Bezan S., McKay R. (eds.) Animal Remains

Routledge, 2021. — 295 p.The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, animal remains are everywhere and so animals remain everywhere. Animal remains are food, medicine, and clothing; extractive resources and traces of animals’ lifeworlds and ecologies; they are sites of political conflict and ontological fear, fetishized visual signs and objects of trade, veneration, and memory; they are biotechnological innovations and spill-over viruses.
To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.Acknowledgements
Contributors
List of Figures
Animal Remains: An Introduction
Notes
Works Cited
Fossil Figurations
J.G. Ballard’s Fossil Imaginaries: Apocalypse, Deep Time, and Deathly Life
Inhuman Intimacies: Theorising the Ballardian Fossil
“Unlimited Pleasure”: Eroding the Human in The Drought, “Now Wakes the Sea,” and The Drowned World
Libidinal Apocalypse and the Geologics of Control
Contaminated Remains and Deathly Futures: “The Terminal Beach”
Notes
Works cited
Photographing Dead Animals: Taphonomy as Embedded Media
Figure and Ground: Smithers Lake as a Necrological Landscape
Picturing Animal Deathscapes in the Aftermath of War
(Re)appropriation of Images and Death Out-of-Place
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Extinction Futures
Snail Trails: A Foray into Disappearing Worlds, Written in Slime
Worlds of Slime
Trail Following
The Disappearance of Slime
Notes
Works cited
Making Specimens Sacred: Putting the Bodies of Solitario Jorge and Cụ Rùa on Display
The Sacred Animal Body 1: The Turtle of Hoàn Kiếm Lake
The Sacred Animal Body 2: The Pinta Giant Tortoise
Sacred Specimens
Notes
Works cited
A Tale of Two Bucardo: Laña, Celia, and the Contested Meanings of Animal Remains
Post-mortem
Unsettling Matter
Rethinking Remains
Notes
Works cited
The Political Cultural Lives of Animal Remains
Beef, Bull, and Ballyhoo: America’s Cattle-Cinema Complex
Meat and Film: From Romance to Conflict
Hollywood Genre Cinema and the Demand for Beef
From Promotion to Propaganda: Marketing Beef in the 1960s
Notes
Works cited
Read Meat
Carnivoracity
Carniveracity
Myth on the Leash
Meatography
Meat Today
Coda
Notes
Works Cited
Le Voreux: Scenes of Animal Labour in Zola’s Germinal
Le Voreux: Capitalism Devours Everything
Horses as Workers but not Proletarians
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Empire, Colony: Animal Remains as Infrastructure
Making Cows Live: Bovine Remains and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism
Remains, Bovine and Human
The Modern History of Cow Protection
Making Live and Letting Die
Three Make Live Interventions
Lives and Deaths
Save the Cow, Save the Country
Notes
Works cited
Before The Thing : Viruses, Sled Dogs, Seabirds, and Science Fiction
Filterable Viruses and the Question of Life
Sled Dogs, Serums, and the Animal as Remains
Seabirds and Viral Remains
Notes
Works cited
Ethics and Affects: Mourning Animal Remains
Data Plus Affect: Interspecific Accommodation in the Models of Art
You Must Carry Me Now
Matrix and Visitations
Matrix
Visitations
Conclusion: Encounters and Interventions, Spaces of Empathy and Loss, in and out of Sight and Shared Environments
Notes
Works Cited
Up in Smoke: Cremation, Mourning, and the Afterdeaths of Bodily Remains for Companion Animals
Death and Remembrance: Cultural Attitudes towards Cremation
What Happens in Cremation?
Flame Cremation
Commingling Anxieties
Aquamation: An Emerging Alternative to Flame Cremation
Different Ashes
Cremation, Mourning, and Public Recognition
Notes
Works Cited
Fish Market, Lagos : Artist Pages and Supporting Statement
Notes
Works cited
Index