Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals and the Politics of Re-interventions on Anthropocentrism

This article ascertains how Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014) aligns with interdisciplinary studies which critique anthropocentric binaries of human-nonhuman relationships. Drawing on a critical analysis of the selected stories of the book, this article attempts a broader study of Dovey’s book. Dovey’s ten stories are, as the article argues, a radical re-narrativisation against human-nonhuman binaries lying in the creative-cultural human world. It also sees the book as a subversive interrogation of human superiority. The ten animals of this book, then, are not mere metaphoric or symbolic embodiments of human sufferings, rather they represent an autonomous world of beings. These beings, as Dovey projects, challenge the human world’s cultural and creative ways of using and subjugating nonhuman beings to consolidate a human-centric world system. This article hinges on this aspect of the assertive nonhuman identity vis-à-vis the human identity, in particular, and then theoretically underpins Dovey’s book’s significance through some ecocritical  and post-human lenses.