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Dossier Université Invitée : University of Leeds

World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question

World-Ecological Literature y la pregunta animal
World-Ecological Literature et la question animale
Dominic O’Key

Résumés

Ces dernières années, la méthode marxiste de la théorie littéraire mondiale a donné naissance à la critique littéraire écologique mondiale, une pratique du comparatisme matérialiste qui analyse comment les textes littéraires enregistrent les crises environnementales de la modernité capitaliste. Bien que ses praticiens aient écrit des essais incisifs sur les engagements littéraires avec l'extraction et l'épuisement des ressources comme l'eau, le pétrole et le cacao, aucun travail n'a été publié sur l'agriculture animale industrialisée et l'expansion mondiale de la production de viande. Ce n'est pas une simple omission, mais plutôt un produit de l'ambivalence de longue date du marxisme envers les animaux. Avec cet argument comme fondement de cet essai, j'ai entrepris à la fois d'étendre et de remettre en question l'analyse écologique mondiale en prêtant attention aux enregistrements littéraires de la production de viande dans différents régimes socio-écologiques. Je le fais en me tournant vers le roman de Jean-Baptiste Del Amo de 2016, Règne animal, publié en anglais sous le titre Animalia en 2019. Je montre comment le roman embrasse des formes de naturalisme littéraire qui, en dépeignant les ouvriers agricoles et leurs animaux comme conjointement consommables aux lois de rentabilité, enregistre la méatification de la France à travers deux siècles. Pourtant, si le naturalisme dépeint en fin de compte des personnages humains qui sont impuissants à arrêter des lois naturelles prédéterminées, alors dans quelle mesure Animalia remet-il vraiment en question les conditions de l'élevage industriel qu'il souhaite exposer ? Autrement dit, quelles sont les possibilités et les limites de la forme naturaliste pour cartographier de manière critique l'agriculture industrielle ?

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Texte intégral

Materialist Comparativism: World-Literature and Capitalism’s Ecologies

  • 1 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 4.
  • 2 In “Introduction,” Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (eds.), World Literature (...)
  • 3 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, Volume 1, 2000, p. 55.
  • 4 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise, Cambridge, Harvard Unive (...)

1During the last two decades, numerous literary scholars have been engaged in a sustained, critical conversation about the practices and futures of comparative literary study. Increasingly, this debate has revolved around the contested question of ‘world literature’. They ask: Is world literature the name for those works that ‘circulate beyond their culture of origin’,1 perhaps ‘that part of the world’s literature that is both “the best” of what literature has to offer and possesses universal appeal’?2 Or is world literature not an object to be canonized within an indicative corpus, but rather a system that is ‘one, and unequal’, even a problem that necessitates an entirely ‘new critical method’,3 one that would illuminate concomitantly the textual specificities of given works and the asymmetrical networks of international literary space that constitute forms of ‘literary domination’?4

  • 5 Trotsky quoted in Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a Ne (...)
  • 6 Ibid., p. 8. Emphasis in original.
  • 7 Ibid., p. 20.
  • 8 There is some ambiguity in WReC’s account about what precisely qualifies or is interpreted as ‘worl (...)

2It is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) who have responded most comprehensively to this call for a new critical method of comparative literary analysis. In short, their project elucidates a concept of ‘world-literature’ as those texts which aesthetically mediate the structural divisions and discontinuities of capitalist social relations. By mobilizing Trotsky’s theory of ‘combined and uneven development’, the notion that the expansion and extension of capitalism produces a heterogeneous, even contradictory ‘amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’,5 and by complementing this with Immanuel Wallerstein’s investigations into capitalism as a world-system, WReC develop a theory of world-literature as ‘the literature of the world-system’.6 Deepening Franco Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s previous interventions, WReC argue that all modern literature is, necessarily speaking, literature of the capitalist world-system. But within this, there are some texts that ‘plot with particular clarity and resonance the landscape of the world-system’.7 With the hyphenated compound noun, world-literature, WReC call attention to those works in which capital is not only unconsciously re-presented but also deliberately encoded within textual form.8

  • 9 Deckard, “Mapping the World-Ecology,” p. 2.
  • 10 WReC, p. 9.
  • 11 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002.
  • 12 This paradoxical phrase derives from Ernst Bloch [Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen], quoted in (...)

3The upshot of WReC’s analysis is the development of we might call a materialist comparativism, a practice of literary study which compares how particular words, passages, texts, writers, styles, genres, movements and traditions are ‘dialectically related to economic and political relations without exactly mirroring them’.9 Adapting the core-periphery model of world-systems theory, which explicates unevenness as being structurally enforced on the periphery by the core (think of the historical underdevelopment of the Global South, for example), WReC’s readings stress how literary forms travel in tandem with capitalist expansion, impacting upon the aesthetics of peripheral areas. The methodological implications are noteworthy. Under WReC’s framework, close reading and its distant counterpart are no longer quite so dichotomous; literature is not simply a reflection of the world, but a ‘registration of the modern world-system’,10 a mediation which sets down in writing and hence makes a record of, makes its own sense of, capitalist modernity; and local particularity is not diametrically opposed to a supposedly totalizing ‘singular modernity’,11 but is rather an expression of capitalism’s immanent heterogeneity as its monopolising tendencies assimilate, allow for, or struggle against persistent alternative lifeways. To mitigate against the risk of vulgar determinism, as well as plain tautology, WReC stress that yes, literary works are produced from within the unevenness of economic and political relations, and hence are materially and stylistically shaped by these relations. But literary works are also semi-autonomous; writers often strain for aesthetic innovations that would extricate them from being merely determined by their own conjuncture. Literature, then, like capitalist modernity itself, is said to be composed out of the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’,12 articulating the coexistence of juxtapositional, historically-distinct forms that persist, travel, transform and combine.

  • 13 Deckard, “Mapping the World-Ecology,” p. 2.

4Recently, critics have re-articulated this materialist comparativism through an attendant inquiry into ecology. Think of it this way: If world-literature compares the unevenness of the capitalist world-system as it is registered across literary works, then world-ecological literature is interested in how texts reveal the unevenness of the world-system to be dependent on nature as both resource and sink, even structurally prone to cyclical crises as it exhausts the very nature it relies on as a supposedly self-replenishing reserve. The term ‘world-ecological literature’13 derives from environmental historian Jason W. Moore, whose theory of world-ecology is also indebted to world-systems theory. The salience of world-ecology as an analytical framework, Moore writes, is that it fastens

  • 14 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, London, Verso, 2015, p. 15.

the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity. Far from asserting the unfettered primacy of capitalism’s capacity to remake planetary natures, capitalism as world-ecology opens up a way of understanding capitalism as already co-produced by manifold species, extending even to our planet’s geo-biological shifts, relations, and cycles.14

  • 15 Ibid., 2.

