Description
Book SynopsisNaisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India, arguing for an interspecies relationality premised on indifference: that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus.
Trade Review“Naisargi N. Davé is one of the most sophisticated, imaginative, and interdisciplinarily literate scholars of animality, activism on behalf of animals, animal slaughter, queerness, and postcolonial South Asia that I know. There is practically no one else to whom she can be compared for the counterintuitive turns of her thought and the spellbinding character of her ethnography. Not surprisingly, then,
Indifference is a work of considerable consequence.” -- Parama Roy, author of * Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial *
“Naisargi N. Davé offers a deeply moving exploration of the vital political work of ‘indifference’ as a mobilizing dehumanist force in this world. Davé brings us through animal activism and sacrifice with candor and extraordinary care. A riveting ethnography of immense beauty and force; I would follow her anywhere.” -- Julietta Singh, author of * Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: What Is Indifference? 1
1. Witness: How Do We Come to Occupy a Different Skin? 13
2. Biography: Why Is Moral Attention to the Animal so Repulsive? 31
3. Contradiction: How Is the Otherwise Exhausted? 55
4. Sound: Can the Subaltern Be Silent? 73
5. Interlude: Take a Walk with Me 91
6. Touch: Can Indifference Be the Basis for an Ethical Engagement with the World? 108
7. Sex: What Does Cow Protection Protect (with Alok Gupta) 125
8. Appetite: Does That Which Is Inevitable Cease to Matter? 146
Acknowledgments 167
Bibliography 171
Index 191
