Animate Literacies

Nathan Snaza's Animate Literacies offers a fresh account of literature and literacy, arguing that literacy helps shape society and has also been used to draw the line between who counts as human. Drawing on new materialist theory alongside feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship, Snaza treats literacy as a space where people, animals, and inanimate things such as chairs and sheets of paper all take part as active agents.

Snaza reads well-known works by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, paying close attention to the part that feeling and sensory experience play in how literacy works. He also challenges the usual idea that literacy is tied to print, contending that this view supports dehumanizing definitions of the human rooted in imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist ideologies.

To break down these exclusionary humanist frameworks, Snaza argues, we need new ways of practicing literacy and studying literature that move beyond the organized production of academic knowledge.