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In contemporary debates around animals, it is generally accepted that transitioning towards a plant-based diet is both an ethical and environmental choice that also has the potential to reduce animal suffering. However, minority practices are often highlighted for their practices as cruel for their foreign practices that are not humane. As Kymlicka and Donaldson (2014) have pointed out there is a serious concern that this may aggravate prejudices against select communities by reproducing existing power relations through “performing whiteness”. The general targeting of a cruel minority for its inhuman practices and the adoption of a vegan lifestyle can appear to legitimatize group and racial privileges. In this context, my presentation focuses on such minority practices in India such as beef-eating that is posited as an act of political subversion against the Hindu fundamentalist state and the dominant nationalist identity (Sathyamala, 2018). Vegetarianism is seen as morally superior because of its association with the upper caste structure. How can we renegotiate the ideals of a multicultural zoopolis that does not inflict animal harm in a multicultural society which is organized by caste? Considering the caste violence that is embodied in the upper caste hegemony, eating meat is an act of political transgression and resistance. What kind of intersectionality can emerge in this double bind? In giving full ethical otherhood to nonhuman animals, what can entail vegetarianism in such a fractious, multicultural society? I explore some of these complications through Derrida’s ‘performative anthropocentrism’ and remarks on vegetarianism that seemed to uphold the distinction between human and animal in its ethical project. Susan Haris(Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) Comments are closed.
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