This chapter tracks the figure of the rat across American short fiction, focusing in particular on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mazes” (1975), and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013). These stories illustrate powerful narrative effects that can be produced by constructing particular forms of animality, while also blurring, at times, the boundaries between what it means to be a human and what it means to be an animal. The chapter engages with the academic fields of human–animal studies, multispecies studies, and animality studies, exploring the short stories not only in relation to animal advocacy, but also problematic histories of animalizing certain human groups. Posthumanism cuts across these various fields, questioning constructions of the human as fundamentally different and superior to all other species on the planet. The chapter ultimately argues that some narrative techniques have more posthumanist potential than others.

New approaches in historiography combine the study of war and violence with human#x2013;animal studies. This type of ‘animate history’ is pursued here. The postulate is that the fabric of history is made up of the interaction of diverse and multiple living creatures possessing different types and degrees of (factual) agency. This perspective changes the historiography of warfare by including animals in the tableau of historically meaningful actors and actions. In its history of humans and animals in wartime, the chapter discusses inter-species relationships during and after periods of war, inter alia by suggesting a specific reading of the role ascribed to animals in war memorials.

The fraught histories of both animal studies and posthumanism as intellectual formations help to explain why ongoing, creative syntheses are proving especially necessary for the wellbeing of humanities scholarship. Maintaining a laser focus on the machine-human hybrid arguably has aided the development of postanthropocentric at the expense of anti-speciesist impulses in posthumanism. At the same time, while a distinct field of study has coalesced around concerns pertaining to nonhuman animate life, debates about what to call it—animal studies, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, etc.— often turn on what role posthumanist theory plays in its genealogy. With an eye toward new developments in and across these discussions, this chapter explores how various posthumanist perspectives on humans, animals, and human-animal relationships themselves foster productive ambivalences, though not without controversy, and points to some promising cross-fertilizations taking shape in fiction (especially sf), plant studies, and what some are calling postanimalism.

Human–Animal Studies is an interdisciplinary field which takes as its subject matter the relationships between humans and other animals. The field is rapidly growing as scholars are recognizing the importance of animals in our own lives, and, increasingly, the ways in which humans shape animal lives. Okunoshima, an island located in the Hiroshima Prefecture in southern Japan, has been host to a large population of feral rabbits for decades. The rabbits of the island have access to limited vegetation and water, and thus rely for their survival on the tourists who feed them. These tourists, who are largely drawn to the island in order to see, touch, and spend time with the rabbits, have altered the rabbits’ lives in ways that have been complicated and unexpected. This chapter will use the case study of the rabbits of Okunoshuma to uncover some of the problematics of the increasingly popular practice of animal tourism, and to shed light on the ways that multispecies ethnography can be useful to sociologists.