach to poetry about sheep that allows for the agency of these sentient beings, that have been associated for humans over ten thousand years. This approach highlights the distinction between wild and domesticated species and the moral dilemma between the goals of animal welfare and those of saving species from extinction. Discussion of mostly contemporary poetry follows a new reading of works from the pastoral and georgic canon. Allowing for the sentience and sociality of this species makes it easier to imagine a natureculture within which to make kin across the species boundary. Reading poetry about sheep has the power to make new meanings as we try to adapt to an increasingly complex and problematic environment.
Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies by ISBN: 9781138673007Publication Date: 2017-08-10This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, post-Cartesian readings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Using critical animal studies work and new materialist theory, Bach argues that attending closely to creatures and objects in texts by Shakespeare and other writers exposes this unequal world and the use and abuse of creatures, including people. The book also adds significantly to animal studies by showing how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture, with many believing that birds were superior to some humans in song, caregiving, and companionship. Bach shows how Descartes, a central figure in the transition to modern ideas about creatures, lived isolated from humans and other creatures and denied ancient knowledge about other creatures' minds, especially bird minds. As significantly, Bach shows how and why Descartes' ideas appealed to human grandiosity. Asking how Renaissance categorizations of creatures differ so much from modern classifications, and why those modern classifications have shaped so much animal studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare's and other Renaissance texts. It will contribute to a range of fields, including Renaissance literature, history, animal studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.
Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals by ISBN: 9783030761585Publication Date: 2021-09-12This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "animal turn" in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics.
Classical Literature and Posthumanism by ISBN: 9781350069503Publication Date: 2019-11-14The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.
Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film by ISBN: 9780231147866Publication Date: 2011-04-07Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence," establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body's significance, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh" and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil's elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.
Explore the following subject headings in IUCAT to learn more about animals and animal representation in the media:
- "Animals in motion pictures"
- "Animal films--History and criticism"
- "Animals in mass media"
- "Human animal relationships in mass media"
Image: Hachicko Statue in Tokyo, Japan. Go Tokyo.
Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater by ISBN: 9780271078342Publication Date: 2017-09-07From bears on the Renaissance stage to the equine pageantry of the nineteenth-century hunt, animals have been used in human-orchestrated entertainments throughout history. The essays in this volume present an array of case studies that inspire new ways of interpreting animal performance and the role of animal agency in the performing relationship. In exploring the human-animal relationship from the early modern period to the nineteenth century, Performing Animals questions what it means for an animal to "perform," examines how conceptions of this relationship have evolved over time, and explores whether and how human understanding of performance is changed by an animal's presence. The contributors discuss the role of animals in venues as varied as medieval plays, natural histories, dissections, and banquets, and they raise provocative questions about animals' agency. In so doing, they demonstrate the innovative potential of thinking beyond the boundaries of the present in order to dismantle the barriers that have traditionally divided human from animal. From fleas to warhorses to animals that "perform" even after death, this delightfully varied volume brings together examples of animals made to "act" in ways that challenge obvious notions of performance. The result is an eye-opening exploration of human-animal relationships and identity that will appeal greatly to scholars and students of animal studies, performance studies, and posthuman studies.
Screening the Nonhuman: Representations of Animal Others in the Media by ISBN: 9781498513746Publication Date: 2016-04-27Screening the Nonhuman draws connections between how animals represented on screen translate into reality. In doing so, the book demonstrates that consuming media is not a neutral act but rather a political one. The images humans consume have real world consequences for how animals are treated as actors, as pets, and in nature. The contributors propose that altering the representations of animals can change the way humans relate to non/humans. Our hope is for humans to generate more ethical relationships with non/humans, ultimately mediating reality both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. To achieve this end, film, television, advertisements, and social media are analyzed through an intersectional lens. But the book doesn t stop here. Each author creates counter-representational strategies that promise to unweave the assumptions that have led to the mistreatment of humans and non/humans alike."
