ANIMAL RESISTANCE IN THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST ERA

Throughout history, animals have been consumed, commodified, and oppressed by humans. Yet, despite the immense constraints nonhuman animals face, they have actively rebelled, and rebel every day, against human control. In Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era, Sarat Colling shares some of these overlooked stories of nonhuman resistance, situating them within the context of capitalism, domestication, and colonization.

Whether monkeys escaping from laboratory cages, pigs refusing to descend the slaughterhouse chute, goats escaping and returning to liberate their herd from livestock auctions, beavers building traps into their dams, whales sinking ships to defend their kin, or elephants retaliating against circus abuses—animals communicate their plight and assert their agency. Exploring this understudied phenomenon, this book is attentive to both the animals’ standpoints and how they are represented in the human imagination. Together, these lenses demonstrate how animal resistance disrupts the dominant paradigm of human exceptionalism and the distancing strategies of animal enterprises. Animals have been relegated to the margins by human spatial and ideological orderings, but they are also the subjects of their own struggle, located at the centre of their liberation movement. Reimagining how we might understand, represent, and act in greater solidarity with other species, Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era makes an essential contribution to scholarship on animals and society. Accessibly written, with over fifty images, this book will appeal to a wide audience interested in human relationships with the other animals with whom we share this planet.
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"Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era is a testimony to the horrendous plight our animal siblings have been enduring at human hands since the dawn of civilization. Sarat Colling allows us to hear the voices of animal resistance as she builds an irrefutable argument for the elimination of the physical and epistemic borders that keep humans locked in supremacy and nonhumans behind the wall of silence and abuse. Written with deep empathy and respect, this book is a must-read." – Layla AbdelRahim, author of Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation and Wild Children—Domesticated Dreams

"Sarat Colling’s Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era offers a profoundly important and overdue contribution: a deep dive into how animals resist the logics of global capitalism that have, for so long, thoroughly shaped their lives and exploitation. Farmed animals, in particular, have been persistently overlooked, but Colling’s attention to their resistance makes a powerful statement about their agency and their ongoing rejection of their conditions, and demands that as humans we act in solidarity with this growing social movement. Colling’s writing weaves beautiful and moving stories of individual animals resisting their conditions with sharp and timely analysis that contextualizes these acts of resistance. Ultimately, Colling inspires action and a complete rethinking of farmed and other animals’ positioning in global society." – Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389

"This powerful and cutting-edge work breaks new theoretical ground by examining nonhuman animal agency and couching the analysis in a political-economic, historical, post-colonialist analysis. From the amazing act of resistance of Emily the cow to the memorialized resistance of Francis the pig, the author masterfully places stories of the resistance of oppressed nonhuman animals in social structural perspective." – David Nibert, Professor of Sociology, Wittenberg University

"Sarat Colling offers a landmark scholarly book about animals and society . . . Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era is a well-researched, extremely unique, and highly readable work that surely will appeal to a broad global audience interested in human-nonhuman relationships (anthrozoology)." – Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado

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