Becoming Less Human: Margaret Atwood’s Climate Emergency and Posthuman Veganism in the MaddAddam Trilogy
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The anthropocene geological period is characterised by how humans have rapidly become the dominant force driving the entire planet to climate and environmental destruction. Humanity’s anthropocentrism values humans as the most important form of existence and all other nonhuman beings as commodities that exist for human ends. These situations of anthropocentrism and its catastrophe are exemplified in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian climate fiction MaddAddam (2013). The article examines how this last book of the trilogy redefines humanity’s place in the world among all nonhuman others by addressing veganism within posthumanist elements of MaddAddam — the hybridity of human and nonhuman animal characters: Crakers, Pigoons and Frankenbabies — as a way for Atwood to address humanity’s ethics of eating from a non-anthropocentric perspective and to offer a way to carefully interrogate humans’ ethics. All of the posthuman creatures’ food ethics are intertwined with environmental and moral issues. It is my argument that posthuman veganism in Atwood’s MaddAddam establishes how humanity must learn to respect other nonhuman beings to survive after the collapse of humanity’s corporate-centred world that eventually drives humans off the top of a hierarchy to the brink of extinction. The article focuses on how Atwood utilises speculative fiction and veganism to push the human-animal boundary through the process of humanising and animalising to rethink humans’ ethical condition, especially regarding eating, to terminate anthropocentrism in order to cohabit a multispecies world respectfully and so avoid the future of climate doom.
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