Animal Life and the Moving Image by ISBN: 9781844578993Publication Date: 2015-12-28From the proto-cinematic sequencing of animal motion in the nineteenth century to the ubiquity of animal videos online, the histories of animal life and the moving image are enigmatically interlocked. Animal Life and the Moving Image is the first collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between screen cultures and non-human animals. The volume brings together some of the most important and influential writers working on the non-human animal's significance for cultures and theories of the moving image. It offers innovative analyses of the representation of animals across a wide range of documentary, fiction, mainstream and avant-garde practices, from early cinema to contemporaryuser-generated media. Individual chapters consider King Kong, The Birds, The Misfits, The Cove, Grizzly Man and Microcosmos, the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Bresson, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Greenaway, Carolee Schneemann and Isabella Rossellini, and YouTube stars Christian the lion and Maru the cat.
Animals on Television: The cultural making of the non-human by ISBN: 9781137516824Publication Date: 2017-11-20This book is the first in-depth study of the representation of animals on television. It explores the variety of ways animals are represented in audio-visual media, including wildlife documentaries and children's animated series, and the consequences these representations have for those species. Brett Mills discusses key ideas and approaches essential for thinking about animals drawing on relevant debates in philosophy, politics, gender studies, humanism and posthumanism, and ethics. The chapters examine different animal representations, focusing on zoos, pets, wildlife and meat. They present case studies, including discussions of Peppa Pig, The Hunt and The Dog Whisperer. This book will be of interest to readers exploring media studies, contemporary television, animal studies, and debates about representation.
The Disneyfication of Animals by ISBN: 9783030493158Publication Date: 2020-09-18This book critically examines how Walt Disney Animation Studios has depicted—and sometimes failed to depict—different forms of harming and objectifying non-human animals in their films. Each chapter addresses a different form of animal harm and objectification through the theories of speciesism, romanticism, and the 'collapse of compassion' effect, from farming, hunting and fishing, to clothing, work, and entertainment. Stanton lucidly presents the dichotomy between depictions of higher order, anthropomorphised and neotonised animal characters and that of lower-order species, showing furthermore how these depictions are closely linked to changing social attitudes about acceptable forms of animal harm. An engaging and novel contribution to the field of Critical Animal Studies, this book explores the use of animals not only in Disney's best known animated films such as 101 Dalmatians, but also lesser known features including Home on the Range. A quantitative appendix supplying data on how often each animal species appears and the amount of times animal harm or objectification is depicted in over fifty films provides an invaluable resource and addition to scholars working in both Disney and animal studies.
Regarding Life: Animals and the documentary moving image by ISBN: 9781438462493Publication Date: 2016-10-14As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc. , the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science.
Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies by ISBN: 9781438476612Publication Date: 2019-11-01It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration—and appreciation—of cinema's many bad beasts.
Critical Animal and Media Studies: Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy by ISBN: 9781138842267Publication Date: 2015-11-03This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches' application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.
The Hurting Kind by ISBN: 9781639550494Publication Date: 2022-05-10An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. "I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limón. "I am the hurting kind." What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"? With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. "Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade," writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, "she is doing what she can to survive."
Edges and Fray: On language, presence, and (invisible) animal architectures by ISBN: 9780819579225Publication Date: 2019-12-20Poetry, prose, and photographs, explore the edges of language. Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds' nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. The frayed edges of consciousness are carefully arranged to suggest how writing, and the book, can serve as a site of radical transformation. Experimental and deeply grounded, this work is lyrical and patient. The text creates overlapping ecological fields, wherein each field is a system always in a state of becoming. Finding its strength in fragility, Edges & Fray is personal without feeling private, experimental without feeling programmatic. Its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.
Personhood by ISBN: 9780811229739Publication Date: 2021-05-04Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.
Red Bird by ISBN: 9780807068922Publication Date: 2008-04-01Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could. So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart." This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.
Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness by ISBN: 9781940696010Publication Date: 2014-09-09CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which they pushes their political and ecological efforts even further. These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics.
