Multispecies Memoir: Self, Genre, and Species Justice in Contemporary Culture
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Date
2022-10-04
Authors
Otjen, Nathaniel
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Liberal humanism articulates an individual, rational, autonomous, universal, and singularly human subject that possesses various rights and freedoms. Although the imagined subject at the heart of liberal humanist philosophy has improved the material and social conditions of many, this dissertation diagnoses the liberal subject and the feelings and experiences of isolation it produces as the root cause of multiple social and environmental injustices. Multispecies Memoir reimagines three interconnected projects that have played central roles in the production of the liberal human subject and human apartness: narrative, selfhood, and justice. Pursuing modes of living premised upon reciprocal relationships with nonhumans, not the logics of isolation and domination perpetuated by liberal humanism, I study a subgenre of life writing that I call “multispecies memoir.” Developing in the late twentieth century, these global narratives theorize selfhood, and literature more broadly, as emerging through relationships with multiple species. I look to the “entangled self” described by multispecies memoirs as fashioning an alternate subject, one that disrupts and dislodges the liberal human figure. In the process, I reimagine justice around an entangled, multispecies self. The modes of multispecies justice developed in this project shift the focus of justice away from serving an isolated, rights-bearing individual to instead prioritizing the maintenance of reciprocal relationships and the elimination of violence that threatens these relationships.
Multispecies Memoir makes three primary interventions in the environmental humanities: 1) it articulates selves as emerging through multispecies relations; 2) it asserts that justice for marginalized peoples and justice for other species must be pursued together via entangled subjects; 3) it theorizes literature as a multispecies contact zone co-authored and populated by nonhumans. The dissertation is organized around two sections, each of which proposes modes of coexistence that disrupt liberal humanism and its logics of isolation. The first section, “Entangled Knowledges and Practices,” studies how contemporary science and care have opened the boundaries of the self to other beings. The second section, “Multispecies Violence and Resistance,” examines how violence impacts humans, nonhumans, and their relationships with each other, and it considers how humans and nonhumans have come together to resist such violence.
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Keywords
Entanglement, Liberal Humanism, Memoir, Multispecies Justice, Self, Violence