Abstract
Anthropocentric preoccupations with human collectivity have obscured the underlying and arguably more fundamental relations of human and nonhuman life. In a period characterized by escalating environmental crisis, learning how to articulate a collective subject—a “we”—that encompasses both human and nonhuman beings is an urgent task. It is also a task well suited to the literary imagination. This essay examines three contemporary fictions that use we-narration to expand notions of collectivity across national, gendered, sexualized, and species lines. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011), Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2018), and Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021) all elaborate versions of the we narrator that open it up to perspectives that suggest a new grounding for the democratic subject so influentially designated as “we the people.”