This chapter distinguishes two ways in which the Middle Ages conceived the relationship between human and nonhuman creatures. The first, according to which humans are a unique kind of animal (in the Latin word’s sense of “living being”), is available primarily to the learned, whereas the second, widely attested in lay usage and practice, concerns the difference (or lack of it) between humans and “beasts.” The chapter explores the complication of both relationships in the French and English romances of William of Palermo (late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century and mid-fourteenth-century, respectively), in which one aristocratic protagonist is turned into a werewolf and others disguise themselves in the skins of bear or deer. Human exceptionalism appears to condition the story’s coding of social dysfunction as animalization, but the romances equally show medieval aristocratic and chivalric identity embracing its proximity to “beasts,” for example, in the notion of sovereignty, in the symbolic languages of heraldry and dreams, and in moments of explicit self-identification. The chapter concludes by arguing that the way these romances build their fiction with reference to animals is materialized in the manuscript books that transmit them, made up as they are of parchment pages, that is, of processed animal skins.

Nowhere are asymmetrical power dynamics between humans and animals more evident than in systems of captivity. This chapter assesses literary responses to animal capture, with particular emphasis on zoos. It considers the colonial networks of trade that help to populate Western zoos and examines questions of spectatorship and subjectivity behind and in front of the cage. The discussion is structured around a series of vignettes staging different attitudes toward captive animals. These focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s panther, Franz Kafka’s ape Red Peter, Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, Marie NDiaye’s fish-woman, and Lydia Millet’s benighted zoogoer, paying special attention to texts inspired by the Jardin des Plantes in Paris – the world’s oldest civil zoo, which opened during the French revolution.

This essay traces the relationship between colonization and academia over recent times, associating it with various intellectual moves to interrogate the hegemonic assumptions of Western culture. It argues that racial representations in literature are multifaceted and variegated, with literary studies offering opportunities to effectively demystify myths about the putative universality of American or European subject systems. This is tied to the historical specificity of particular colonial situations, with reference to the work of Nicholas Thomas, noting how one significant contribution of Australian cultural theory to literary studies has been to make debates around settler colonial paradigms more prominent. This leads into discussion of larger questions around regional autonomy, cultural appropriation and social class, with reference to the work of Walter Mignolo and Stuart Hall. It also touches upon political controversies involving with the highly problematic relationship between academic and civic authorities, a continuing power struggle that can be traced back to medieval times. The essay concludes that the etymological links between university and universality offer scope to resist local standardizations of all kinds, and in this sense a decentring of racial hierarchies runs in parallel to a decentring of geographical hierarchies.

Exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures were central to representations of human-animal relations in the eighteenth century. When in 1713 Alexander Pope published an essay against cruelty to animals, he observed how “Everyone knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind.” This chapter explains how feeling for fellow creatures was coupled in English minds with Eastern – Ottoman and Arab as well as Persian and Indian – compassion for them. Derived from mercantile, scholarly, and scientific exchanges; travelers’ tales; and widely circulating translations of Eastern beast fables, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Enlightenment Orientalism” is examined in relation to a contemporary Ottoman representation of animals, the natural history and storytelling of Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1687). It also considers such texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Essay on Man, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. These texts present different versions of multiple species of animal kind as “peoples” in the sense of the Qur’anic verse, explicated by Sarra Tlili, that ‘”there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you.”

Goodison’s nuanced poem about the Hope Royal Botanical Gardens sheds light on the often-unbridgeable gap between the classroom and the world outside. The “post-colonial scholar” is often considered the killjoy whose knowledge of the history and aftermaths of colonialism subsumes the complex lived experiences of postcolonial societies. In this respect, she is not different than the critical race scholar, who in the United States is accused of a range of sins, including the distortion of American history, if they want to teach the roots of slavery. In his essay “Muse of History,” Derek Walcott had cautioned against a petrifying of colonial history into myth, with its unchangeable binary of perpetrator and victim: “In the New World, servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters. Because this literature serves historic truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos” (What the Twilight Says 37).

In this chapter I read a range of Zadie Smith’s fiction and nonfiction prose to look at how Zadie Smith’s corpus testifies to an agon between the writer’s prerogative of impersonality and elective affinities and the “dark and unarguable blackness” that relentlessly attaches to raced bodies. The novels and non-fiction ask to be read not as global theory or interventionist polemic but as battlefields in themselves. Reading Zadie Smith according to the terms set up by Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall could also be crucial for decolonizing hard-bitten reading habits in the classroom that treat Black literature as interchangeable with Black culture and society. While Smith’s writing of this culture and society is immersive, she routinely and systematically problematizes the category of Blackness itself, choosing instead to imaginatively recreate the vicissitudes of identity at the intersections of race and class.

Critical framing of UK poetry often ignores the pressures of racism or xenophobia (even when the work at hand responds to it), the shaping of a reader’s perceptions of the poet and her text as one and of the same and from where this cultural construction emerges, as well as the poet’s own determination of themselves as a subject. It is my intention here to interrogate the readerly gesture, its lyric premise of expression and authenticity, in order to reproach national canons and traditions that privilege the well-crafted lyric poem and its supposed universality. Mobilizing a decolonized reading of the lyric – one that dismantles formal features and a reader’s expectations of an expressive and authentic voice – I will offer finally two examples from my own experience teaching the works of Sarah Howe and Bhanu Kapil.

