Thinking Species

Abstract:This essay considers what Donna Haraway and others have called "multispecies relations." It takes artist Alison Ruttan's The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–2011), which comprises photographs of a reenactment of a chimpanzee war studied by Jane Goodall, as an invitation to contemplate how the biological and behavioral similarities between humans and chimpanzees have been figured. Exploring the promises and risks of multispecies imaginings and multispecies mourning, the essay cautions against the way "species," as a category of thought and a means of differentiation, is used in contemporary discourses in a manner that elides its troubling racist history. Indeed, the relation of chimpanzees to humans has been racialized historically, and "species" have been evoked to divide not only the order of primates but also the category of the human.