Silk Poems by ISBN: 9781937658724Publication Date: 2017-10-03In conjunction with Tufts University's Silk Lab's cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.
Garments Against Women by ISBN: 9781934103593Publication Date: 2015-03-15Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women's and children's lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It's a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival's requisite thoughts.
The Friend by ISBN: 9780735219441Publication Date: 2018-02-06When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatised by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
What We Fed to the Manticore by ISBN: 9781953534415Publication Date: 2022-09-06Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri's debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri's pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelope that perished in Central Asia. A beloved donkey's loyalty to a zookeeper in Gaza is put to the ultimate test. And a wounded pigeon in Delhi finds an unlikely friend. In striking, immersive detail against the backdrop of an ever-changing international landscape, What We Fed to the Manticore speaks to the fears and joys of the creatures we share our world with, and ultimately places the reader under the rich canopy of the tree of life.
I Am a Cat by ISBN: 9780804832656Publication Date: 2001-09-01Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.
A Cat, a Man & Two Women by ISBN: 9780811224499Publication Date: 2015-08-27The three pieces in this collection—the novella "A Cat, A Man, and Two Women" and two shorter pieces "The Little Kingdom" and "Professor Rado"—are lighthearted and entertaining variations on one of Tanizaki's favorite preoccupations: dominance and submission in relationships, complicated even further here by customs, public opinion, and comic grotesqueries. In the title piece, the bumbling Shozo is caught in the middle of an ongoing struggle between his ex-wife and her younger successor. Shozo would prefer to stay out of it and be peacefully left alone with his elegant tortoiseshell cat Lily, but he keeps getting dragged back into the battles and arguments. The result is an oddball love triangle centered around Lily, the only true object of Shozo's affections—"one of the finest pieces of literature concerning cats ever written."
If Cats Disappeared From The World by ISBN: 1509889175Our narrator's days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week...Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself—and his beloved cat—to the brink.
Watership Down by ISBN: 9780380002931Publication Date: 1976-01-01One of the most beloved novels of our time, Richard Adams's Watership Down takes us to a world we have never truly seen: to the remarkable life that teems in the fields, forests and riverbanks far beyond our cities and towns. It is a powerful saga of courage, leadership and survival; an epic tale of a hardy band of adventurers forced to flee the destruction of their fragile community...and their trials and triumphs in the face of extraordinary adversity as they pursue a glorious dream called "home." Watership Down is a remarkable tale of exile and survival, of heroism and leadership...the epic novel of a group of adventurers who desert their doomed city, and venture forth against all odds on a quest for a new home, a sturdier future.
The Wind in the Willows by ISBN: 9781789504767Publication Date: 2019-09-15This edition contains the original, unabridged text. Arthur Rackham's beautiful illustrations bring Kenneth Grahame's enchanting world to life.
Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by ISBN: 9780679407287Publication Date: 2006-02-07Few writers have attempted to explore the natural history of a particular animal by adopting the animal's own sensibility. But Verlyn Klinkenborg with his deeply empathetic relation to the world around him has done just that, and done it brilliantly, in Timothy. This is the story of a tortoise whose real life was observed by the eighteenth-century English curate Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne. For thirteen years, Timothy lived in White's garden making an occasional appearance in his journals. Now Klinkenborg gives the tortoise an unforgettable voice and powers of observation as keen as those of any bipedal naturalist. The happy result: Timothy regales us with an account of a gracefully paced (no unseemly hurry!) eight-day adventure outside the gate.
Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990 by ISBN: 9780399165979Publication Date: 2013-09-26Edward is a hamster—yet he contains multitudes. Trapped in a cage with a wheel that taunts him with its meaninglessness, Edward records the existential ennui that is the sum of his short life. His diary is an extraordinary work, filled with profound meditations on the nature of captivity, the emptiness of life, and the irrational will to live. This dark, pithy, irresistibly witty diary, with illustrations by acclaimed artist Miriam Elia, makes the perfect gift for anyone on your holiday list. It won't take long before readers recognize that Edward is not just a hamster—he is a state of mind.
