Paper short abstract:

The Southern and animal turns have become recognised discourses that are circulating in the academic milieux. However, there has been limited engagement between the two turns. Repositioning livestock geographies in African cities and towns will reveal the limited engagement between the two turns.

Paper long abstract:

The Southern and animal turns have become recognised discourses that are circulating in the academic milieux. However, there has been limited engagement between the two turns. Despite the academics turning South, the animal turn is a limited terrain of research in the Southern turn discourse. Studies in animal geography are polarised that the ‘animal turn’ does not capture the wide ontology of the ‘Southern turn.’ While African cities are ‘livestocking,’ the space of animal geographies of livestock in the ‘Southern turn’ discourse has attracted less research activities. Emerging studies of livestock geographies in cities and towns of the global South view their presence from a perspective of objectification which is anthropocentric, Eurocentric and informed by the discourse of human exceptionalism. Thus, this body of work argues that although animal geography is a vibrant field of knowledge that has attracted a plethora of studies, the idiom of a Southern city has been disguised by the prevailing worldviews of narratives of animal geographies that originate from the West. Repositioning livestock geographies within the ‘Southern turn’ will lead to the revelation of limitations that truncate the illumination of the ‘animal turn’ to African cities. To do so, the study situates livestock geographies within the boundaries of the ‘Southern turn,’ discourse. It analyses limitations of the ‘animal turn’ when sedimented with the ‘Southern turn’ discourse. Furthermore, it discusses ways of decentering animal geographies to capture the analytics of an African city.