Book launch: Cormorant - A Cultural History of Greed and Prejudice
The result of AIAS-Cofund Fellow Gordon McMullan’s project at AIAS is out in a new interdisciplinary book, Cormorant. By studying the cormorant, the book shows how human discourses of prejudice extend to non-human creatures, the persistence of these discursive displacements, and the variations in the form they take across time and cultures.
How does prejudice grow and mutate? What does intolerance, when transferred from human beings onto animals, do to those creatures? And what, in return, does it do to us?
These are some of the questions that Gordon McMullan, AIAS-Cofund Fellow & Professor at King’s College London, UK raised in his research project at AIAS, 'Cormorant: A Natural and Cultural History of Prejudice,' in which he studied the cormorant and how it over centuries has been a vehicle of prejudice.
The results of McMullan’s research at AIAS is out in a his new book Cormorant: A Cultural History of Greed and Prejudice, published by Cambridge University Press. In this interdisciplinary work, Gordon McMullan includes literature, art history and zoology, and ranging from America to China and from Britain to Peru, to tell the cultural history of prejudice as represented in the cormorant.
Unravelling the past for novel insights
McMullan looks to the past to understand how prejudicial attitudes towards both animals and our fellow human beings overlap and sustain each other. Several stories are included in his book - of a ‘greedy’ bird hated across the world, the object of global conflict between the fishing industry and environmental science, and a revealing exploration of racism, xenophobia and capitalism.
Book launch – Friday 12 June at 14:30
Join AIAS for an engaging and inspiring afternoon as we celebrate the launch of Gordon McMullan’s new book:
https://aias.au.dk/events/show/artikel/cormorant-a-cultural-history-of-greed-and-prejudice
Register for the book launch and reception here
More about the book
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cormorant/7F3CD955B2B24EE4A5A5E25DA121E1E3#fndtn-information
Contact
Gordon McMullan, Professor & 2022-2023 AIAS-Cofund MSCA Fellow
E-mail: gordon.mcmullan@kcl.ac.uk
Faculty of Arts & Humanities
Department of English
King’s College London, UK