With The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Donna Haraway moves away from the figure of the cyborg (which made her famous) and toward the figure of the companion species--specifically, the dog. She attempts to do much the same thing with dogs that she did with cyborgs, saying:Cyborgs and companion species each ( Read more... )

Reading this book immediately following hooks' first book, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism reveals how much a writer and theorist can develop in just a few years. Where Ain't I a Woman suffered because of underdeveloped points and undertheorized intersections of class with race and gender, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center shines. ( Read more... )

The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon by Arnold Krupat is literary and cultural criticism that is clearly of its time (20 years ago). Krupat's ideas about canonicity and the place of Native American literature in American literature more broadly are useful but, to a reader of today, are somewhat obvious. He argues ( Read more... )

Though she sometimes succumbs to generalizations and risks merely substituting the dominance of one gender over the other in her theorization of matriarchal American Indian cultures, Paula Gunn Allen provides some really interesting ideas about the differences between American Indian literature and western literature as well as some useful analysis ( Read more... )