Auguring the animal
Starts June 26 2024 ~ 7 WEEKS ~ $400
“Decolonization is only possible through an animal ethic that disrupts anthropocentrism as a settler-colonial logic…What imaginaries and subjectivities are foreclosed when our politics of decolonization is always already anthropocentric? ” - Billy-Ray Belcourt
What & Why:
Auguring the Animal is a course dedicated to living in harmony.
Considering literacy as an ecosystem enables a communion with the more-than-human, toward a liberation that is not at the expense of the animal or the natural, but alongside, within and in reverence toward the animal, the natural, the wild, the queer, the native.
By diving a dialogue with the animals present in our tarot decks we can better relate the animals of our natural world to the cultural and supernal worlds we share. This course continues to build decolonial epistemologies through the focused of prism of revolutionizing our animal considerations and thus animal relations.
We will approach these images from the perspectives beyond the lenses of alienating taxonomy. By looking into the eye of the raven, the eye of the stallion, the eye of the dingoe, and on we will see a “submerged perspective” looking back. We can then engage a disobedient reading of animal images, representations and stagings for oppositional purposes to their colonial context of creation. Thus, this course disrupts anthropocentrism, which is the fourth logic of white supremacy.
Animals undoubtedly continue to be the subjects of colonial domination and displacement, the objects of colonial knowledge and at times the agents of colonial conquest and settlement.
Auguring the Animal aims to position animal knowledges as a possible means for students to understand the epistemic shifts necessary for structural decolonization, while enabling the consideration of animals as cultural mediators and agents of decolonization. This course offers a decolonial ethic that accounts for animal bodies as resurgent bodies. The tarot will be our counterpoint to create a circuit of coherence amongst the various cultural layers, significations, and vantages that coexist within the cards animal references. No prior experience with tarot required but always welcome.
When, Where & How
COURSE SCHEDULE
June 26 - August 10 / Wednesdays, 1pm PST / $400 enrollment investment
Week 1: Introductions, Orientations & Entry points - State Species: The Digital Animal and Domestication
Wednesday June 26, 1 pm pst, Zoom
Are you a dog person? How does one learn about wildness? Let us stretch the ingrained notion of the wild animal within our childhood reveries. Animating animality from horses in the chauvet grotto to the cartoon creatures, we will consider the visual politic of how humans control animals as proxies for state formations, affective engagement, responses and the cards that can especially cue possibilities for alterity.
Week 2: From Cage to Stage
Wednesday July 3, 1 pm pst, Zoom
How do zoos endorse and naturalize an ethical captivity? How do we regard the idea of decent, dignified behavior due to animals and what is implicated by being denied and despised? What is the role of the displayed animal? How does the wild child “grow up sideways” while also epitomizing the colonial imagination? This week we will examine the white gaze of extinction, displayed by taxonomy established from zoos to museums to the circus. We will examine the Major Arcana that help us understand native land stolen and repurposed to establish the colonial garden of eden.
Week 3: The Legacy of Lion Tamers
Wednesday July 10, 1 pm pst, Zoom
If the human humanizes himself through the negation of his animality what doest the Strength arcana offer us? What does it mean to be wild? What does it mean to be tame? We will consider the history of the Strength arcana, as a mode of gendered, racial analysis from the iconographic history. By updating the philosophical underpinnings, along with the association of the feline with the trickster aspect of female sexuality through the tarot’s cat cards, we will connect this to the modern 'Proud Mary,’ Tina Turner, and similarly deploy a disidentificatory move in consciously forging a personal animal association and insisting on the radical hybridity of the self.
Week 4: The Grotesque Bestiary
Wednesday July 17, 1 pm pst, Zoom
What is happening in the depth of the forest? Where can the wild take you? How does the bestiary, that is not meant to be zoological, engage animality and what can it offer our readings? What ways can the Devil arcanum engage “monstrous intimacies?” What if some forms of desire stood outside of commodification? Continuing our hybrid explorations from last week, this week we are the attendants to the beasts within and without, and we will shapeshift. It’ll be an afternoon with a faun, serpent women, spider seers and deer ladies. From these stories we understand animals as observers, adversaries, guardians and protagonists with agency and their own perspectives.
Week 5: The Beast and the Sovereign (the Cockroach court & colonization)
Wednesday July 24, 1 pm pst, Zoom
Con Que Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? How can the animal extract us from the logic of the human? How can each rank of the court help us reconsider human-animal relationality? Which animal is the pillar of settler technology. Animal allegories are embedded within the major arcana, to which the Wheel of Fortune is a nexus. This week we deconstruct the court cards by looking to the series of lecture by Derrida which call attention the parallel between the monarch and the animal. By focusing on Indigenous relationalities we will disrupt the idea of taming the Wild West. The cards will help us become unbridled and wild.
Week 6: The Assembly of Birds & Siren Songs
Wednesday July 31, 1 pm pst, Zoom
What is a bird? What are the cards of extinction? When is innocence tempted? Let us take flight and engage in musical self-questioning, and with enough curiosity we may get free of ourselves. Our insistent hybridity continues in our attempts to reconcile disparate desires of domesticity and independence. The winged women guide us through this tension. Murmurations will meld into our thinking.
Week 7: Sea Country
Wednesday August 7, 1 pm pst, Zoom
How can fish provide a problem for colonial authority? Where do interspecies agreement emerge? How do we read like a beast? What does it mean to live alongside wildness? How can animals help us access nonordinary realms? How do we interpret the animal omen? As we wrap up we will dwell in the oceanic depths to contact the leviathan. We will sit at the seacoast and direct a multifocal gaze downwards into the dirt, into the waterways which connect all life forms. We will practice engaging in the speculative narration of animal subjectivities as co-creators of lifeworlds, coexisting in proximity, understanding that these lives are not fully visible or knowable. I leave you with suggestions for animal altars so as to restore the reverence, respect and spiritual communion with animals that was disrupted by the settler project which used these modes of relation as evidence of the savagery of Indigenous peoples. You will leave certain of non-human animals as knowledge-holders, council, independent actors, symbol and signified by the cards of the tarot.
Sources include: Colleen Glenney Bogs, Walter Mignolo, Irving Goh, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Erika Buenaflor, Laetitia Barber, Jack Halberstam, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Christina Sharpe, José Esteban Muñoz, and more!
*Please email me if you would like to set up a payment plan or have questions about accessibility*