146 chApter four
and new lines of sight—and not simply as reproducing already given en-
tities that either are or are not ‘like’ other already given entities” (2009,
18– 1 9). Stern makes clear the problem of thinking the Holocaust victim
and the factory- farmed animal as “bedfellows,” since to his mind the link
cannot help but to confirm the Nazi discourse that Jews were subhuman
beings deserving of extermination. His resistance also signals the limits of
decolonial thinking, which has, as I argued in the first half of this book,
sought to redress the relegation of the colonized to animal status without
accounting for the ways in which the human/animal distinction itself is
deeply problematic within and beyond the human. Redressing the ways
that humans have been rendered “animal” across time and space marks
the limits of postcolonial thinking as much as it signals the limits of Stern’s
thought as affronted Jew. Both discourses remain limited by their political
parameters and mired by unimaginative modes of comparison. In forget-
ting the productive potential of acknowledging the animality of all humans,
we abandon the urgent need to redress the human/animal distinction that
makes possible the subjugation of all beings. Dehumanist readings of fic-
tion can be a venue for Rothberg’s necessary “bracketing of empirical his-
tory,” a venue through which we can begin to repoliticize animal metaphor-
ics toward the liberation not only of particularly dispossessed humans but
also of the animal as a sacrificial object. Recalling Animal’s disarmingly
productive insistence at the start of this chapter that he is both “just like” a
human and ”just like” his canine friend Jara, we might begin to assemble a
politics that enables us—from within and beyond language—to be always
both different from and proximate to those others to whom we are bound.
Toward a Dispossessed Humanimality
If humanist discourse has become instrumental to seeking rights and
equality for those dehumanized by colonial force and its reverberations, it
will seem to many counterintuitive, laughable, even an act of betrayal, that
I engage postcolonial texts with an openness toward what I am calling a
humanimal ethics. Yet by claiming the human—over and over again, across
discrete historical moments and within particular political contexts—we
have in this act of bringing some into the fold of humanity continued to
produce others as abjectly outside. Anticolonial discourse has produced
a series of human, dehumanized, and inhuman “remainders” through its