Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature)

'Traditionally, important books concerning animals report scientific views. Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledge, and the Arts is an important book concerning animals that reports artistic views held by a wide array of people from a variety of cultures. Considering that art was the method used by the earliest members of our species to represent animals, this says a great deal about us and our biophilic views. It's fascinating, and no wonder, as we all have some desire to connect with other species, and we can rely on this book, which is written with scholarly care.' -- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Harmless People, The Hidden Life of Dogs, and The Animal Wife, USA This volume illuminates how creative representations remain sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epistemologies. Traditionally imagined in relation to spiritual realms and the occult, animals have always been more than primitive symbols of human relations. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors, totems, talismans, or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the volume's unique emphasis on Southern Africa and North America - historical loci of the greatest ranges of species and linguistic diversity - help to situate how indigenous knowledges of human-animal relations are being adapted to modern conditions of life shared across species lines. Wendy Woodward is the author of The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (2008). She co-edited a special issue of Journal of Literary Studies entitled Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa (2014) and has published three volumes of poetry. Susan McHugh is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (2011) as well as Dog (2004). She co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014), and Literary Animals Look, a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2013) Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Introduction (Wendy Woodward, Susan McHugh)....Pages 1-10 Front Matter ....Pages 11-11 Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-Maloti (Michael Wessels)....Pages 13-33 Kabbo Sings the Animals (Dan Wylie)....Pages 35-57 Interrogating the Sacred Art of Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper (Richard Alan Northover)....Pages 59-81 Front Matter ....Pages 83-83 Spirit Guards: A Squad of Ceramic Dogs in South Africa (Nicolene Swanepoel)....Pages 85-92 Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities, and Indigenous Wisdoms (Delphi Carstens)....Pages 93-115 Front Matter ....Pages 117-117 The Porosity of Human/Nonhuman Beings in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys (Alexandra-Mary Wheeler)....Pages 119-137 Animated Animals: Allegories of Transformation in Khumba (Hermann Wittenberg)....Pages 139-159 Magic Wells, the Stream and the Flow: The Promise of Literary Animal Studies (Marion Copeland)....Pages 161-182 Front Matter ....Pages 183-183 Border Crossings: Animals, Tricksters and Shape-Shifters in Modern Native American Fiction (Daniel G. Payne)....Pages 185-204 I’m Mad You’re Mad We Are All Mad: The Alice Diaries (Wilma Cruise)....Pages 205-227 Front Matter ....Pages 229-229 ‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some Contemporary Southern African Texts (Wendy Woodward)....Pages 231-248 Cross-Pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges of Extinction and Genocide in Honeybee Fictions (Susan McHugh)....Pages 249-270 Back Matter ....Pages 271-275