Feeling Animal Death: Being Host to Ghosts, Hardcover

The emotional exchange between so-called "humans" and more-than-human creatures is an overlooked phenomenon in societies characterized by the ubiquitous deaths of animals. This text offers examples of people across diverse disciplines and perspectives--from biomedical research to black theology to art--learning and performing emotions, expanding their desires, discovering new ways to behave, and altering their sense of self, purpose, and community because of passionate, but not romanticized, attachments to animals. By articulating the emotional ties that bind them to specific animals' lives and deaths, these authors play host to creaturely ghosts who reorient their world vision and work in the world, offering examples of affect and feeling needed to enliven multi-species ethics.

Brianne Donaldson is the Bhagwaan Mahavir/Chao Family Foundation fellow in Jain studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is the author of Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (2015), and the edited collections Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature: A Common World for Animals and the Environment (2014), and The Future of Meat without Animals (with Christopher Carter) (2016). Ashley King is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Northwestern University. Their dissertation project, "Body, Flesh, Meat: A Science-fictional Theory of Soteriology," develops the concepts of "flesh" and "meat" to theorize racialized queerness, transness, and animality in the viscously embodied soteriologies of contemporary science fiction.