Endlings

Pyne, Lydia

doi:10.5749/9781452968858

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Extinction storytelling largely focuses on megafauna, often mammals and birds, that have become culturally important (Heise, 2016;Jørgensen, 2019;Pyne, 2023). While there are exceptions, like eels, snails or even unknown extinctions, this does raise the question of why it is that, in an age of overall biodiversity loss, the public imagination is still predominantly fixated on a few select species.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taxonomies of exclusion: Storytelling, naming and classification in an age of extinction

Tabak

2024

Camb. prisms Extinction

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Among the stories on individual examples of charismatic fauna, there are also extinction stories that evoke databases and their aesthetics in how they list endangered species. At the same time, these different stories grapple with a legacy of taxonomy that, while necessary in conservation, also carries a history of exclusion. This paper turns to the poetry of Claire Wahmanholm and Juliana Spahr to consider some of the ways extinction stories can be told outside of the relatively narrow scope of charismatic species. To begin, I reflect on extinction storytelling and the classificatory impulse in some of these stories, including poetry. Then, I consider scientific practices of naming before I turn back to Wahmanholm and Spahr and explore practices of naming and classification in their poetry. Following that, I dwell on the influence of scientific classification on the ways people including poets can engage with extinction. The poems in this paper are not merely an object for analysis; they should be considered an invitation to come to terms with and move beyond complicated histories and practices of naming and classification in storytelling.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taxonomies of exclusion: Storytelling, naming and classification in an age of extinction

Tabak

2024

Camb. prisms Extinction

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“…Might this somehow apply to extinction discourse? At least, growing evidence of the escalation of species death seems to have generated a fascination with extinctions, stressing the notion of endlings (borrowed from legal discourse on inheritance), the last animal of a kind (Pyne 2022). Taxonomy and classification are hotly debated, more than ever before, inviting anthropological and philosophical arguments about 'the species problem' (concerns with establishing, or abandoning, solid grounds for classification and naming), even moving beyond species (Wilkins et al 2022).…”

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confidence: 99%

Anthropologies of extinction

Pálsson¹

2023

Anthropology Today

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2Animal Studies

O’Key¹

2023

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

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In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caught my attention in 2022. I do not pretend to have a robust rationale for my criteria for inclusion. Instead, let me say that these are all publications that excited me in some way, that excited something in me, and that I believe will excite others too. I have divided the chapter into four sections: 1. ‘Living Machines of Imperialism’ examines two postcolonial animal histories, Saheed Aderinto’s Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa and Jonathan Saha’s Colonizing Animals; 2. ‘I Dream of Dogs’ briefly considers Lydia Pyne’s Endlings before focusing on Margret Grebowicz’s short book of cultural critique on dog ownership, Rescue Me; 3. ‘The Gay Frog Is the Opposite of the Gay Penguin’ turns to recent issues of Humanimalia and Green Letters, and a special section of Environmental Humanities, co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Ina Linge; and 4. ‘Inside the Slaughterhouse’ looks at recent publications in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series, concentrating mostly on Sune Borkfelt’s Reading Slaughter. I end the chapter by reflecting on the links between these publications; I introduce my own monograph, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, to tie together the review’s key ideas. In all of this I have tried not to impose a grand narrative on the books reviewed, nor isolate them as symptoms of broader ideological tendencies. Yet if there is an argument here it is this: animal studies continues to remind us that human–animal relations are not natural, timeless, or inevitable. They are historical. They can be transformed.

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Endlings

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Taxonomies of exclusion: Storytelling, naming and classification in an age of extinction

Taxonomies of exclusion: Storytelling, naming and classification in an age of extinction

Anthropologies of extinction

2Animal Studies

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