5The takeaway of Moore’s analysis is that capitalism, far from being external to nature, is in fact materially constituted by it. Capital accumulation is therefore deeply imbricated in the very natures it produces and transforms. Capital therefore acts through nature, not simply on nature; it is one particular ‘way of organising nature’,15 a process and mode of production that establishes and sustains particular socio-ecological regimes while destroying others. What Moore is striving for, then, is a more dialectical understanding of capital and nature, one that does not simply reproach capital for destroying nature, but that understands more fully the contradictory reality that how capital’s destruction of some natures is in fact made possible by its reliance on others.

  • 16 Michael Niblett, “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature,” Green Letters, Volume 16, Number (...)
  • 17 Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950, Lo (...)
  • 18 Sharae Deckard, “Cacao and cascadura: Energetic consumption andproduction in world-ecological liter (...)
  • 19 Sharae Deckard, “Water shocks: Neoliberal hydrofiction and the crisis of ‘cheap water’,” Atlantic S (...)
  • 20 Graeme Macdonald, “‘Monstrous transformer’: Petrofiction and world literature,” Journal of Postcolo (...)
  • 21 Caitlin Vandertop, “Opium Cities, Carbon Routes: World-ecological prehistory in Amitav Ghosh’s Hong (...)

6World-literary critics, by translating these theorizations of ‘world-ecology’ into a language of their own, have wanted to investigate literature’s registration of capitalism as a world-system that shapes and is shaped by periodic transformations of nature. In the words of Mike Niblett, another member of WReC, the intention is to analyse how different ‘ecological ruptures […] imprint themselves on the aesthetics of texts’.16 Thus far, contributions to the study of world-ecological literary analysis have concentrated on the ‘aesthetics of commodity frontiers’,17 those intense zones of extraction and/or production that reorganise human and bio-physical natures for the increase of profit rates, but whose profit depends on the very exploitation, and potential exhaustion, of human labour and nonhuman natures: the plantation, the oil well, the mine, the old-growth forest. Critics have written about literary mediations of cacao extraction across the American hemisphere,18 water regimes and hydropolitics in China and Latin America,19 oil-driven imperialism and petrofiction in Scotland and Saudi Arabia,20 and coal and opium in the British Empire.21 In these essays, literary significations are argued to be profoundly occasioned by the socio-ecological transformations of capitalist development. ‘World-ecological literature’ thus becomes the literary-formal expression of differentiated social experiences within the changing regimes of the world-ecology. It becomes its mode of criticism that enables a way of seeing how literary works map and interrogate the impacts of world-ecological regimes on human and extra-human natures.

World-Ecological Literature and the Meatification of Modernity

  • 22 To my knowledge, Michael Paye’s publications on literary and filmic depictions of North Atlantic fi (...)
  • 23 See Juno Salazar Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, D (...)

7Yet when reading these publications, I am struck by the fact that so little has been written about nonhuman animals, about farming and the global food system, and about the attendant regimes of cheap food which continue to underpin the capitalist world-ecology, the consumption of which sustains the wage-labour of workers as calorific fuel.22 Capitalism’s re-organization of animal life has been immense, and its impacts on human-animal relations continue to be immensely complex. The historical shift towards intensive industrialized agricultural systems is surely one of the most wide-reaching transformations of production in modernity. Indeed, capitalism’s profitability depends on its appropriation of a number of animal species as free gifts of nature, to adopt Moore’s formulation. It squeezes as much value as possible from the bodies of animals that are valued as guaranteeing a return on investment. Even within the domains of supposed animal care, such as biodiversity conservation, the protection of the earth’s critically endangered species often rests on these animals acquiring the status of propertied objects. Indeed, some species become valuable precisely because they are scarce. For the eco-tourism industry and its attendant volunteer sector to grow, it needs to keep endangered species on the verge of extinction.23

  • 24 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, London, Verso, 2014, p. 71.
  • 25 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London, Penguin, 1990, p. 283.
  • 26 Ibid., p. 343.

8And yet, within the emerging work on world-ecological literature, animals are nowhere. Why is this? Perhaps it has something to do with Marxism’s own longstanding indifference to animal life. A great deal of Marxist thought is premised on the idea that human society, when rationally organized and liberated under socialism, will continue to dominate nature, albeit more rationally and justly as ‘the highest form of real mediation between man and nature’.24 In both his early and mature writings, Marx called for the humanisation of nature, by which he meant that communism will still ‘appropriate the materials of nature’, but will do so ‘in a form adapted to his own needs’ rather than the needs of capital.25 It is this humanistic interpretation of Marx’s work, I think, that remains the dominant if largely unacknowledged foundation of world-ecological criticism, a discourse which declares that it is dismantling the longstanding post-Cartesian binary between Society and Nature, but does so while being firmly committed to human liberation alone. This situation is certainly not helped by the fact that much of pro-animal thought is founded on a liberal and idealist model that appears incompatible with historical materialism. To date, many of the most popular and pathbreaking works of animal liberation – including works by Peter Singer and Tom Reagan – have been premised on welfarism, utilitarian ethics and right-based philosophies of individual personhood that Marx himself once criticized as a form of bourgeois sentimental moralism.26

  • 27 Tony Weis, ‘Towards 120 Billion’, Radical Philosophy, Volume 199, 2016, p. 8.
  • 28 Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals, London, Pluto Press, 1989, p. 22.

9Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the animal question – the question of human-animal relations, of how to live alongside other animals on this planet – need not be expressed through moralism and idealism. In fact, I want to say that our response to this question is actually more complete if it is contingent on capital, that is if it grapples with capitalism’s specific transformation of socio-ecological life. Factory farming and the like are, it must be said, inventions of capitalism, historically-specific forms of industrialized commodity production that shape and are shaped by world-ecological regimes, that cement the prevailing instrumentalization and commodification of animals as free gifts. Capitalism has created a global meat regime. Tony Weiss has theorized this expansion of meat-production in capitalist modernity as a process of ‘meatification’.27 For him, meatification denotes a globally unequal dietary transformation, beginning in the nineteenth-century, in which meat, previously at the peripheries of global diets, has been dramatically shifted towards the centre of consumption habits: most so in the global north, and increasingly so elsewhere. The industrial-capitalist food regime accelerated in the mid-twentieth century through the roll-out of major structural, geographical and technological changes, including the development of monocropping methods, in which food is produced not for people but for livestock, and through the expansion of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) as the most efficient system for mass-rearing and slaughtering. Through the invention of the CAFO, farms became factories proper, and the United States began its domination of meat production. Thereafter we see the emergence of the ‘animal-industrial complex’,28 the increasing contractualisation and hence precarisation of farm work, and then vertical integration, in which the same large company directly engineers every stage of the animal’s life-and-death cycle, from its embryonic growth to its rearing, from its slaughter to its post-kill processing.

  • 29 The conglomerate names include JBS, Brasil Food, Tyson Foods, and WH Group, headquartered in South (...)
  • 30 Katy Keiffer, What’s the Matter with Meat?, London, Reaktion, 2017, p. 8.
  • 31 Tony Weis, The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock, Zed Books, London, (...)
  • 32 Quoted in Keiffer, p. 8.
  • 33 Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, London, Verso, 2018, p. (...)

10Today the situation looks like this: the meat and dairy industry is dominated by just a handful of exploitative, democratically unaccountable, and commercially expanding multinational mega-agribusinesses.29 The consolidation of the mega-agribusiness model has led to a steep decline in wages in the sector, accompanied by the erosion of basic labour laws. The disassembly lines of animal factories are notoriously dangerous places to work, and for the mostly migrant and poor, casualised labourers, work-place injuries can be a daily occurrence. The production of animal lives and deaths takes up over a quarter of the earth’s land surface, more than is occupied by the world’s forests. And meat consumption has never been higher than it is right now. In the decades that followed the Second World War, mega-agribusinesses began to mass produce meat products like never before. The so-called ‘Livestock Revolution’ of the last half century has matched growing global demand for meat proteins by creating increasingly extreme methods for raising and slaughtering chickens, pigs and cows in the quickest time possible. Between 1970 and 2008, beef production doubled, poultry increased sixfold and pork tripled.30 From 1961 to 2010, the global population of animals for slaughter leapt from roughly 8 to 64 billion.31 Multinational organisations are rapidly expanding the meat trade into developing markets in Asia and Africa. The United Nations predicts that world consumption will be ‘nearly 450 million tonnes of meat per year by 2050, roughly double the amount for the year 2000’.32 As Jason W. Moore himself puts it, we live on an ‘increasingly carnivorous planet’.33

  • 34 Valérie Masson-Delmotte, et al., Global Warming of 1.5 ºC: An IPCC Special Report, Geneva: IPCC, 20 (...)

11The rise of industrialized animal production has staggering socio-ecological costs. The animal agricultural industry is an ecological regime unto itself, the continual operation of which has numerous down-the-line detriments. The supply chains – from feed production to enteric fermentation, from livestock transport to slaughtering, processing, and shipping – produce climate-warming air pollution and greenhouse gases, degrading local soils and water. In 2018, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change concluded that livestock supply chains account for around fifteen percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.34

  • 35 Troy Vettese and Alex Blanchette, “Covid-19 shows factory food production is dangerous for animals (...)
  • 36 Kenneth Fish, Living Factories: Biotechnology and the Unique Nature of Capitalism, Montreal, McGill (...)
  • 37 Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, New York: The New Press, 2005.
  • 38 Monique Grooten and Rosamunde E. A. Almond, Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher, Gland: WWF, (...)

12But we ought to not lose sight of the specific impacts on the animals themselves. ‘For capital’, Troy Vettese and Alex Blanchette write, ‘there is no difference between machine, animal and human – all must be simplified and remade to increase productivity’.35 Indeed, meatification has led to an industry-wide attempt to standardise animal life, with diverse species being forcefully bred into bigger and faster-growing life forms. Their genes and hormones are manipulated so that they are more heat-tolerant than their ancestors and produce more offspring. Under this industrialized model, then, the bodies of farmed animals have increasingly become ‘living factories’, to adopt Kenneth Fish’s formulation, ‘harnessed as a force of industrial production’.36 To stretch one of Marx’s own concepts, we might we say that factory farming profoundly curtails and reshapes each animal’s species-being, estranging animals from the particular ways they wish to live out their lives. The trade-off in this genetic selection is that many factory-farmed animals have skeletal malformations and compromised immune systems; they nurse broken bones, clipped beaks and severed tails. Annually, millions of farm animals die not because of slaughter but because of injury, stress, heat, cold or poor ventilation. This is because factory farms, confinement barns, and concentrated feedlots are small, enclosed, dirty spaces. So farmed animals are fed antibiotics to fight off infection. But this increases the risk of diseases, posing major public health risks to human society. Indeed, in their drives for value extraction and geographical expansion, intensive animal industries also increase the potential for the emergence of zoonotic diseases. As Mike Davis reveals in The Monster at Our Door, the industry’s extension into old-growth forests for ranching and plantation leads to the destruction of innumerable wild species’ habitats, forcing creatures like bats into closer and more sustained contact with farmed animals and other humans, thus dramatically increasing the likelihood of a pathogen spillover event.37 There has been seen a sixty-percent decline in the population size of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians since the Livestock Revolution.38 At stake in the meatification of modernity is the collapse of entire ecosystems, an entire mass extinction event whose scale rivals that of a meteorite slamming into the earth’s surface.

13Meatification therefore names a historically unique socio-ecological revolution, one in which all that was solid – small-scale agricultural practices – melted into air as they faced defeat by a new industrialized organisation of animal production, heavily subsidized by and hence embedded within nation states. In sum, factory farming reduces costs, accelerates turnover time, increases profits, defangs unionized workforces and relies heavily on cheap migrant and precarious labour. For animals, both the animals intensively farmed and the wild animals who suffer the indirect effects of industrial agriculture’s expansion, the system is one of constant annihilation.