A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There by ISBN: 0195007778Publication Date: 1968-12-31First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa,Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago.
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by ISBN: 9780374718794Publication Date: 2020-11-24The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats—the animal that has most captured our imagination—than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.
The Rabbit Between Us by ISBN: 9780857427977Publication Date: 2021-11-17One morning as they parted, Victor Menza's daughter handed him a bunny postcard. This gift made him wonder why rabbits had been their symbol of visitation: "How did this kind of creature become such a powerful way of feeling your presence?" Through philosophy, history, education, art, and personal musing on everyday uncanny experiences, Menza reveals why people have long found rabbits our special kin and emblems of love. Menza considers human nature and how we are undone by separation—both from each other and from our childhood selves. Surprising allies in these non-traditional philosophical wanderings include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Murray, and Beatrix Potter. Menza examines what symbols are and how they work, the value of dialect, and the subversive lesson of animal fables, alongside his thoughts on language learning, memory, and slavery. Only now did he see that he'd taken to Brer Rabbit early on. Just as the Uncle Remus tales displayed the small hero's virtues in warm dialogues, The Rabbit Between Us shows we abound in talents and moves when we "lean like Socrates did to the Aesop in us." Gentle and political at once, this unique book will appeal to any intellectually curious reader.
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness by ISBN: 0971757585Publication Date: 2003-04-01The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness." In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival" but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train."
Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World by ISBN: 9781635574944Publication Date: 2021-09-30From an acclaimed environmental writer, a groundbreaking and provocative new vision for our relationships with—and responsibilities toward—the planet's wild animals. Protecting wild animals and preserving the environment are two ideals so seemingly compatible as to be almost inseparable. But in fact, between animal welfare and conservation science there exists a space of underexamined and unresolved tension: wildness itself. When is it right to capture or feed wild animals for the good of their species? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? Can hunting be ecological? Are any animals truly wild on a planet that humans have so thoroughly changed? No clear guidelines yet exist to help us resolve such questions. Transporting readers into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges, Emma Marris tells the affecting and inspiring stories of animals around the globe—from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbies, rare Hawai'ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. And she offers a companionable tour of the philosophical ideas that may steer our search for sustainability and justice in the non-human world. Revealing just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, Wild Souls will change the way we think about nature—and our place within it.
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by ISBN: 9781681370408Publication Date: 2016-10-04The moth snowstorm, a phenomenon Michael McCarthy remembers from his boyhood when moths "would pack a car's headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard," is a distant memory. Wildlife is being lost, not only in the wholesale extinctions of species but also in the dwindling of those species that still exist. The Moth Snowstorm is unlike any other book about climate change today; combining the personal with the polemical, it is a manifesto rooted in experience, a poignant memoir of the author's first love: nature. McCarthy traces his adoration of the natural world to when he was seven, when the discovery of butterflies and birds brought sudden joy to a boy whose mother had just been hospitalized and whose family life was deteriorating. He goes on to record in painful detail the rapid dissolution of nature's abundance in the intervening decades, and he proposes a radical solution to our current problem: that we each recognize in ourselves the capacity to love the natural world. Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love. An award-winning environmental journalist, McCarthy presents a clear, well-documented picture of what he calls "the great thinning" around the world, while interweaving the story of his own early discovery of the wilderness and a childhood saved by nature. Drawing on the truths of poets, the studies of scientists, and the author's long experience in the field, The Moth Snowstorm is part elegy, part ode, and part argument, resulting in a passionate call to action.
