Description:
Explores a narrative pattern in which storytellers revisit instances of genocide and extinction not simply to reveal historical erasures of whole populations but also to rearticulate lifeways premised on cross-species interdependence. Focuses on recovering a sense of affective bonds shared across species lines.
Brief description: Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England. She is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines and coeditor of Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds.
Review Quotes:
"McHugh's emphasis on multispecies affective bonding and shared living across texts and histories reshapes the terrain of literary animal studies, posing new lines of inquiry for scholars across many fields. Bringing interspecies lifeways and indigenous knowledges to consciousness within animal studies discourses, Love in a Time of Slaughters models a crucial new set of interpretive geographies for our social and ecological moment."
--Carrie Rohman, author of Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance