Rethinking Human-Animal Relationship: Reading Stories from Bengali Literature

Rethinking Human-Animal Relationship engages with animal studies, a growing interdisciplinary field that reveals the deep human unreason and moral schizophrenia regarding their animal 'others'. This book focuses on the links of the unrelenting exploitation of animals throughout history to the domination of humans over other humans: women, lower classes, colonized people and other marginalized categories that are more or less animalized by oppressors. Facilitated by scientific insights into physical and emotional continuity between humans and non-humans as well as by the opening up of a theoretical space by postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism and other such critical modes of discourse, animal studies emphasizes the human failure to look beyond themselves due to cultural blinders. It emerges in the exploration of shifts in thought in this book that ultimately, this leads to a posthumanistic view, asserting that rather than championing the rights of certain select subjects from a safe ontological distance, one should, fundamentally question the very human schema of knowing them.