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Abstract

This dissertation argues that Indigenous American and African diasporic human-animal shapeshifting figures are locations of resurgence and resistance to the ferine. By analyzing these figures in 21st century literary and on-screen narratives, I argue that human-animal shapeshifting figures reject ideas of the human and animal that have and continue to be used to buttress Euro-colonial power. I make these arguments by turning to three shapeshifting figures: the werewolf; finfolk; and Deer Woman. I follow a recent increase in scholarship on shapeshifting figures, though unlike much of this scholarship, I read these figures as agential beings who can teach things through their own bodies rather than as metaphors for human and/or animal lives. When analyzing, thinking with, and learning from these figures, I suggest that Euro-colonial necropolitics in imagined settler colonial space in the Americas is founded upon the ferine. The ferine (the idea that there’s a savage, menacing, and undomesticated wild) both names Euro-colonial anxieties of the other-than-human world and other humans in the Americas at the same time as it’s used as a justification for Euro-colonial violence and invasions on Indigenous American, African diasporic, and other-than-human communities. The idea of the ferine rests upon the Euro-colonial belief of the bounded sovereign self, but human-animal shapeshifting figures – specifically finfolk and Deer Women – offer a different vision of the self. These figures reject the bounded body and separations between humans, animals, and the other-than-human world. Finfolk and Deer Women are feminist and queer figures whose communities, bodies, and coexistence with cultural and biological kin opens space for a resurgence of Indigenous American and African feminisms, queer theories, and cosmologies. While these shapeshifting figures continue to reckon with Euro-colonial necropolitics, they also open space for safety, protection, and love in ways that nurture and propel life. Though shapeshifting and shapeshifting figures can be appropriated in dangerous ways, I argue that 21st-century African diasporic and Indigenous American literary and on-screen representations of these figures is part of resurgence movements that ask readers to remake the world beyond the boundaries of the ferine.