Pointing the Way: How Critical Systemic Novels Can Help to Address Polarisations

The dialogue in this chapter is centred around how we can live differently if we challenge the speciesism based on an assumption of clear-cut boundaries between what are seen as different species. The dialogue takes the form of our deliberating around two fictional pieces created by Janet McIntyre (editor of this volume) to challenge the way we relate to one another and speciesism, in order to prompt the reader to think about ways of communicating with other animals (other than human animals) and with plant life and other forms of life with which we share our lives. It explores the links between the South African institutionalisation of Apartheid in 1948 as a structure of discrimination between ‘races’ and the way in which we are now potentially complicit in forwarding what Janet calls a species apartheid unless we re-look at and enact a multispecies relationality. It explains how the novel as a genre can perform the function of attuning us to such relationality.