Michael Lundblad

The Animal Question

Peter Singer’s call for animal rights in 1975 began with a bold statement in Animal Liberation that linked the “tyranny” of animal oppression with slavery: “This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans.” The practice of “speciesism,” according to Singer, must therefore be condemned as analogous to racism and sexism. Whether these explicit links are plausible or not continues to be debated, but the last quarter century has certainly seen increased attention to the plight of animals in American culture. Only recently, though, has this ethical impulse gained currency within the humanities. The time may seem right, then, for similarly bold statements from critics such as Cary Wolfe, whose two new books call for interventions into the question of the animal. In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, for example, Wolfe suggests that “much of what we call cultural studies situates itself squarely, if only implicitly, on what looks . . . more and more like a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse: repressing the question of nonhuman subjectivity, taking it for granted that the subject is always already human” (1). Wolfe’s approach is a far cry from that of Peter Singer, a figure who comes under critical scrutiny in Animal Rites, and the form of posthumanist ethics advocated by Wolfe is not likely to be found in the rhetoric of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) or the ALF (Animal Liberation Front), two organizations created in the aftermath of Singer’s landmark book. But Animal Rites, along with Wolfe’s edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, offers provocative