From Comparison to Coalition: Toward an Intersectional Econarratology of Multispecies Resistance

This article examines the risks and affordances of comparisons between human and nonhuman suffering through a dialogue between Critical Animal Studies, econarratology, and intersectional ecocriticism. While such comparisons can generate political and affective forms of solidarity, they also risk flattening historical asymmetries and reducing distinct forms of violence to abstract equivalence. The article argues that literature plays a distinctive role in mediating these tensions and proposes an intersectional econarratological framework attentive to how narrative form organises ecological, racialized, gendered, colonial, and interspecies relations without collapsing them into sameness. Through readings of Alice Walker’s “Am I Blue?” and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, the essay traces a shift from comparison to coalition by examining how literary form renders nonhuman agency and resistance politically legible through empathy, nonhuman focalisation, multiperspectivity, and reconfigured forms of omniscient narration.