Oroonoko's Interspecies Imaginary: Race, Gender, and Animality.

This essay employs Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) as a case study through which to explore the "interspecies imaginary": a conceptual framework that examines how violent tensions between disparate species are imagined in the colonial archive and how these tensions cohere around representations of Blackness, Indigeneity, and animality. The interspecies imaginary, rather than defaulting to a discriminatory rhetoric in which subaltern positions are flattened, instead maintains a subversive, decolonial effect in that its documentation produces new constellations of co-constitutive becoming. By highlighting the tiger and eel episodes in the novella, this essay argues that the interspecies imaginary magnifies the textures of violent contact between human and nonhuman species that shape how formations of gender, Blackness, and Indigeneity are productively tethered to and produced alongside animality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]