CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Rudolph, Catherine |
|---|---|
| Title | Becoming Human With Dogs: Race, Affect and Interspecies Autopoiesis in Human-dog Relations in South Africa |
| Summary | This study explores how relations between dogs and humans in post-apartheid South Africa function in the ongoing production of racialized humanness. Drawing on the work of decolonial philosopher Sylvia Wynter, I illustrate the reification of the Human as a category of power in human-dog relations, that is, how Whiteness as Human is instated in the negation and control of Blackness as its referent human Other. Using Wynter’s conceptualizations of “sociogeny” and “autopoiesis”, I develop her insights from the perspective of interspecies relationality, tracing how racial meanings of humanness, as symbolic, biopolitical, experiential, are inscripted in relations with dogs. Taking into account animal agency, I emphasize the relational poiesis of dogs and humans in systems of power. First, I consider the ways in which human-dog relationality operates as an apparatus for gendered racial differentiation and for legitimizing violence. Looking at the discourse around the proposed ban on pit bulls in South Africa, I outline how human-dog relations are racialized and moralized to reproduce tropes of Black masculinity as violent and criminal and Whiteness as the universal human(e). I then explore how human-dog relationality operates in the White suburbs and natural public space to produce racialized relations of familiarity and strange(r)ness, structured by affective economies of love and fear. Tracing movements of affect between bodies, I consider how forms of kinship and separation are enacted to reproduce White normativity and colonial constructions of gender and race. In view of this, I explore the possibilities for relation across difference to open up different narratives of humanity in inter- and intra-species relations. I look to South African writers’ work on racialized human-dog relations – specifically Gabeba Baderoon’s readings of Njabulo Ndebele’s “The Year of the Dog” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Eskia Mphalele’s Mrs Plum – which offer imaginative grounds for new modes of being human in relation to dogs. My focus on how dog-human relations reproduce the Human as a category of power, facilitates exploring how these relations might be altered towards its disruption, foregrounding relationality and recognition of difference, towards a new kind of humanism. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin (First Supervisor); Zuleika Sheik (Second Supervisor) |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/rudolph_catherine.pdf |
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