Animal crossings: Contagion and immunologic in Gothic American literature.

摘要

Evolutionary theory and geological discoveries during the nineteenth century unleashed the animal from the strict hierarchical confines of The Great Chain of Being wherein the human was privileged. Animal Crossings considers how an anxious awareness of animality is a profound cultural reservoir that continues to resonate in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American texts. The unfixing of the animal indicated a systemic crisis where admixture between all categories was suddenly possible. I argue that the animal Other becomes a locus around which cultural logic and reading practices coalesce, for as an increasingly mobile contagion the animal necessitates increasingly vigilant policing. Donna Haraway articulates an immune system as "a plan...to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other." Animality presents a unique problem for the maintenance of such a cultural immune system since the animal always contaminates these boundaries---as the origin of the human, its spectral return is unavoidable. Indeed, the containment of animality is the problem par excellence of all colonizing practices and thus also becomes one of the deepest points from which all expressions of dominion and entitlement arise.; Since transformation to an exceptional, purified state is so germinal to the American cultural imagination, transformation to a "regressive" state of animality is the subtext which haunts the dominant project. I argue that animality is a circuit of contagious and relentless crossings wherein the fixed architecture of the human is made fluid and open to inter-subjective contact, and thus animality is also a resource for racial and gender resistance to oppression. Animal Crossings reads the animal as both horrific contagion and contagious generator of new cultural formations.