Interspecies Communication

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In Interspecies Communication, ethnomusicologist Gavin Steingo examines several significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--several cases, that is, where the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. Analyzing scenarios including a small coastal community in South Africa where humans call to whales, a scientific laboratory in the Caribbean where humans tried to speak with dolphins, and a case of black performance art involving human-alien communication, Steingo charts various mechanisms that humans have devised to think about, and indeed to reach, beings very unlike ourselves. These speculative endeavors look--and listen--beyond what we are and what we know. The book focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when Enlightenment conceptualizations of human and non-human were increasingly materialized. Following the Second World War, scientists embarked upon the deep exploration of oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential "final frontiers, " the "outer" space of the cosmos and the "inner" space of oceans were conceptualized as structurally isomorphic twins, subject to the same method of scrutiny. Interspecies Communication examines the way that globally circulating ideas are taken up by a range of different subject positions-including, and especially, "peripheral" subject positions in the global South"--