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Theories about Third Space or "in-betweeness" often lack an ethics that responds to the position of the majority of people who experience the violence of colonialism, as Amar Acheraïou argues. How can we think about hybridity with a more committed ethics? Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist suggests that much of the violence experienced by humans and animals under dominant or colonial thought stems from a traditional view of subjectivity as fixed, stable, knowable, distinct, and independent from others and the material world. Colonial logic views as "disposable" those regarded as not human or somehow less than human and often sacrifices them in order to maintain a stable, dominant notion of subjectivity, an exclusionary definition of Man, a continuous flow of extractionary capital from the colonies, and a particular hierarchy or ordering of the world. This article argues that The Impressionist portrays subjectivity not as fixed but in process, after Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming animal," as a way to challenge dominant thinking. The novel also emphasizes the nonhuman nature of subjectivity and human dependence on the nonhuman, including the environment, for existence. The Impressionist offers an important corrective to concepts of hybridity by emphasizing that those humans and nonhumans regarded as "disposable" demand ethical treatment.

This essay offers a Deleuzean reading of desire in the relationship between the eponymous protagonist of Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller (2005) and a whale named Sharisha. In the setting of a highly stratified ecotourist village in South Africa where most characters relate to marine animals only through consumption and capitalization, the human-whale relationship between the protagonist and Sharisha offers a different mode of comportment. While some Animal Studies scholars read the novel as evidence of animal subjectivity and call for a recognition of animal rights in South African law, this essay contends that the novel's more significant contribution to ecocritical thought is its insistence on positing nonhuman desire as a mode of resistance to neocolonial capitalist violence. The essay also engages this discussion of nonhuman desire as resistance with postcolonial critiques of both resistance literature and posthuman accounts of subjectivity.