In this chapter, I will look at how the twin projects of cultural and political decolonization in the overlapping fields of literature and law played out over the past hundred years in order to consider how the problem of “formal” decolonization – the filling of foreign colonial administrative structures and cultural educational systems with “native” content – can detour and defer a more radical decolonization of form itself, rooting out the intrinsic eurocentrism at the bottom of both international law and comparative literature. Calls to decolonize (whether territory or a curriculum), especially in the current name of “the decolonial,” often appeal to the language of human rights, but human rights are intentionally counterrevolutionary, designed to forestall the possibility of radical disruption by expanding the compass of the universal to include, over time, people and peoples historically excluded from its coverage.

Created by Chicanx and Indigenous artists living and working in the US–Mexico Borderlands, Borderlands Shakespeare appropriations situate Shakespeare within the unique context of la frontera, engaging with its hybrid cultures, genres, and languages. These appropriations draw from Anglo, Spanish, and Indigenous traditions, and they confront Shakespeare’s colonial legacies, interrogating the complex layers of colonialism shaping the region and Shakespeare’s reception in it. To explore the decolonial vision of Borderlands Shakespeare, this essay focuses on Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers (1991), an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet set in Los Angeles during Día de los Muertos, and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry (2014), an appropriation of Henry IV, Part I set in post-apocalyptic San Diego. These plays engage with Shakespeare to critique imperialist policies that have resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous land, the criminalization of migration, and high levels of labor and environmental exploitation. In their use of multilingual Indigenous and Chicanx frameworks to imagine more just futures, Borderlands Shakespeare plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry offer valuable methodologies for decolonizing English literary studies and for approaching canonical Western texts in culturally sustaining ways.

Decolonizing the English literary curriculum is a necessary and yet impossible task. It requires more than overcoming institutional inertia within the university; it requires much more than having a series of difficult conversations at the departmental level regarding the purpose and scope of an English literary education today. Decolonizing the literary curriculum in the United States, the location from which I write, demands nothing short of revolutionizing an entire educational apparatus where the university is only the tip of the iceberg. Add to it Kindergarten–12 schools, the textbook industry, and state legislatures, eight of which as of 2021 have banned the discussion of structural racism, sexism, and White privilege in the classroom (Ray and Gibbons).

This chapter will explore the entangled histories of postcolonialism, world literature, and global anglophone as pedagogical and institutional rubrics. The English curriculum in the Anglo-American academy has in various degrees been reconfigured by these rubrics since the 1980s, but each has often been perceived as antagonistic to the other two, and scholars have devoted volumes to staking their territorial claim on each. Rather than wage partisan battles that perceive the rise of global anglophone as a threat to postcolonial studies, or world literature as a neoliberal takeover/erasure of the literary riches of the non-European world, it is worthwhile, I argue to trace their collective impetus to decolonize English and comparative literary studies.

In the works of controversy that poured from the presses in the century after the Reformation in England, religious opponents regularly called each other by the names of animals. Biblical animals were favored by both puritans and conformists in the early Tudor era, as controversialists sought to claim for their own words the authority of scripture. The metaphoric animals employed by Elizabethan controversialists were more varied, derived from biblical, classical, and some popular sources. By the mid-seventeenth century, the rhetorical animals evoked by religious controversialists were drawn from a wide range of mostly secular sources and were notable for figuring predatory violence, monstrosity, and grotesqueness. Everyday experience of animals was kept strictly separate from the roles that they were assigned in polemical tracts. Arguably, the extreme animalizing of opponents contributed to the failure of negotiation and compromise as civil war approached.

This chapter reads Hamlet in the light of debates in early modern animal studies, arguing that it is a play that responds to contemporary religious and philosophical questions about the distinction between humans and animals in its representation of flesh and of death. In particular, it focuses on ideas about the difference between human and animal death, and sees in Hamlet a challenge to the assumption of human immortality, reading human fleshiness – our edibility – as lying at the core of the play’s contemplations. In what is often regarded as Shakespeare’s key exploration of “the human,” the chapter argues that what can be found is a conception of our species that offers a challenge to the anthropocentrism of the early modern period, but also of our own.

“Victorian studies” and “decolonization” have a unique historical relation. Though the recent discourse of “decolonization” has gained unprecedented traction in Victorian studies, there is a much older relation between these two domains. For the “Victorian” itself became available as a coherent object of study and was institutionalized as an area studies field in the heyday of Third Worldist liberation and the age of decolonization – the 1950s and 60s. A field notorious for its ignorance of questions of race and empire, Victorian studies came to be in the postwar period amidst an efflorescence of area studies fields in the United States. But as should be common knowledge by now, this period in the West, and the formation of area studies fields, did not develop in isolation from the colonial peripheries. This is evinced by the fact that writers from the periphery not only make frequent mention of the Victorians but also rely on them for making the postcolonial legible. Citations to Victorian writers, of course, abound in postcolonial writing. But rather than focus on the familiar instances in which the “empire writes back” (Rhys’s Jamaica, Achebe’s excoriation of Conrad, Guerrillas’ Thrushcross Grange, and daffodils in Lucy), this chapter considers those encounters with Victorian culture and society that seek to formulate the politics of decolonization.

The introduction charts the ways in which literary studies and animal studies have formed a mutually enriching dialogue. Starting with a selection of contemporary short stories, and exploring questions of exploitation, anthropomorphism, and metaphor, it demonstrates how animals alter the way we think about, write, and read literature. The introduction includes a summary of the chapters contained in the book.