ABSTRACT
The essay explores the portrayal of insects in literature, focusing specifically on the representation of ants in Yitzhak Orpaz’s Nemalim (Ants) and Italo Calvino’s La formica argentina (The Argentine Ant). Both stories delve into the dynamics of species interaction, specifically into the response of two married couples whose homes or apartments are invaded by ants. Despite the humans’ efforts, particularly those of the husbands’, to regain control of their territory, they are unsuccessful. Throughout the narratives, the ants, functioning as a superorganism, exhibit a greater degree of agency compared to the human characters. The house or flat transforms into an anthill, effectively reverting the anthropized space into a natural environment. Consequently, the two species intertwine, mingle, and hybridize. This analysis will be conducted through the lens of animal studies, highlighting the themes of animal agency and Otherness, which are particularly significant when considering insects. Additionally, the essay will draw upon the concept of consilience between the humanities and sciences.
Issue ID: 23
n.1 (2023)
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on descriptions of Jews and Muslims in writings by officials and journalists in nineteenth century colonial Algeria and their recycling by antisemites at the end of that century. These writers assumed that Muslim Arabs shared their beliefs and would acquiesce to French rule and serve its military imperial expansion.
ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the animal symbolism used for representing the local identity of the southern periphery in Israel. From an ecocritical point of view, the domestic and the wild animal images will be analyzed as expressions of different shades (domestication and wildness) in the category of Nature, on the Nature-Culture dichotomy. The anthropological research method of discourse analysis has been adapted here to review the domestic donkey’s image in Sami Berdugo’s novel, Donkey (2019), and the discourse on the wild ass’s image in the media and especially by activists from the Negev. While the representation of the two types of animals raises awareness of the existential problems of southern periphery’s inhabitants, it also exposures nuances in their social status and the local identity reconstruction process.
ABSTRACT
Donkey’s presence is an essential characteristic of the Israeli Palestinian landscape. This essay addresses the donkey as an agent of a subjectivity that has been denied by the Israeli establishment, through a reading of Sami Berdugo’s novel, Donkey (2019). The essay examines the political functionality and biopolitical significance of the donkey as a metaphor, companion, and scapegoat. I argue that Berdugo portrays the donkey as the agency that enables a transition from object/other to subject. This subjectivity is built on human/animal continuity and fluidity; in his novel, Berdugo collapses the boundaries between his protagonist and Donkey and renders what in life resists power, domination, and eventually the different forms of death. The essay analyzes the alternative sociopolitical matrix that Berdugo portrays in which animality mobilizes a change; it also examines Berdugo’s literary strategy of “interrupting” the hegemonic cultural tyranny that has established, for years, rigid boundaries between humans and animals and by that denies freedom. Berdugo challenges “accepted” categories such as heteronormative sexuality, masculinity, and standard Hebrew through abjection and perversion; he “interrupts” and teases out the tyrannies of sexual and gender normativity by questioning and queering heteronormativity. Challenging the “accepted” and revealing its under-the-surface wounded matrix, is a literary concern that Berdugo has had for a long time; however, in Donkey he criticizes the Israeli tragic biopolitical condition, and he also challenges the narrator’s traditional stance. The essay discusses ecological and biopolitical issues that reveal the tragedy of both humans and donkeys in Israel, and particularly in the southern periphery. Reading the Israeli reality through the human-cum-donkey prism renders the neglected peripheries as an alternative Israeli existence, which forms the sociopolitical subtext of Berdugo’s novel. It is here, in the periphery of mental and material poverty, that Berdugo insists on the very idea of life.