Abstract
The best-known insects worldwide, European honeybees (apis mellifera) came to be that way through histories in which colonial experiences and indigenous frictions extend far beyond human communities. Amid a growing crisis in honeybee health in recent decades, novelists explore the multispecies dimensions of their colonial experience in the converging contexts of extinction and genocide. Through fictions by David Malouf, J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Sue Monk Kidd, Louise Erdrich, Douglas Coupland, Lindsay Eagar, and others, this essay outlines a pattern in which the convergence of native knowledges and histories of mass killings spurs productive interventions in contemporary honeybee fictions.
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McHugh, S. (2017). Cross-Pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges of Extinction and Genocide in Honeybee Fictions. In: Woodward, W., McHugh, S. (eds) Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_13
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