What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals provides a much-needed, in-depth examination of the paradox of extinction – which both signifies the ultimate threat to any given species, as well as serves as its inevitable conclusion – through a wide range of case studies that roughly chart the development of Eurowestern settler colonialism. Schuster makes an important contribution to the recent development of extinction studies, particularly by engaging and extending discussions of the multiform ways in which the histories of mass killings of human and nonhuman animals intertwine.---Susan McHugh, author of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction

How are we to understand the unknowable, the extinction of humans? Joshua Schuster helps us grapple with the end by framing extinction broadly to encompass genocides (Native American Indian populations and European Jews), animal extinctions (as documented in photography), speculative extinctions (the last human as in HG Well’s The Time Machine), and gestured solutions such as re-wilding as de-extinction. Schuster’s detailed investigation into each shattering event provides lessons we have poorly learned that bear correction. With its novel framing What is Extinction? provides a breadth and depth for rethinking this pressing question. Schuster concludes with a hopeful possibility and pressing imperative: to live on a shared earth that demands an ecological lives of hospitality.---Ron Broglio, author of Animal Revolution

Essential. All Readers.

. . .Schuster takes readers on a journey that is acutely sensitive to its own complexities, raising problematic, species-specific questions. And if there is just one takeaway from such an impressively diverse and well referenced title, it is in the study of extinction as a multifarious study of finitude itself: the implications of absence in our psyche.

. . .[A] rich mosaic of historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts with which to explore extinction.

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk.

Introduction | 1

Part I
1 Photographing the Last Animal | 43
2 Indigeneity and Anthropology in Last Worlds | 69

Part II
3 Literary Extinctions and the Existentiality of Reading | 109
4 Concepts of Extinction in the Holocaust | 134

Part III
5 Critical Theory for the Critically Endangered | 167
6 What Is De-Extinction? | 198

Conclusion | 231

Acknowledgments | 247
Notes | 251
Index | 279