Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the appearance of a commonly humanized animal—the dog. Focusing on a dog’s tail’s capacity to signify in Manto’s text, it argues that the establishment of ethical relations between human and animal is predicated on the ways through which humans anthropocentrically attribute meaning/meaninglessness to the signing bodies of animals. Posthumanist trends in animal studies are often associated with the works of Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, although Haraway has often rejected the label. While the study of the imbrications of race and species through a bio/necropolitical lens is the first major trajectory we identify in studies of animals and animality in postcolonial theory, the second trajectory emerges from multispecies ethnography. The situation is very different in former colonial or postcolonial locales where strays are a ubiquitous part of the urban landscapes.