An Animal Counter-Textuality? Sounding the Dog in the Global South

Abstract

The visual bias in the West has decisively shaped literary and cultural criticism in the past decades. Perpetuated by the linguistic turn, this bias has seen the written word placed firmly at the heart of (post-)humanist critique. Surveying current trends in contemporary theory, it soon becomes evident that, coinciding with the decline of the linguistic turn, Animal and Sound Studies have been on a steady rise. Increasingly shaping the global literary imagination, canine poetics, in particular, are enmeshed in a complex ideological web. Basing my investigation on literary and dramatic works from the Global South, such as Mark Fleishman et al.’s Antigone (Not Quite/Quiet) (2019), Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog (2007), and Ari Gauthier’s Carnet secret de Lakshmi (2015), I argue that, analogous to the way sound has gained increased agency in the Global South, so too canine figurations point to the way acoustic symbols can be rearticulated.