Reading Meat Regimes

14If the factory farm is of profound significance to capitalism as a world-ecology, then what bearing might this have on how we practice world-ecological literary criticism? What might it look like to develop a method of materialist interpretation that reads literature for the specific commodity fetishisms, ecological upheavals and social impacts of meat regimes? These are the questions that I now wish to address in the second half of this essay. I will do so by focusing on just one text, a historical novel about family life and industrial agricultural practices in France: Règne animal, the fourth novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, first published by Gallimard in 2016 and winner of the UK’s Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2020. In its original French, the title Règne animal recalls Georges Cuvier’s nineteenth-century work of the same name, a crucial natural-history forerunner to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Under Frank Wynne’s earthy and tactile translation, the English-language version of the novel bears the modified title Animalia, a Latinate category which carries over both the original’s denotation of biological taxa and comparative anatomy and its symbolic evocation of forms of sovereignty, of rule, and of a putatively ‘natural’ order of lifeforms.

15I wish to argue that it is through this imbrication of biological life and sovereign hierarchy, implied by the novel’s title and articulated throughout the work itself, that Del Amo dramatizes the socio-ecological impacts of meatification. I will explore in particular how Del Amo’s plotted exploration of developing meat regimes is made possible by his text’s adoption of an older novelistic mode, for this is a historical novel that it borrows its genre from its depicted period: the naturalism of the nineteenth century. Why is it, then, that Animalia turns to literary naturalism in order to represent the meatification of modernity as it is played out in this corner of France? What does naturalism expose, what does it achieve, and what are its limits?

16Animalia is set in Puy-Larroque, in the deep south of France, in what critics informed by world-systems theory might call the intra-core periphery: the underdeveloped margins of a central capitalist economy whose resources are continually extracted in order to sustain the more-developed social conditions in the core. It is a novel preoccupied with mapping the time-space sensorium of French animal agricultural practices as they develop across modernity and impact upon five generations of farmworkers. To trace this cross-generational transformation, Del Amo separates his text into two distinct time periods, which is to say two socio-ecological regimes of agricultural production.

  • 39 Jean-Baptise Del Amo, Animalia, trans. Frank Wynne, London, Fitzcarraldo, 2019, p. 18.
  • 40 Ibid., p. 19.
  • 41 Ibid., p. 11.

17Beginning in the 1890s, then, Animalia’s first half opening chapters depict a lowly rural existence of fin-de-siecle peasant life, a world of small-scale family farming, dung heaps, tiny rations of food, and Sunday mass in the nearby village. The father, a ‘wretched peasant farmer’ whose own father had dropped dead beside an ox, works himself to exhaustion in the days, and in the nights sleeps amongst ‘the meagre livestock dozing behind the doors of the henhouse or the byres, the grunting of the pig in the sty and the clucking of the hens’.39 The mother, worrying about recurring agricultural crises and falling wheat prices, thinks that ‘soon they will be the only people left on this hostile, implacable land, tilling the intractable earth that one day will be the death of them’.40 Through their daughter, Éléonore, who will survive into the novel’s second half, Del Amo offers a unique child’s-eye-view of ‘this filthy earth’.41 Where the first of the novel’s opening chapters ends with Éléonore being sexually harassed, the second dramatizes the return of her cousin, Marcel, disfigured after serving during the First World War. Written in a mode of granular realism which, by following the slow, repetitive and diurnal temporality of the farm, turns the drudgery of everyday labours into a plot-without-drama, Animalia’s first half reads like a literary mediation of slow cinema; transforming description into action, its mud-clogged pages recall Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó.

  • 42 Ibid., p. 34.
  • 43 Ibid., p. 209.

18Although Del Amo’s highly descriptive style continues throughout the novel’s second half, his narration of agricultural misery is repeated with a difference as he seeks to bear witness to a revolution in farming and labour practices. In short, the novel’s nineteenth-century family of paysan characters metamorphose – are proletarianised – into a new generation of post-Liberation agriculteurs. No longer does the family’s livelihood rest on the life and death of one sow who must be ‘carefully force-fed’42 in preparation for an annual village auction. Now in the agro-industrial 1980s, as huge hog-farming sheds dominate the farm’s landscape, the sow of the rural nineteenth century is replaced by what Del Amo calls ‘the herd’43 – the crowd, the unit, the multitude, manipulated by new technologies and enclosed within the concentrated pens of an industrial barn warehouse:

  • 44 Ibid., p. 215.

the sows are crowded next to each other in stalls, their hips, flanks and hocks smeared with their own faeces. […] Under the infrared lamps, piglets squeal and suckle the teats of nursing sows held in place by straps and metal bars. The sows are stupefied by exhaustion; their eyes roll beneath thick-lashed lids. Gestating sows lie sleeping on their taut, swollen bellies, twitching to the kicks of litters yet unborn. Their dreams are haunted by the shadows of men.44

19Del Amo’s third-person narrative voice, often focalized through the thoughts and actions of the farm’s labourers, perceives of factory farming as an enterprise which traumatizes pigs, which possesses their waking lives and haunts their dreams.

  • 45 I take the concept of ‘metabolic rift’ from John Bellamy Foster, who explicates Marx’s argument in (...)
  • 46 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 310.

20What is the effect of Animalia’s diptych-like structure? It encodes a metabolic rift between then and now.45 By structurally dividing the novel in half, Del Amo builds and juxtaposes two contrasting epochs of cross-species relations: the first of rural life, slow farming and localised distribution, the latter of industrialised, technologised and state-managed agricultural production. These pigs were once raised, Del Amo implies, but now they are processed. Farming was once responsive to seasonal rhythms, but has now transcended the natural affordances and limitations of the seasons. Worse than this, Animalia intimates, is the fact that agro-industrial farming actually constitutes a near-total mastery over nature. One character mutters that the barn is an entire ‘fucking biosphere, a self-contained ecosystem, the slightest thing could screw it up’.46 It is a discrete ecology all of its own, no longer operating in tandem with the clock of nature that we encountered in the novel’s opening sections. However, this structural divide between the novel’s then and its now is not articulated by Del Amo in the service of a nostalgia for a bygone era of small-scale farming that has been ruthlessly eliminated by capitalist development. On the contrary, the novel suggests that for all of the dramatic differences between pre- and post-war farming in France, both are regimes of cross-species exploitation, with the latter’s transformation of nature-society relations directly deriving from the former. The novel therefore bears witness to two distinct but subsequent phases of capitalist accumulation and production, the latter winning out over the former.

