3 Review(s)

Rethinking Human–Animal Relationship engages with animal studies, a growing interdisciplinary field that reveals the deep human unreason and moral schizophrenia regarding their animal ‘others’. This book focuses on the links of the unrelenting exploitation of animals throughout history to the domination of humans over other humans: women, lower classes, colonized people and other marginalized categories that are more or less animalized by oppressors. Facilitated by scientific insights into physical and emotional continuity between humans and non-humans as well as by the opening up of a theoretical space by postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism and other such critical modes of discourse, animal studies emphasizes the human failure to look beyond themselves due to cultural blinders. It emerges in the exploration of shifts in thought in this book that ultimately, this leads to a posthumanistic view, asserting that rather than championing the rights of certain select subjects from a safe ontological distance, one should, fundamentally question the very human schema of knowing them. This book also analyses stories from modern Bengali literature through the lens of animal studies. The writers depict deep bonds between humans and animals and, through their empathetic insights and sympathetic imagination, show us that a soulmate-like relationship can be achieved. even in the face of opposition. This volume on human-animal relationship focuses on one of the environmental issues covered by the ‘Reconnecting with Nature’ series—flora, fauna, river systems and urban ecology.