Posthumanist Urbanism: Nonhuman Perspectives in Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris (2020)

Abstract

Urban literature has traditionally reinforced species hierarchies by portraying cities as exclusively human spaces and animals as either symbolic figures or marginal presences. Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris (2020) disrupts this anthropocentric structure by placing sentient nonhuman characters at the centre of the narrative. Through the escaped racehorse Perestroika, the raven Frida, and the dog Paras, the novel explores how nonhuman beings actively navigate, inhabit, and ethically reshape the modern city. This paper examines how Smiley unsettles species hierarchies by granting animals narrative perspective, agency, and relational subjectivity. Taking a reference of Cary Wolfe’s critique of humanist subjectivity, Peter Singer’s principle of equal consideration of interests, Kari Weil’s emphasis on animal vulnerability, and Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, the analysis demonstrates that the novel moves beyond mere representation to perform a posthumanist intervention. In Smiley’s re-imagined Paris, the city is no longer a bounded human domain but a multi-species contact zone where boundaries between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, and reason and instinct are actively contested. By foregrounding nonhuman sensory experience and interspecies alliances without falling into reductive anthropomorphism, Smiley reveals the ethical limitations of anthropocentric urban planning and social organisation. The mare’s quiet claim to urban freedom and her tentative bonds with other animals and humans gesture toward an alternative ethics of coexistence grounded in shared vulnerability and mutual recognition. Ultimately, the novel challenges readers to reconsider the moral and political implications of species hierarchies in contemporary urban life and to imagine more inclusive forms of belonging that extend ethical consideration across species lines.