Are there any contemporary periodicals (online or otherwise) that serve a similar purpose as The Brownie’s Book? Should there be? On page 417 in the “As the Crow Flies” essay, Fielder writes, “At times, Black people also framed their human-animal…

The “Fantastic futures” and “flying Africans” Fielder describes remind me of Christina Sharpe’s “wake work” and, with the reference to wings suddenly appearing, they remind me of Bruno Bettelheim’s theorization of fairytales in which protagonists find solutions to troubling situations…

Just wondering, what would Brigitte Fielder say about the film Black Panther?

Hello, everyone. Sorry I will miss class tomorrow! Just posting a few thoughts for our readings this week: What Feilder poses in Pets, Race is something that I always had a question about. If representation matters, how much more does…

In “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism”, Marah Gubar writes that “the critical story we have been telling about children’s literature rules out the possibility that young people can function as artistic agents, participants in the production…

I really loved the ‘As the Crow Flies’ article, I was fascinated by the way Fielder tracks the ideas of the crow and the Flying Africans throughout folkore and literature, and the way she brought out the much more rich…

Feuerstein and Nolte-Odhiambo write: “‘Pethood’ here serves as the analogous term to ‘child-hood,’ a similarly constructed social space that points to specific hierarchical relationships” (4). I was trying to understand the relationship between childhood and pethood and thus wondered: Can…

I’m interested in this historic belief that empathy towards animals translates into empathy towards humans. It’s easy to see this isn’t true—however, patriarchal “power of care” does seems to translate. It seems as though ideas relating to hierarchy are easier…

In what way is the ownership of pets (and pet-ownership as a subject-position) a privilege? In what ways is it classed? What kinds of adults are being imagined and constructed in literary narrative of pets and pethood? In the case…

Beautiful Joe has such low self-esteem, and I wonder what the child reader made/makes of that? The young reader especially is supposed to pick up on the unfair treatment of animals at the same time inhabit the animal’s physical and…