Animal Aspects Working Group Autumn Meeting with Guest Speaker Dr. Julian Yates

About

The UD Animal Aspects Working Group (IDAAWG) is hosting a special talk by UD’s own Dr. Julian Yates during our November meeting, and everyone is welcome to attend! This special event will be held over Zoom on Friday, November 6th, at 4pm (link below). You do not need to be a current member of UDAAWG to join in (though you are welcome to become one!).

Zoom: (link below)

“Spit Boys, Spit Jacks, Turnspit Dogs, and the Bioenergetics of the Flesh in early modern England”

Abstract: In When Species Meet (2007), Donna Haraway famously asserted that “we might nurture responsibility with and for other animals better by plumbing the category of labor more than the category of rights” (73). This speculative paper follows Haraway’s lead by investigating child-labor and dog-labor in the early modern kitchen (1300-1800) to focus on the way animal labor (human and canine) overlapped with, and was reinforced by, the advent of technologies / machines for roasting meat. How does factoring non human labor in medieval and early modern kitchens contribute to our understanding of the household and its communities? Motive force for spit turning might be provided by a human hand (usually a child’s) or by a now extinct breed of dog who ran, as The Comedy of Errors’ Dromio of Syracuse puts it, “in the wheel.” Dromio’s fear of being reduced to involuntary motive energy indexes the way “Spit Jacks” as they were generically termed (regardless of whether they were a child, a dog, or a machine) stood as a figure for unfree / coerced / enslaved labor through early modernity into the Enlightenment. In historical terms, this paper offers an example of what we learn by reading our archives for practices shared across supposed divisions between human, animal, and machine. Methodologically, it offers a case study in how attending to extinct labor practices and extinct beings—spit dogs were extinct by the early 1800s—can tell us about extinction today. The Comedy of Errors provides a jumping off point in the Shakespearean canon for a story which travels forward from medieval and early modern kitchens to the colonial prison / plantation, a story that seeks to keep human and animal bodies central to the thinking of energetics and energy sources.

Bio:

Julian Yates is H. Fletcher Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware. He writes about Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, objects, things, posthumanism, ecology, and literary theory. His books include Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), finalist for the Modern Language Association’s Best First Book Prize; What’s the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? (2013), co-authored with Richard Burt; Object-Oriented Environs in Early Modern England (2016), co-edited with Jeffrey J. Cohen; Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (2017), winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts); and, most recently, with Jeffrey J. Cohen, Noah’s Arkive (2023), a study of the legacies of the Genesis story in narratives of global climate change.