Jia Hui Lee, "Rodent Trapping and the Just Possible"

MSJ Events presents Jia Hui Lee, "Rodent Trapping and the Just Possible"

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Join us for an online event with Promise of Multispecies Justice contributing author Jia Hui Lee, "Rodent Trapping and the Just Possible." The event will include discussion with Evan Mwangi and MSJ editors, followed by audience Q&A.

In this talk, Jia Hui Lee will offer a few stories about how rodent traps are designed and used in Morogoro, Tanzania, reflecting on these traps as "cognitive devices" that help people mediate human-rodent relations and meditate on how best to live with rodents, who are sometimes considered agricultural pests. This will be followed by a discussion with Evan Mwangi, who will critically reflect on animal studies in Africa and the possibilities for multispecies justice that can come from an appreciation of African literature.

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Jia Hui Lee's research focuses on practices of work, communication, and cognition among humans and rodents in the context of science and technology in the global South. Drawing on methods from anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), he examines human-rodent encounters in Tanzania, including practices of trapping, research, and training that transform rodents into objects of scientific knowledge and into sensing technology. He argues that these more-than-human relations offer more-than-human epistemologies that grapple with economic precarity, the afterlives of colonialism, and the technological future of Tanzania.

Evan Maina Mwangi is a professor of English and the Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies at Northwestern University. His works include Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (State University of New York Press, 2009) and Translation in African Contexts (2017). Mwangi's most recent monograph, The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics (Michigan, 2019), examines the interface of critical animal studies and postcolonial literature to bring to the fore the vegan impulses in African writing. He demonstrates that these vegan motivations and affects that are not a copy of western practices but draw from indigenous sources. His primary texts in this book include African folktales, religious texts, philosophical materials, and work by anti-colonial movements, as well as postcolonial and other literary sources, which the authors have repurposed to call for ethical treatment of non-human others and sexual minorities. By including work by East African writers such as Rebecca Nandwa, Nuruddin Farah, Henry ole Kulet, and Yuda Komora in its study of the figure of the animal in African literature, the book seeks to debunk the implied belief in critical animal studies that only white African writers (exemplified by J.M. Coetzee) have been attentive to the animal question.

The Promise of Multispecies Justiceis an edited book (under contract with Duke University Press) and a series of virtual events that explores the possibilities of justice beyond human realms. Please check out our website for other upcoming events.