Lexington Books Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (Contemporary Whitehead Studies)

Metaphysics-or the grand narratives about reality that shape a community-has historically been identified as one of the primary oppressive factors in violence against animals, the environment, and other subordinated populations. Yet, this rejection of metaphysics has allowed inadequate worldviews to be smuggled back into secular rights-based systems, and into politics, language, arts, economics, media, and science under the guise of value-free and narrowly human-centric facts that relegate many populations to the margins and exclude them from consideration as active members of the planetary community. Those concerned with systemic violence against creatures and other oppressed populations must overcome this allergy to metaphysics in order to illuminate latent assumptions at work in their own worldviews, and to seek out dynamic, many-sided, and relational narratives about reality that are more adequate to a universe of responsive and creative world-shaping creatures. This text examines two such worldviews-Whitehead's process-relational thought in the west and the nonviolent Indian tradition of Jainism-alongside theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, that offer a new perspective on metaphysics as well as the creaturely kin and planetary fellows with whom we co-shape our future. Review In this refreshing, elegantly written study Donaldson brings together two streams of creative constructivism--Process thought and Jainism--and artfully demonstrates the centrality of animals in the formation of our living universe. Drawing from her experiences with the Jaina community in India, she suggests new ways in which to engage the world with tenderness, care, and nonviolence.--Christopher Key Chapple, Loyola Marymount University "With this important and exciting work, Brianne Donaldson simultaneously advances several important conversations, as well as demonstrating the interconnections that bind them. By integrating eco-criticism and metaphysics-two discourses long seen as mutually antithetical-she enlivens both, and points toward ways in which each can be mutually supportive. Similarly, her integration of Whiteheadian process thought and Jainism builds upon and extends earlier work on these two philosophies in exciting and important new directions, showing the relevance of both of these 'creaturely cosmologies' to conceptualizing a less cruel, more ecologically conscious global civilization. Her constructive use of Jain thought and practice, in particular, helps to spotlight a very important, ancient, and all too often overlooked wisdom tradition with profound relevance to contemporary issues. The need to rethink humanity's relationship to the rest of the planet has never been more urgent. With this work, Brianne Donaldson shows herself to be a leading light in showing the way to the kind of cosmological thinking that is so badly needed today.--Jeffery D. Long, Elizabethtown College Donaldson is to be thanked for bringing primary and secondary literature in the Jain tradition to bear on ethical issues surrounding nonhuman animals. She is also to be thanked for bringing the Jains and critical animal studies into conversation with process thinkers. All three areas are enriched as a result.--Daniel A. Dombrowski, professor of philosophy, Seattle University In this startling encounter of critical animal studies with both process and Jain cosmologies, something new roars, flutters, slithers into being: beautifully readable, ethically compelling, theoretically profound --a new becoming of the creature, a "becoming creaturely."--Catherine Keller, Drew University Both these books [Creaturely Cosmologies and Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes us More and Less than Human by Dominic Pettman] are significant contributions in the domain of Critical Animal Studies and Planetary Studies as both launch a substantial critique of speciesism or species exceptionalism. . .