Animal Suffering in Global Development and Antipoverty Praxis: Enforced Animal Labor in the Peripheral Capitalism of Indian Brick Kilns

Abstract

Alleviation of human suffering is a key driver of antipoverty praxis. Poverty is a human experience of suffering from the violence of development, which often uses animals as relief and is insufficient to understand multispecies endurances of development. Positioning suffering per se as a critical reason to rethink development, this article aims to politicize animals’ emotional, physical, and psychological suffering from being not human in relation to the human in development and antipoverty praxis. Animal suffering, although sharing characteristics with sufferings of vulnerable humans in poverty, contains distinct harms that arise from being not human. This article brings together relational poverty politics and critical animal geographies to showcase the sociospatial suffering of animals, entrenched in their inherent commodity-labor status, in and against the grain of poverty, the corollary of racial-anthropocentric-capitalist global development. It focuses on animals in coercive labor in the brick kilns in India’s periurban regions, sites of peripheral capitalism that are constitutive of global production, and frontiers of extreme (human) poverty, and ecological degradation. Attending to fleeting moments of “everyday multispecies brilliance” from the grounded interspecific realities of the brick kilns, the article introduces human–animal relations into relational poverty politics, to overturn the anthropocentric theoretical hegemony of development and poverty, and address animal and human suffering together toward an anti-anthropocentric, antipoverty development praxis.

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