  • 47 Paul Bairoch, “Dix-huit décennies de développement agricole français dans une perspective internati (...)
  • 48 Venus Bivar, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France, Chapel Hil (...)
  • 49 Ibid., p. 181.
  • 50 Venus Bivar and Tamara L. Whited, “Industrial French food and its critics,” Modern & Contemporary F (...)
  • 51 Mark C. Cleary, Peasants, Politicians and Producers: The Organisation of Agriculture in France sinc (...)
  • 52 Annie Moulin, Peasantry and Society in France since 1789, trans. M. C. and M. F. Cleary, Cambridge: (...)

21To draw out Animalia’s specific registration of meatification, let us consider the historical development of French farming practices. In the late nineteenth century, at precisely the moment when Animalia begins, French agricultural production lagged significantly behind its European counterparts.47 Across the Atlantic Ocean, American industry was already populating its Chicago-based disassembly lines with labourers and animal body-parts, as Upton Sinclair would vividly portray in The Jungle, his 1906 novel on meatpacking and migrant labour. But in France, the predominantly rural agricultural model would continue for another five decades, right up to the end of the Second World War. Until then, draught animals performed the heavy lifting, manure remained the only fertilizer, and small family holdings were more of a feature of village life than a nationally-organized and internationally-competitive site of production. ‘At the close of the Second World War’, environmental historian Venus Bivar writes, ‘the agricultural sector was for the most part a backward holdover of the nineteenth century’. By the mid-1970s though, in the space of just two decades, France became ‘the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods – second only to the United States.’48 Harnessing agro-industrial production as a key pathway towards modernization, post-Liberation governments conducted a programme of nationwide agricultural restructuring, a ‘brutal state-mandated industrialization’49 according to Bivar, that boosted France’s prominence within the new European Economic Community as the erstwhile ‘breadbasket of Europe’.50 Between 1955 and 1975, as food retail giants like Franprix and Leclerc widened their distribution, tens of thousands of family farms began to close. Farms thus became ‘larger in size and smaller in number’.51 In 1960 the average French farmer fed roughly seven people. By the turn of the millennium, they were feeding forty.52

  • 53 Bivar and Whited, p. 132.
  • 54 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 311, 261.
  • 55 Ibid., p. 317.

22Today, Bivar writes, France is an agribusiness powerhouse with a flourishing state-managed meat and dairy sector. Yet the dominant image of its agricultural landscape still tends to be this: a country of bucolic landscapes, human hands and pastured livestock, not agribusinesses, machines and confined animals. There is, then, ‘a serious contradiction at work when France can be both one of the most powerful producers of globally traded agricultural commodities and the embodiment of gastronomy as cultural identity’.53Animalia can certainly be read as a literary response to this contradiction, a novel which tasks itself with depicting the consolidation of megafarms in the 1980s. In these decades, Animalia suggests, the animal’s body became a frontier to be experimented on; productivity and efficiencies had to be discovered, honed and manipulated. In the novel’s hog-factory, the ten-year plan is to grow from producing ‘nine piglets per sow and per litter, and at least two pint five litters a year’, to ‘fifteen piglets a litter’, that would ‘revitalise the sales of breeding stock to Germany, Spain and Italy’.54 Each sow is judiciously monitored and controlled in order to maximise the gestation of new piglets. If a sow miscarries, they say, it is merely ‘a symptom of dysfunction, a cog in the system gone awry, there’s always a reason, you’ve just got to know where to look.’55 Organic problems are there to be rationalized, managed and ultimately overcome as minor obstacles in the road to continual profitability.

  • 56 Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm, Durham, D (...)

23It is important to keep in mind that Animalia is a recent work. Del Amo, writing from within our contemporary conjuncture, turns to the historical novel in order to recover and represent earlier forms of exploitation which have laid the foundations for today’s situation. In the global north especially, we live in a culture of increased public knowledge about, hesitancy towards, and resistance to factory farms, even if this has not yet developed into organized mass opposition beyond consumer practices. We live, too, during a period in which the monopolizing ambitions of global agribusinesses are coming under considerable strain as they reach a level of peak appropriation. As Alex Blanchette has shown through his ethnographic work at hog farms in the United States, although the industry endeavours to ‘derive profit from every moment of the pig’s life-and-death cycle’, there are in fact few obvious opportunities left for new money to be extracted from a farmed species whose entire existence has been carefully constructed to maximise corporeal profitability.56 Animalia’s action takes place in the decades before this near-exhaustion of animal capital, a time when Del Amo’s labourer-characters can afford to be optimistic about profiting off their investments in the free gift of pig flesh.

  • 57 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 310.
  • 58 Ibid., p. 396.

24Yet the novel ultimately signals that the factory farm model is doomed. Del Amo dramatizes an entropic narrative arc that is foreshadowed to the reader in the work’s table of contents: ‘The Herd’, we read, will be followed by ‘The Collapse’. Del Amo describes the hog-farming shed as a ‘breeding ground for infections’, ‘crawling with worms’, and ‘any slippage in hygiene standards has an immediate impact on productivity’. Although it can never be fully sterile, there is still an ‘invisible threshold’ of cleanliness that must not be crossed.57 Characters continually try to ‘push back the tide of the excrement produced by the pigs’, yet ‘the slurry pit relentlessly continues to fill’, ‘quickly forming stinking, infectious little mounds where flies come to lay their eggs’. Millions of larvae hatch, making their way across the muddy walkways ‘as slowly and inexorably as a lava flow’.58 The novel ends soon after: as inspectors order the brucellosis-infected herd to be destroyed, the protagonist Joël pours petrol throughout the sheds.

  • 59 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 37.
  • 60 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 292.
  • 61 Ibid., p. 261.

25The operative word here is ‘inexorably’. Del Amo sees intensive animal agricultural practices not only as a site of production that destroys workers and animals, the farmers and the farmed, but as a machinic system that, long set in motion, relentlessly continues on. Echoing Upton Sinclair before him, who describes the disassembly line as a ‘slaughtering machine’,59 Del Amo writes of the hog-shed as being ‘at the heart of some much greater disturbance’, ‘like some machine that is unpredictable, out of kilter, by its nature uncontrollable’. Joël has an acute feeling that the piggery is in fact ‘the cradle of their barbarism and that of the whole world’.60 Del Amo’s point? That while the factory farm stands as an apex of capitalism’s instrumentalization of nature, it is also an outcome of a longer-term conflict between society and nature, a ‘greater disturbance’ in human-animal relations that has intensified across the centuries and whose representation thus necessitates multi-generational narration: like ‘a river [that] reshapes a landscape with a movement that is barely noticeable when measured against the span of a human life’.61 In other words, Animalia is instructive for the method and practice of materialist comparativism because it emphasizes that the long-term socio-ecological upheavals of capitalism are ontological-metaphysical: they rest ideologically on a complex transformation of human-animal relations, a violent division and exploitation of species difference.

