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“Soon We Will Grow Tails”: Animal Stories, Memory, and Reimagining the Not-Quite-Human in Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter

Abstract:This essay articulates a relationship between migration, memory, and animals in Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter. By exploring the history of the Cambodian Genocide and how survivors turn to animals and animality to work through memories, I demonstrate how the figure of the refugee imagines new modalities of the human. A central assertion of this essay is that the main character Janie’s relationships to animals undo and reimagine the not-quite-human. In this space of the not-quite-human, kinships that include and move beyond the human come forward.