“Sovereignty of the Self”: Interspecies Ethics in Sherman Alexie's Face

Along these lines, Michael Lundblad's recent essay on "animality studies" calls for a critical perspective that evaluates "various identity categories within the human" as well as the nonhuman (498).3 Especially since one aim of animal studies is to bring diverse disciplines into dialogue-as this special issue does-it seems important to attend to the ways that identity categories of all kinds, including human ones, are effected by "patterns of relationality" (Haraway 17). For scholars invested in seeing sovereignty become a reality for all kinds of beings, it is essential to forge "emotional and physical bridges, lifelines between species, that take us to new ways of being human in our shared world" (Hogan, Metzger, and Peterson xv).