Naturalism: A Literature Fit for Swine

  • 62 David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990 (...)
  • 63 Quoted in Baguley, p.32.

26Del Amo’s focus on the inexorable and the inevitable, on entropic laws and assured destruction, is symptomatic of the novel’s wider engagement with literary naturalism. Animalia does not simply adopt naturalism but embraces it, even re-working naturalism’s generic and formal valences in the face of industrial animal agriculture. Naturalism, as a literary movement and portrayal of ‘life in the raw’,62 was an aesthetic response to a particular development in socio-biological knowledge, a mutation of realism in response to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Naturalism has long been disparaged as the dirtiest, indeed most swine-like of novelistic forms. Émile Zola, naturalism’s principal theorist and practitioner, was often caricatured scatologically as a pig in a trough, painting an image of France with his excrement. In the 1880s, after a boom of French naturalist fictions made their way onto English readers’ bookshelves, the House of Commons hosted a debate on so-called pernicious literature in which naturalism was accused of only being ‘fit for swine’, a form that turned the reader’s ‘mind into something akin to a sty’.63 In Animalia, then, Del Amo literalizes naturalism as a genre of the trough. This is a novel that dedicates itself to the very subject matter through which the genre was once depreciated.

  • 64 Ibid., p. 48.

27Naturalism, David Baguley theorizes, is a method, a mode and subset of literary realism.64 Although it has been heterogeneous in historical application, he says, naturalism has several readily identifiable characteristics – many of which Del Amo steadfastly upholds. One such characteristic is a thematics of destitution. The novel plots out scenes of miscarriage, verbal and physical abuse, alcoholism and impoverishment that push the characters towards psychological breakdown. Another is heredity. Through the novel’s multigenerational narrative and structure, Del Amo passes down destitution from one generation to the next, thereby reenforcing the naturalist penchant for predetermination and socio-biological fate. Gripped by ‘inexorable’ laws, Animalia’s characters of the 1980s come to resemble their grandparents, inheriting and acting out the self-destructive behaviours of their ancestors. Heredity is an invisible force guiding all of Del Amo’s characters’ fates, undergirding and hence governing human desire and agency. Animalia thus conforms to the form’s entropic vision.

  • 65 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1 (...)
  • 66 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 21.
  • 67 Ibid., p. 397.

28Importantly, the narrative’s multigenerational entropy is ecologically encoded, that is, it is enacted in relation to and propelled by the environment. Naturalism, Raymond Williams reminds us, is a form in which ‘character and action were seen as affected or determined by environment’.65 Naturalism has an underlying ecological tendency which exposes the human to the natural world, revelling in a diminution of human character as they enter into zones of ontological indistinction with nonhuman life. In Animalia, the historical development of modernity – the agricultural nineteenth century, the industrial twentieth – is shown to further imbricate human and animal life. In the novel’s opening section, the mother figure is continually referred to as the genetrix, a naturalizing term for female progenitor that metaphorically associates the mother with the farm’s sow. Indeed, in the novel’s opening passages Del Amo narrates her miscarriage in a way that mimics the sow’s own miscarriage. Stuck in the barn with the animals, she ‘gives birth, like a bitch, like a sow, panting, red-faced, her forehead bathed in sweat’.66 In the final passages in the 1980s, as the contagion ravages the hog-sheds, Joël also finds himself becoming ‘like’ a pig: ‘He eats the grain intended for the pigs. He pisses and shits like them in the middle of the walkways.’67 Animalia’s peasant farmers and their pigs are thus both trapped in a cycle of suffering. Across the novel, both human and nonhuman species become ‘haggard, spent creature[s]’ (2019: 15). Del Amo’s miserable determinism thus extends beyond the human, invoking a multispecies heredity in which humans and pigs are concomitantly depersonalised: ‘In the same time, the same space, men and beasts are born, struggle, and pass away’ (71); ‘they come into the world like livestock, scrabble in the dust in search of meagre sustenance, and die in miserable solitude’ (121).

29Animalia thus deploys literary naturalism in order to plot out a critique of meatification’s intensifying destruction of proletarian and animal life. Indeed, Del Amo pushes this even further by adopting the genre’s distinct coupling of literary writing with scientific method, which instantiates the form’s immanent tension between observation and judgement. Like Zola, the content of Del Amo’s novel is based on first-person on-site research. Drawing from his experiences of touring confinement barns, Del Amo writes with a fine-grained prose that strives to document those practices which constitute the rearing and slaughter of pigs:

  • 68 Ibid. p. 273.

She saw the men lead the cull sows into the truck, some suffering rectal prolapse, dragging a sac of entrails forced out through the anus from years of farrowing, others unable to walk, crippled by arthritis, by forced immobility, by their own weight which their legs can no longer support. They beat them with a stick, kick them to make them move, and the animals squeal in pain and fear, drag themselves across on the concrete, their flesh red raw, their eyes rolled back in their heads.68

  • 69 Ibid., p. 250.

30There are tens of passages like this which, by combining the work of narrative with clinical and autonomous mimetic description, reveal how the rationally-organised slaughter of animals is chaotic and violent. Naturalism has an encyclopaedic tendency, a drive to name and classify. Here, we have whole paragraphs dedicated to listing the various measures of decontamination and optimization: disinfectants, worming pellets, vaccines for swine flu and parvovirus, injections for iron, antibiotics, vitamins and minerals, growth hormones, food supplements. At one point, after a long description of the slurry pit which aestheticizes excrement, Del Amo writes that all of this is nothing exceptional, just an ‘ordinary day’.69 Animalia thus conforms to the naturalist tendency to represent the unique as something generalisable: the novel’s narrated events, although specific to this work and this world, are typical of wider farming practices, which are themselves depicted as being typical of a ‘greater disturbance’ in human-animal relations.

  • 70 Émile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre,” in George J. Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Re (...)
  • 71 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 273, 288.

