This volume illuminates how creative representations remain sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epistemologies. Traditionally imagined in relation to spiritual realms and the occult, animals have always been more than primitive symbols of human relations. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors, totems, talismans, or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the volume's unique emphasis on Southern Africa and North America - historical loci of the greatest ranges of species and linguistic diversity - help to situate how indigenous knowledges of human-animal relations are being adapted to modern conditions of life shared across species lines.

Across the abyss a bannister goes, a raining on a ledge over sullen darkness, leading its intermediaries to stairs up and down, rooms that begin and do not end, halls of light (but rarely glory), alcoves peopled by rain spiders and slow breathing. So begins Wendy Woodward's third volume of poetry, a journey into vulnerability and grace, across terrains inhabited by dogs, minotaurs and leviathans, by puppets and a failed Icarus. Stories are teased from the ears of donkeys and the pit-pits of an oyster catcher, from a cupboard in the Amatholas to a monastery in Sikkim--all held behind the saving bannister of her poetry.

Many humans do not regard animals as complex beings. Instead, they objectify animals, relate to them as 'pets', or see them simply as spectacles of beauty or wildness. By contrast, the southern African writers whose work is explored in The animal gaze, including Olive Schreiner, Zakes Mda, Yvonne Vera, Eugene N. Marais, J.M. Coetzee, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Michiel Heyns, Marlene van Niekerk and Linda Tucker, represents animals as richly individual subjects. The animals – including cattle, horses, birds, lions, leopards, baboons, dogs, cats and a whale – experience complex emotions and have agency, intentionality and morality, as well as an ability to recognize and fear death. When animals are acknowledged as subjects in this way, then the animal gaze and the human response encapsulate an interspecies communication of kinship, rather than confirming a human sense of superiority. This volume goes beyond Jacques Derrida's notion of the animal gaze which still has animal as the 'absolute other', and suggests a re-conceptualising of animals as 'anothers.' The animal gaze engages with the writings of Jacques Derrida, J.M. Coetzee, Val Plumwood and Martha C. Nussbaum, as it brings together Animal studies, ethics, literary studies and African traditional thought, including shamanism, in a way that compels the reader to think differently about nonhuman animals and human relationship with them.