Against Anthropocentrism: A Stray's Quest in Diane Cook's The New Wilderness

This essay examines the representation of an ecological collapse in Diane Cook's The New Wilderness (2020) in the context of the interrelated concepts of straying and stray ethics, proposed by Barbara Creed in her work Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017) as the new ethical paradigm for the Anthropocene era. Drawing upon the definition of straying as a process of identity (re-)formation, we discuss Cook's narrative in terms of its socio-political engagement with the reality of the climate crisis from the perspective of a stray, identified in our analysis as a liminal abject figure that transcends species boundaries. By positing stray ethics as the novel's interpretative pivot, we propose to read the experience of becoming a stray through the lens of its implicitly disruptive but also transformative potential, engendered by the essentially sympoietic, non-anthropocentric relationship between human and non-human animals.