The Posthumanist Ethico-politicality in Silko's Storytelling of the Animal-Other

Jin Man Jeong

doi:10.21049/ccs.2014.35..7

This essay explores how Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller encourage human's sympathetic relationship with the nonhuman animal-Other, paying attention to her posthumanist voices against anthropocentric mistreatment of animals which is inseparable from white Americans' environmental and racio-ethnic subjugation of nature and Natives in the colonialist history of the United States. As a way of dissolving the problematic anthropocentrism and embracing the animal-Other as a fellow creature, Silko employs and transforms Native American oral tradition in her own idiosyncratic posthumanist storytelling. In order to highlight the ethico-political examination of the animal issue in her storytelling, this essay refers to contemporary posthumanist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who are all in their own ways critically engaged with Western metaphysical anthropocentrism. Arguably, in a similar vein with the posthumanist critics, Silko disrupts the mischievous hierarchical opposition of humans/animals that have directly or obliquely warranted violence against the animal-Other. In order to demonstrate Silko's ethico-politicality concerning the animal issue, this essay inquires her critical perception of humans' misunderstanding (or misbehavior) toward animals in terms of the suffering and death of animals. Besides, Silko's posthumanist storytelling of the animal's gaze (as Derrida notes as an event of revealing human aporia and vulnerability) and “in-between” (as a reification of crossing the boundary of humans/animals) is discussed with the exemplification of Tayo's encounter with a mountain lion and a bear-man Shush. The posthumanist approach to thinking about the animal-Other in Ceremony and Storyteller would shed light on the ethico-political significances of Silko's storytelling in our time in peril of losing the tie between humans and nonhuman animals.

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