Zoopolitical Agency without Recognition: Animals, Politics, and History in Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

This essay argues that Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out exposes the political manipulation of animals while presenting them as agents of political life and historical change. Drawing on Critical Animal Studies and zoopolitical thought, it develops two connected arguments. First, the socialist pig-raising campaign makes animals instruments of production and political achievement, yet their responses to feeding, breeding, display, and violence also shape the relations through which they are governed. Their political agency emerges within these unequal relations and can both contest and reproduce domination. Second, the novel attempts to write a history of animals by presenting them as protagonists whose actions affect the course of village and family history. Animal narration and successive reincarnations bring these actions, experiences, and consequences into an account of China’s transformation from land reform to the new millennium. Through literary imagination, the novel gives narrative form to animal experience and brings these companions into a history largely recorded and written by humans.