Enticing Infestations: Animal Encounters and Contested Belonging in American Literature and Visual Media

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

How should the growing field of Animal Studies concern itself with ugly affects that often pervade human and non-human encounters? Affects like dread, repugnance, phobia, and hatred? Even in the age of affect theory, deep traditions of sympathy retain a certain hegemony in motivating the politics of animal studies and ecological activism. Can anything valuable or productive come from engaging these less palatable sensations that continue to define human encounters with a nonhuman world? After all, even when these encounters may feel remote on a day-to-day basis, their very possibility structures our environment: the presumption that our kitchens and domestic spaces should be free of mice, rats, and insects; the precautions taken, personal and governmental, to ensure that Zika and other viruses are prevented from crossing national and physiological borders by way of mosquito or bird; and all our laws governing responsible pet keeping, from leash and muzzle laws to required vaccinations. Plenty of encounters irreducible to law also disturb us—from roadkill and bugsplatter on our windshields to more generalized anxieties, such as the possibility that migrating geese will collide with plane engines mid-flight.

Enticing Infestations takes our dread-inducing encounters with the nonhuman world as experiences worth thinking through and representing—aesthetically, scientifically, politically, and otherwise. In dialogue with the 2017 ASA theme, Pedagogies of Dissent, our panel asks how nonhuman infestations, infections, and interruptions, to which we may feel naturally averse, might be re-conceptualized as forms of dissent that populate the most quotidian of experiences. Through this ubiquity, disturbing encounters with nonhuman agents generate pedagogies premised upon alterity and contestation, which deserve greater scholarly attention. As demonstrated in the abstracts below, which explore everything from pigeon feces and taxidermy to rabies and cockroach infestation art, papers will touch on an array of themes in American literature, visual media, and political history.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Daniel Lanza Rivers, Sonoma State University

Individual Presentations

• Repose Amid the Pigeon Shit, or, Thinking with Flocks - Julia Dauer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Bug (the movie): Infestation, Interdependence, and Affect - Lindsay Garcia, College of William and Mary

• Stuffed: On Taxidermic Style - Cliff Mak, Queens College (CUNY)

• Canine Contaminations: Douglass, Hurston, Cujo - Don James McLaughlin, Swarthmore College