This peer-reviewed essay conceptualizes the neologism ‘‘airborne hospitality’’ to characterize animal- focused cinematic representations and visualization processes that collectively reimagine air as a transspecies community-building medium. It brings Jacques Derrida’s theorizations on hospitality into dialogue with literary and cultural interpretations of air to analyze human-avian caregiving and other vertically oriented practices of hospitable intimacies in Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s 2022 documentary All That Breathes and to envision alternative emancipatory aesthetics in response to airborne toxicity. A twofold approach to interspecies hospitality—reading nonanthropocentric representational frameworks or cinematic techniques as aesthetic instances of hospitality, and the very act of viewing such cinematic mediations of interspecies intimacies as a form of spectatorial hospitality—informs my understanding of the relationship between black kites and their caregiving humans.

This peer-reviewed article foregrounds new vernacular aesthetics of multispecies ethics through close readings of two short stories – “Shokun” (“Vulture”) and “Amrityu Ajibon” (“Till Death, Through Life”) – by Bengali writer Hasan Azizul Haque (1939–2021). Postcolonial literary criticism has predominantly focused on Haque’s incisive portrayal of the consequences of the Partition of India and Bangladesh Liberation War on affected minorities, but his depictions of other-than-human subjects and interspecies relationalities implicated in postcolonial power dynamics have not received the critical attention that they merit. This essay draws on the analytical frameworks offered by interdisciplinary animal studies to demonstrate the agential roles of animals in Haque’s stories. Through literary speculations on animal alterities and entangled human–animal vulnerabilities, the short stories studied in this essay articulate the impact of feudal economic structures and inter-class hierarchies on landless peasants and debt-bonded labourers in post-Partition Bengal. They elaborate the mechanisms through which vernacular knowledges about human–animal coexistence, communication, and co-constitution provide textual corollaries for subaltern consciousness, resistance, and moral upliftment. I argue that the material and semiotic dimensions of literary animal figures in the stories produce unique narrative instances of recuperative animal agencies through sustained attention to the corporeal dynamics and affective logics of interspecies interactions. I also argue that while the material aspects of interspecies relationships are manifested through embodied affect, their symbolic aspects become conspicuous through the textual preeminence of metonymic animals over their metaphoric configurations. I show that through different textual iterations of transspecies relatedness stemming from (but not limited to) two kinds of physical contiguity – a vulture’s peck and a snake’s bite – Haque’s short stories critique both uncritical consolidation and outright disavowal of interspecies difference.

This peer-reviewed article focuses on the story of a domesticated Indian elephant named Jagamohan in postcolonial Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s relatively less-known novella “Jagamohaner Mrityu” (“The Death of Jagamohan,” 1979) in order to show how the combined material-symbolic exploitation of the elephant facilitates social oppression and economic disenfranchisement of indigenous forest-dwelling Adivasi communities in post-Independence India. Mahasweta interrogates the contentious, multidimensional relationship between humans and elephants in the forest- belts and mining-affected regions in eastern India in the context of the rise of industrial encroachments and attendant environmental degradation. In the first half of the article, I interrogate the textual representations of interspecies relationalities in terms of shared vulnerability, entangled empathy, human–animal communication, and nonhuman narrative agency, alongside the methodological application of non- anthropocentric narratological techniques foregrounding the characters' interiorities. In the second half of the article, I analyze how Jagamohan is implicated in the historiographic violence implicit in the suppression of minority (subaltern) histories by dominant-caste histories through explorations of multiple co-existing temporalities.

A disparate ensemble of British and Indian ghosts enact the dramatic vicissitudes of Indian social history in the iconic ghost dance in Satyajit Ray’s 1969 cult classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Diverse in their class, caste, racial, and religious identities, profes- sions, sartorial preferences, and movements, the ghosts alert viewers to the nonhuman voices inflected by power dynamics that animate historical consciousness. As I read Tithi Bhattacharya’s book, I felt like I had stepped into the textual iteration of a comparable ghost dance. The five chapters combine a motley crew of Bengali and British specters to conceptualize a social history of fear. Bhattacharya begins with Rabindranath Tagore’s realist account of a familiar Brahmin ghost residing in the Tagore family’s Jorasanko house, the Brahmadaitya, whose departure symptomatizes, both literally and figuratively, the transition from premodern nostalgia to modern rationality in nineteenth-century Bengal. (Follow the link to read the entire article or email me for a PDF).

What are the ways in which literary comparatists might reconceive animals as veritable subjects of transcultural comparison? How are cross-linguistic literary speculations about the spectral appearance of a prehistoric pterodactyl in postcolonial India, the killing of dogs in post-apartheid South Africa, herring over-fishing in industrialized English seaside towns, and animal captivity in European zoological gardens interconnected? In Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, Dominic O’Key initiates a dialogue between two fields that are all too seldom brought together — comparative literature and animal studies — to determine the theoretical/methodological frameworks that might interpret animal figures, produced across literary traditions and geopolitical concerns, through a shared set of critical coordinates. (Follow the link to read the entire article or email me for a PDF).