With Dogs at the Edge of Life by ISBN: 9780231167123Publication Date: 2015-12-08In this original and provocative book, Colin Dayan tackles head-on the inexhaustible world, at once tender and fierce, of dogs and humans. We follow the tracks of dogs in the bayous of Louisiana, the streets of Istanbul, and the humane societies of the United States, and in the memories and myths of the humans who love them. Dayan reorients our ethical and political assumptions through a trans-species engagement that risks as much as it promises. She makes a powerful case for questioning what we think of as our deepest-held beliefs and, with dogs in the lead, unsettles the dubious promises of liberal humanism. Moving seamlessly between memoir, case law, and film, Dayan takes politics and animal studies in a new direction—one that gives us glimpses of how we can think beyond ourselves and with other beings. Her unconventional perspective raises hard questions and renews what it means for any animal or human to live in the twenty-first century. Nothing less than a challenge for us to confront violence and suffering even in the privileged precincts of modernity, this searing and lyrical book calls for another way to think the world. Theoretically sophisticated yet aimed at a broad readership, With Dogs at the Edge of Life illuminates how dogs—and their struggles—take us beyond sentimentality and into a form of thought that can make a difference to our lives.
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And other excursions to Iceland's most unusual museums by ISBN: 9780143135463Publication Date: 2020-05-12Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen? In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects—a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams—can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. "The world is chockablock with untold wonders," she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open."
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by ISBN: 9780316540537Publication Date: 2022-12-06A fascinating tour of creatures from the surface to the deepest ocean floor, inviting us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live. A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature, including: the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre, predatory Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena), the common goldfish that flourishes in the wild, and more. Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community, and care can be found in the sea, from gelatinous chains that are both individual organisms and colonies of clones to deep-sea crabs that have no need for the sun, nourished instead by the chemicals and heat throbbing from the core of the Earth. Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, How Far the Light Reaches is a shimmering, otherworldly debut that attunes us to new visions of our world and its miracles.
Music
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Images: Album covers, clockwise from left to right: Alex G God Save the Animals; Ia Clua & Jordi Batiste Chichonera’s Cat; The Birdsong Project For The Birds: Vol. 1; Fiona Apple Fetch the Boltcutters; Nyokabi Kariũki peace places: kenyan memories; Pink Floyd Animals.
About the Playlist
The nonhuman world, including animals, have long captured the cultural and musical imaginations of people. In this playlist, we have curated a selection of songs about, referring to, or in any way inspired by our fellow critters, whether literally or symbolically. To learn more about the music we've included, the history of nonhuman animal references in music, and animals' own relationships with music, consult some of the resources below:
- "How Birds and Animals Have Inspired Classical Music" (BBC Music)
- "The Specialist's Guide to Animals in Music" (Gramophone)
- "Animals in Music" Playlist (Naxos)
- "Readers Recommend: Songs About Animals" (The Guardian)
- "Zoomusicology" (Wikipedia)
- "Are Humans the Only Music Species?" (MIT Press Reader)
- "Do Any Other Animals Play Music?" (BBC Science Focus)
- "7 Scientific Studies About How Animals React to Music" (Mental Floss)
Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.
Podcasts
This American Life
- The Feather Heist A flute player breaks into a British museum and makes off with a million dollars worth of dead birds.
- Spark Bird Stories about birds and the hearts they sway, the havoc they wreak, the lives they change.
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In Dog We Trust Exactly how much are the animals that live in our homes caught up in our everyday family dynamics?
Ologies with Alie Ward
- Chickenology (Hens & Roosters) Part 1 with Tove Danovich
- Diplopodology (Millipedes & Centipedes) with Dr. Derek Hennen
- Carnivore Ecology (Lions, Tigers, & Bears) with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant
The Ezra Klein Show
- Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything The acclaimed food writer offers a sweeping indictment of our modern food system.
- The Hidden Costs of Cheap Meat The animal rights activist Leah Garcés discusses how modern meat production harms animals, people and the environment.
- A Conversation With Ada Limón, in Six Poems The award-winning poet shares how she stays open to wonder and beauty in a difficult world.