31Even so, this is also the moment in which Animalia breaks with the ideals of naturalist empiricism. The naturalist novel is a genre in which the author’s polemical strains – the motivations for writing the book in the first place – are, according to Zola, supposed to give way to ‘moral impersonality’.70 For him, the naturalist novelist is supposed to act like a scientist who need not intervene because their experiments produce results that communicate a sufficient truth. Yet Del Amo occasionally conveys authorial judgement through focalization. Sometimes he depicts his characters as carrying out tasks, lost in a moment of reflection, when they are suddenly gripped by a polemical thought, undoubtedly Del Amo’s own. Catherine recoils at the ‘never-ending agony’, ‘the squealing pigs and the cruelty of men’; Jöel thinks that the injections and supplements given to pigs ‘compensate for deficiencies deliberately created by man’; these are animals ‘with hearts and lungs that beat and oxygenate the blood only to constantly produce more lean meat for consumption’.71 At its heart, the naturalist novel is a reformist genre, usually allied with a humanitarian ethos. In these moments, Animalia reveals itself to be a novel that reconfigures this humanism into a posthumanism: its ethical purview focuses jointly on the fates of human and nonhuman lives.

Conclusion: Naturalism, Inevitability, Anthropomorphism

32And yet, despite my claims that Animalia articulates a form of posthumanist naturalism that critically registers the meatification of France, there is a tension that needs further, and final, exploration. It concerns the relationship between naturalism and inevitability. I have said above that the novel’s title, Animalia, imbricates biological life and sovereign hierarchy. Indeed this is one of the hallmarks of literary naturalism itself, which emerged out of the new biological epistemes of the nineteenth century and depicted characters whose social lives were not just underpinned but contaminated by biology: the tyranny of immediate ancestry on the one side, the deeper lineage of evolutionary struggle on the other. Hierarchies, the naturalist novel implies, are socio-biologically encoded, impossible to fully break. Just as individual characters are bound by this repetition and disintegration, so too is plot, as naturalist storytelling weds itself to the supposedly hidden conditions that structure all social life. The effect of this is simultaneously liberatory and imprisoning. Liberatory, because it promises to abolish the myth of the sovereign subject, upturning protagonicity and rupturing the abiding fictions of human exceptionalism. Yet imprisoning because while the genre intends to expose inequalities, its emplotment formally locks in place the very social conditions it wishes to reform. So too does this seem to be the case for Animalia, a novel whose multi-generational narrative mode bears witness to the centuries-long destruction of human and nonhuman life, but in doing so ultimately suggests that there is no escape, only inexorable laws of entropy. Thus for all the ways Animalia points towards a world-ecological literary criticism that incorporates animals, the critique from world-ecology would be that the novel is ultimately founded on a naturalism that at best undercuts, and at worst defeats, its own critical articulation of factory farming. Put differently, Del Amo offers no respite and no futurity for his human characters.

  • 72 Ibid., p. 408–09.
  • 73 Ibid., p. 410.

33But if we switch our attention away from Animalia’s human characters, we do in fact find a flicker of futurity at the last. In italicised font, Del Amo writes a third-person account of a boar – dubbed the Beast by the farmworkers – who successfully flees the barn, patiently manipulating the bolt and latch, ripping the chain-link fence, then trotting into the woods, feasting on acorns, berries and soft grass. The Beast’s dreams remain ‘overlaid by the voices of men, by screams and shouts, by blows to his snout, his flanks, his rump’,72 but as he returns to the now-ruined farmhouse, overgrown with brambles and creepers, he finds that the workers have all disappeared. The novel ends like this: ‘He smells the scent of men, remote, as though diluted by the years, and it is strangely reassuring. He clears away a corner and lies against a wall.’ Recalling Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the Angelus Novus, watching on over the storm of progress, the Beast ‘keeps one eye open, scanning the darkness’.73

34Animalia’s novelistic anthropomorphism thus unsettles naturalist form while also redirecting world-ecological literary criticism towards the literary articulation of animal life. Naturalism is a genre that wants, above all, to naturalise the human. But here, in the novel’s final sentences, Del Amo humanises the animal as it manoeuvres through and out of its prison. Thus for all the manifold ways in which Animalia endorses naturalism’s lowering of the human to the level of the animal, the novel ends by elevating the animal. This process of inversion undoubtedly keeps intact the foundational structure of the human-animal hierarchy. But its anthropomorphic form nevertheless challenges naturalism’s enduring concentration on the human. Through its close-yet-distant voice of the third-person, which concomitantly follows the boar’s movements and partially inhabits its consciousness, Animalia suggests that animal life – both human and nonhuman – wishes to be free of factory farming, wishes to escape the socio-ecological imprisonment of industrial animal agriculture. Perhaps the naturalist novel cannot conjure a better world. But what it can do is dramatize the destruction of our worse world, testifying to a shared desire – a drive, an instinct – for the end of capitalism’s exploitation of human and nonhuman life.

Acknowledgements

35My thanks to David Wylot for offering perceptive comments on an early draft, Carlos Navarro González for translating this article’s abstract into Spanish, and Francesca del Zoppo for inviting me to contribute to this collection of essays.

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Bibliographie

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BAIROCH, Paul, “Dix-huit décennies de développement agricole français dans une perspective internationale,” Économie Rurale, Volume 184–86, 1988, p. 13–23.

BELLAMY FOSTER, John, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

BIVAR, Venus, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

BIVAR, Venus, and Tamara L. Whited, “Industrial French food and its critics,” Modern & Contemporary France, Volume 28, Number 2, 2020, p. 129–139.

BLANCHETTE, Alex, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020.

CASANOVA, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004.

CLEARY, Mark C., Peasants, Politicians and Producers: The Organisation of Agriculture in France since 1918, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

DAMROSCH, David, What is World Literature?, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003.

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DECKARD, Sharae, “Water shocks: Neoliberal hydrofiction and the crisis of ‘cheap water’,” Atlantic Studies, Volume 16, Number 1, 2019, p. 108–125.

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Notes

1 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 4.

2 In “Introduction,” Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (eds.), World Literature: A Reader, London, Routledge 2013, p. xi.

3 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, Volume 1, 2000, p. 55.

4 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. xii.

