The Decolonization of Queer Politics in Suniti Namjoshi’s Select Animal Fables: Locating “The Animal That Therefore I Am”

Abstract

This paper explores how queer subjectivity in the select literary works of Suniti Namjoshi can be read through the theoretical optics of postcolonial Animal studies. Postcolonial Animal studies foregrounds newer ways of rethinking the crisis in humanism by dismantling the centrality of the discursively constructed category of the ‘human’ as species sovereign. Herein lies the intersection of gender studies and postcolonial animal studies in their aligned concern with the exclusivist western hermeneutics that have informed the construction of the category of the ‘human’. The corollary of this is the production of constituted sub-humans consigned the status of an animalised humanity and all subjectivities of marginality belong to this paradigm. Therefore, to rethink the rigid species boundaries between the human and the non-human animal, this paper argues can open up newer postcolonial literary modalities to reconfigure gender alterity from South-Asia.