Otherness, Discrimination, and Cats in Eugene Trivizas's The Last Black Cat

Abstract

This paper examines Greek writer Eugene Trivizas's 2001 crossover animal fantasy The Last Black Cat, considering the implications of using the trope of the animal both to interrogate the construction of black cats as Other and to challenge examples of prejudice, or rather the grounds of prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating. Extended consideration is devoted to the ways in which the narrative produces black cats as the marginalised and demonised Other of both humans and other cats, while at the same time it questions the culturally established hierarchy between humans and animals, and the paradigm of animal victim. It is argued that the focus on how the human/animal relations are articulated in Trivizas's novel makes it possible to perceive both the irrationality of the ideology behind the discrimination and the beast in humankind; in others words, by using misfortunes of animals as a tool for social criticism it subverts dominant discriminatory discourses and redefines prevailing ideas of humanity.