인종과 동물 1: 동물 담론과 진화생물학의 쟁점과 허점

Abstract

In the criticism of American literature and culture, animal studies have been rarely associated with African-American studies, even though both of the disciplines share a common ground of victimhood, that is, speciesism and racism. It is well known that The Lives of Animals, which is contributed by J. M. Coetzee and five other like-minded scholars, puts on the table a bunch of controversial issues about humanity and animality. Re-reading the text about humans and animals, what I found interesting is the viability of a combination of animal discourse and racial discourse. What is integral to this uncharted critical cooperation is a post-anthropocentrist perspective. With this in mind, tracing animal discourses in Western thought which range from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas via Descartes and Jeremy Bentham to Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, I examine where the issue of race can be properly inserted into them and how the issue of race is productively engaged with them. Then, exploring the ways in which the factor of race has operated in evolutionary biology, I attempt to divulge the complicated relationship between racism and speciesism. For this purpose, rather than doing somewhat scientific researches into evolutionary biology per se, I pay attention to the evolutionary biologists’ ways of approaching to the issues of race and species, particularly focusing on the views and values of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. In closing, I discuss why the post-anthropocentrism matters for beings of a particular animal as well as beings of human others, and finally I come up with a possible scenario for the joyful encounter that transcends both species and racial boundaries.