Samantha Hind – författare

This study introduces the original rubric of ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ by bringing together the concept of ‘flesh’, the ethical approach of ‘indistinction’, and a strand of twenty-first-century speculative fiction interested in human and nonhuman ontologies and ethical relationships. It challenges human/nonhuman distinctions, and explores the wide range of multi-species possibilities imagined by the ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ of contemporary speculative fiction. Through five kinds of flesh in speculative fiction – human, animal, plant, thing and cultured – this book demonstrates the value of ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ as an approach for understanding and embracing the seemingly disparate ontologies of humans and nonhumans, making present new forms of ethical thinking that explore what it means to live as, with and through other fleshy beings.

Animality and Horror Cinema provides a wide-ranging overview of the role played by animals in the genre of horror cinema. Across four sections that unite affective and generic modes of horror with animals, animality, and the discourse of species, the volume demonstrates the multivalent operation of animality in transnational cinemas that look beyond the trope of monstrous adversity associated with the creature feature. With chapters focusing on the extrusion of animals from horror narratives, the multisensorial dimensions of animal horror, the intrusion of documentary violence, and the horrific contiguity of human and nonhuman flesh, it argues for the concept of creaturely fear as a lens through which to read horror’s blurring of the species barrier. The collection appeals to those interested in the intersection of animal and film studies with memory studies, afropessimism and critical race theory, posthumanism, biopolitics, ecocriticism, queer theory and vegan theory.