Chimeras & other animals: The cultural imagination and conceptualization of human and non-human animals

How can art and literature help us see non-human animals differently—and rethink what it means to be human? This new issue of Locus explores the cultural representation of human-animal relationships through the lens of the chimera—hybrid beings composed of different animal species—and interspecies metamorphosis. Drawing from diverse disciplines in the humanities, the contributions offer ecocentric perspectives on coexistence between humans and non-human species through image, literary and poetic language, and the acting and dancing body. From singing crickets in a Disney film to early modern representations of the devil as an ambiguous creature, and from pig industry promotional materials to rat-people, and mourning rituals for melting glaciers, this issue reveals how cultural representations shape—and can help reimagine—our relationships with non-human animals.

Articles in this issue include:
• In our editorial, Winkler and I argue that the arts and literature are essential for expanding the human capacity to empathize with non-human species and for envisioning more eco-centric ways of multispecies coexistence.
• Capitain examines the Disney film You, the Human Animal, showing how it presents music as a uniquely human trait—of Western people, to be precise.
• Dialeti analyzes early modern theological and legal texts in which the devil, portrayed as a shape-shifting hybrid, blurs boundaries between spirit, human, and non-human animals, thus undermining human exceptionalism. The anxieties it provoked were allayed through witch hunts.
• Verduin explores how climate catastrophe prompts changes in established ideas about mourning. Drawing on philosophy and visual art, he reflects on grief over ecological loss and species extinction.
• Van Herten & Brouwer analyze how literary representations of rat-people express anxieties over the collapse of human order.
• Rinzema & Dekker blend theory and visual art to expose hidden violence in the pig industry. Critiquing the emphasis on “performance” and “growth,” they call attention to the overlooked temporality of animal “waiting” as a way of acknowledging kinship and difference.
• Fraipont & Vanasten offer a “zoopoetic” reading of Ramsey Nasr’s poem “zoo mensch zoo dier” (2005), exploring how it confronts unequal power dynamics between humans and non-human animals and experiments with new literary and political forms of representation.