Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose. Towards Interspecies Thriving by Małgorzata Poks (Book Review)
Abstract
Małgorzata Pok’s Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose: Towards Interspecies Thriving (2023) focuses on the relationship between the modern, hierarchical, anthropocentric view of non-human animals, and the traditional, relational view in Indigenous ontologies. In dialogue with human-animal studies, decolonial studies, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), the study provides an in-depth engagement with the literary authorship of Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan. The questions that Poks asks are: What is the significance of Indigenous knowledges for the Anthropocene? How do these knowledges relate to the extinction of species and environmental grief? What insights are offered by Indigenous ethics to activists and decision makers in this regard? Despite the scope of Hogan’s production there is not much written about her literary production, Poks claims, even less so about the representation of the human-animal relationship in it. This is a lack which Poks makes up for in a thorough investigation of Hogan’s prose and poetry from the 1970’s until today. In Hogan’s works, themes like mercy, compassion, wildness, grief, and the connection between femininity and animality are in constant dialogue with the painful story of Indigenous America. Through Hogan’s own experiences in life, her description of places like Oklahoma and Colorado gain both material and metaphorical qualities. This is also the case with the landscapes and the non-human animals who inhabit them and who become agents in their own right in a constant yet shifting and transformative relationship to the human, who is thus decentered in effective ways.
Keywords
literature; indigenous studies; human-animal relations
References
Poks, Małgorzata. Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose. Towards Interspecies Thriving. Routledge, 2023.
Södertörn University Sweden
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3151-7083
Ann-Sofie Lönngren is full (appointed) professor in literature at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests include Northern-European nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, interdisciplinarity, queer studies, education and intersectionality. These are all perspectives that are employed in her most recent peer-reviewed monography, Following the Animal: Power, Agency, and Human-Animal Transformations in Modern, Northern European Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). In addition, she has published numerous articles, essays, and reviews in research journals such as NORA: Nordic Journal of feminist and Gender Research; Contagion: Journal of Culture, Mimesis, and Violence; Literature and Medicine; lambda nordica; European Journal of English Studies, and Humanimalia. Lönngren has also contributed to international anthologies of human-animal studies published by Routledge and Palgrave, and she has edited several peer-reviewed anthologies and journal issues, in both English and Swedish.
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