Reading Postcolonial Animals with the Animist Code: A Critique of “New” Materialist Animal Studies

Abstract

This article looks at the challenges that animist materialism offers to reading strategies in new materialist animal studies scholarship. Where Rosi Braidotti’s vitalist materialism calls for a neoliteral, anti-metaphorical mode of relating to animals, Harry Garuba identifies metaphor as a primary feature of animist materialist practice in African material culture. After critiquing Rosi Braidotti’s dismissal of the “old” metaphorical ways of relating to animals, the article offers a reading of animals and the animist code in two southern African novels, Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), to consider the potential of animist codings of animals for resisting colonial necropolitics. Animist materialism offers the potential to raise animals and humans into ethical status by affirming the very knowledges and worldviews that Cartesian, colonial humanism wrote off as nonsense and as a marker of inhumanity.