Anna James ABSTRACT

“Notes Towards the Vegan Elegy”

Anna James, Franklin College, Indiana, USA

 

Transfixed by what animal grief researcher Barbara J. King called her “unprecedented vigil,” the world watched as Tahlequah – a Southern Resident orca also known as J35 – carried with her the body of her recently deceased calf for seventeen days, across nearly 1000 miles. This elegiac spectacle inspired a range of human responses, from skeptical to sentimental, as viewers grappled with how to understand what they witnessed. The widespread and passionate interest provoked by Tahlequah’s grief thus suggests mourning may be an important site for thinking about interspecies relations.

 

This paper proposes that a natural affinity exists between veganism and elegy, and through close-readings of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, and Rosa Alice Branco, posits the vegan elegy as a distinct poetic genre defined by unique forms of aesthetic and ethical attention. Paradoxical as it might seem, elegy’s characteristic sensitivity to alterity makes it a mode peculiarly suited to recognizing and sustaining the aliveness of non-human animals; the vegan elegy thus serves as an important counterbalance to the fatalistic necropolitics of much vegan literature.

 

Building on Jessica Holmes’s theorization of “vegan poetics,” and on the foundational work of Carol J. Adams and Laura Wright, I illustrate how poetics (especially the elegy) provides tools for nuancing and expanding vegan literary studies. At the same time, however, I argue that literary studies stands to benefit from a greater engagement with veganism. Elegy is perhaps the form in which poetics most clearly defines its place in the human social world, yet it’s precisely in the elegiac encounter with animals that (as John Vickery observes) the genre’s boundaries are formed. I seek, consequently, to complement the genre studies of Jahan Ramazani, Diana Fuss, and others by demonstrating that veganism is a key locus from which poetics constructs – and fulfills – its ethical demands.

 

Keywords: elegy, ethics, poetry, vegan literature, vegan poetics