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  • Chapter 13 - Biocentrism

  • from Part II - Contexts and Controversies
  • Edited by Derek Ryan, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
    Published online:
    26 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 236-251

  • Summary

    This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.