Articles
- For ‘Gender’, See ‘Turtles’: Experiments in Empathetic Biology (Callum Angus)
- excerpts from "every dog i pet in 2016" (joseph parker okay)
- Why I Write About Animals, or, My Body Is the Animal I Write About (Hannah Gamble)
Miscellany
Modern Animal by isolarii: Isolarii is a pocket-sized magazine that conceives of every issue as a kind of ‘island’; new space from which to view the world. Authored by the Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets, issue five is entitled ‘Modern Animal’ and is conceived as a series of lectures on the modern lives of animals.
The Institute of Queer Ecology is an ever-evolving collaborative organism that seeks to bring peripheral solutions to environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but unified and grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality.
The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is a critical-poetic platform for making and studying operating primarily out of Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI. The OPR works through writing, visual art, group discussion, and performative events to explore ideas—materially and generatively—across disciplines, e.g. “science,” “philosophy,” “history,” or “painting,” “poetry,” “music,” etc. OPR projects take a number of forms: readings, seminars, installations, books, digital residency projects on our website, and Pelt, a sporadically published (in print and online) magazine organized around an invented concept that is further articulated through the collective work of the issue.
There are many ways to get involved with Animal Rights and Environmental movements right here in and around Bloomington. From incorporating animal studies into your scholarship to donating money and participating in direct action campaigns, see the following list for organizations supporting animals and the environment in the Bloomington area:
- Bloomington Animal Shelter Run by Bloomington Animal Care and Control, whose mission is to address and respond to all animal needs in the community through education, enforcement and support in order to build a community where animals are valued and treated with kindness and respect. The Animal Shelter is accepting donations and foster applications.
- Monroe County Humane Association (MCHA) "Dedicated to promoting the welfare of animals, strengthening the human-animal bond, and providing access to veterinary care & humane education across our community."
- Sunrise Bloomington "We are a group of undergrads, grads, faculty, high schoolers and Bloomington community members who are dedicated to bringing about positive changes towards climate justice initiative through grassroots movement building!"
- IU Student Animal Legal Defense Fund The Student Animal Legal Defense Fund was established at IU Maurer School of Law in 2010 to provide a forum for education, advocacy, and scholarship aimed at improving the lives of animals and advancing their interests through the legal system.
- BloomingVeg "An all-ages social and advocacy group for vegetarians, vegans, and veggie-lovers alike in Bloomington, Indiana."
- Indy VegFest A "nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase the public’s acceptance of the compassionate, environmental, and health facets of a vegan lifestyle through an annual event and year-round outreach and education opportunities."
- Rainbow Bakery Vegan bakery in Bloomington, IN.
- Vegan, Vegetarian & Gluten-Free Restaurants in Bloomington (Visit Bloomington)
- Uplands PEAK Sanctuary Indiana's first farmed animal sanctuary, providing lifelong care to their residents, educational tours, and volunteer opportunities.
The following are national organizations fighting for animal rights, liberation, and environmental justice. For more information on the impact of a few of the organizations listed below, check out Animal Charity Evaluators, which researches animal welfare organizations.
- Native American Humane Society "Shares our expertise to help tribal communities learn how to humanely manage and care for the animal populations in their own communities. NAHS connects tribal communities and animal welfare service providers, NGOs, foundations, and other agencies to assist tribal communities in resolving their challenges with animals through regular animal care, population management, and community activities."
- The Humane League "We exist to end the abuse of animals raised for food by influencing the policies of the world’s biggest companies, demanding legislation, and empowering others to take action and leave animals off their plates."
- Good Food Institute "A nonprofit think tank working to make the global food system better for the planet, people, and animals. Alongside scientists, businesses, and policymakers, GFI’s teams focus on making plant-based and cultivated meat delicious, affordable, and accessible."
- The Green New Deal Network "A coalition of grassroots organizations, labor, and climate and environmental justice organizations growing a movement to pass local, state, and national policies that create millions of family-sustaining union jobs, ensure racial and gender equity, and take action on climate at the scale and scope the crisis demands."
- Indigenous Environmental Network "IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues (EJ). IEN’s activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities."