Animal Revolution
Illustrated by Marina Zurkow
Why our failure to consider the power of animals is to our deep detriment.
Animals are staging a revolution — they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boars invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, this book threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how animals will push back. "Animal Revolution" is a passionate, provocative, cogent call for us to do so.
Ron Broglio reveals how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. We can try to frame such disruptions as environmental intervention or through the lens of philosophy or biopolitics, but regardless, the animals persist beyond our comprehension in reminding us that we too are part of an animal world. Animals see our technologies and machines as invasive beings and, in a nonlinguistic but nonetheless intensive mode of communicating with us, resist our attempts to control them and diminish their habitats. In doing so, they expose the environmental injustices and vulnerabilities in our systems.
A witty, informative and captivating work — at the juncture of posthumanism, animal studies, phenomenology and environmental studies — Broglio reminds us of our inadequacy as humans, not our exceptionalism.
Bio
Ron Broglio is associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU, where he also directs the Desert Humanities Initiative, is a professor in the Department of English’s literature program, and a senior sustainability scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
Praise for this book
Might animals be deliberately ‘jamming the anthropological machine?' This is the brilliant question 'Animal Revolution' asks its readers to consider through sly interpretations of destructive animal acts. Readers will enjoy the shrewdness Ron Broglio lends to various animal behaviors, even as his insights inevitably reveal our own shortsightedness and remind us that we are the most invasive and destructive species.
Kari Weil Author of "Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France"
Ron Broglio’s 'Animal Revolution' holds human beings accountable for this myopic, dichotomous approach to animals. There is always something else, or something other, when it comes to the animal. There is no ‘animal’ without the human to name it as such; animals themselves could not care less.
Eugene Thacker From the Afterword