5 Trotsky quoted in Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2015, p. 6.

6 Ibid., p. 8. Emphasis in original.

7 Ibid., p. 20.

8 There is some ambiguity in WReC’s account about what precisely qualifies or is interpreted as ‘world-literature’. In Combined and Uneven Development, they state that world-literature is not limited to ‘those works that self-consciously define themselves in opposition to capitalist modernity’, nor still ‘those that stage a coded or formally mediated resistance to capitalist modernity’ (p. 19). But across numerous other works, WReC’s members put it world-literature denotes literature ‘which is systemic in its perspective, in which the world-system is consciously or critically mapped as a time-space sensorium corresponding to subjective experience of the epochal and development cycles of capitalist modernity’ (Sharae Deckard, “Mapping the World Ecology: Conjectures on World-Ecological Literature,” 2015, https://www.academia.edu/2083255/Mapping_the_World_Ecology_Conjectures_on_World_Ecological_Literature, p. 1). See also an earlier iteration of this argument in which WReC’s contributors write that world-literature refers ‘to those works in which the world-system is not a distant horizon only unconsciously registered in immanent form, but rather consciously or critically mapped – that is, to literature that is in some way world-systemic in its perspective. Correspondingly, we might use the term “world-literary criticism” to denote a deliberately world-systemic inflected mode of critique.’ (James Graham, Michael Niblett and Sharae Deckard, “Postcolonial Studies and World Literature,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Volume 48, Number 5, 2012, p. 468).

9 Deckard, “Mapping the World-Ecology,” p. 2.

10 WReC, p. 9.

11 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002.

12 This paradoxical phrase derives from Ernst Bloch [Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen], quoted in WReC, p. 12.

13 Deckard, “Mapping the World-Ecology,” p. 2.

14 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, London, Verso, 2015, p. 15.

15 Ibid., 2.

16 Michael Niblett, “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature,” Green Letters, Volume 16, Number 1, 2012, p. 16.

17 Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950, London, Palgrave, 2020, p. 3.

18 Sharae Deckard, “Cacao and cascadura: Energetic consumption andproduction in world-ecological literature,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Volume 53, Number 3, 2017, p. 342–354.

19 Sharae Deckard, “Water shocks: Neoliberal hydrofiction and the crisis of ‘cheap water’,” Atlantic Studies, Volume 16, Number 1, 2019, p. 108–125.

20 Graeme Macdonald, “‘Monstrous transformer’: Petrofiction and world literature,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Volume 53, Number 3, 2017, p. 289–302.

21 Caitlin Vandertop, “Opium Cities, Carbon Routes: World-ecological prehistory in Amitav Ghosh’s Hong Kong,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Volume 55, Number 4, 2019, p. 527–540.

22 To my knowledge, Michael Paye’s publications on literary and filmic depictions of North Atlantic fisheries are the only contributions to world-ecological literary critique which explore animal industries. See for example Michael Paye, “From Fishery Limits to Limits to Capital: Gendered appropriation and spectres of North Atlantic fishery collapse in The Silver Darlings and Sylvanus Now”, Atlantic Studies, Volume 15, Number 4, 2018, p. 523–538.

23 See Juno Salazar Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019.

24 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, London, Verso, 2014, p. 71.

25 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London, Penguin, 1990, p. 283.

26 Ibid., p. 343.

27 Tony Weis, ‘Towards 120 Billion’, Radical Philosophy, Volume 199, 2016, p. 8.

28 Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals, London, Pluto Press, 1989, p. 22.

29 The conglomerate names include JBS, Brasil Food, Tyson Foods, and WH Group, headquartered in South America, the United States and China, but with an increasingly global reach.

30 Katy Keiffer, What’s the Matter with Meat?, London, Reaktion, 2017, p. 8.

31 Tony Weis, The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock, Zed Books, London, 2013, p. 2.

32 Quoted in Keiffer, p. 8.

33 Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, London, Verso, 2018, p. 153.

34 Valérie Masson-Delmotte, et al., Global Warming of 1.5 ºC: An IPCC Special Report, Geneva: IPCC, 2018, p. 327.

35 Troy Vettese and Alex Blanchette, “Covid-19 shows factory food production is dangerous for animals and humans alike,” Guardian, Tuesday 8 Sept, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/meat-production-animals-humans-covid-19-slaughterhouses-workers.

36 Kenneth Fish, Living Factories: Biotechnology and the Unique Nature of Capitalism, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012, p. 5.

37 Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, New York: The New Press, 2005.

38 Monique Grooten and Rosamunde E. A. Almond, Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher, Gland: WWF, 2018, p. 6.

39 Jean-Baptise Del Amo, Animalia, trans. Frank Wynne, London, Fitzcarraldo, 2019, p. 18.

40 Ibid., p. 19.

41 Ibid., p. 11.

42 Ibid., p. 34.

43 Ibid., p. 209.

44 Ibid., p. 215.

45 I take the concept of ‘metabolic rift’ from John Bellamy Foster, who explicates Marx’s argument in Capital that the capitalist mode of production ‘disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth’, p. 637. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, p. 141.

46 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 310.

47 Paul Bairoch, “Dix-huit décennies de développement agricole français dans une perspective internationale,” Économie Rurale, Volume 184–86, 1988, p. 15.

48 Venus Bivar, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2018, p. 1.

49 Ibid., p. 181.

50 Venus Bivar and Tamara L. Whited, “Industrial French food and its critics,” Modern & Contemporary France, Volume 28, Number 2, 2020, p. 130.

51 Mark C. Cleary, Peasants, Politicians and Producers: The Organisation of Agriculture in France since 1918, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 5.

52 Annie Moulin, Peasantry and Society in France since 1789, trans. M. C. and M. F. Cleary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 181.

53 Bivar and Whited, p. 132.

54 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 311, 261.

55 Ibid., p. 317.

56 Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, p. 4.

57 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 310.

58 Ibid., p. 396.

59 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 37.

60 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 292.

61 Ibid., p. 261.

62 David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 81.

63 Quoted in Baguley, p.32.

64 Ibid., p. 48.

65 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 217.

66 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 21.

67 Ibid., p. 397.

68 Ibid. p. 273.

69 Ibid., p. 250.

70 Émile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre,” in George J. Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism, Princeton, 197–229, 2016, p. 208.

71 Del Amo, Animalia, p. 273, 288.

72 Ibid., p. 408–09.

73 Ibid., p. 410.

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Dominic O’Key, « World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question »TRANS- [En ligne], 27 | 2021, mis en ligne le 27 novembre 2024, consulté le 17 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/trans/6948 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/trans.6948

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