2Animal Studies.

This chapter provides a critical overview of key 2022 publications in animal studies, a field examining human–animal relations as historically and culturally constructed rather than natural or inevitable. It highlights two postcolonial animal histories—Saheed Aderinto's *Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa* and Jonathan Saha's *Colonizing Animals*—which explore colonialism’s impact on animal subjecthood in Nigeria and Myanmar, respectively. The chapter also discusses contemporary cultural critiques of human–dog relationships, notably Margret Grebowicz's *Rescue Me*, and surveys interdisciplinary journal issues addressing animal futures, queer ecology, and the politics of animal representation. Finally, it reviews recent literary animal studies works, including Sune Borkfelt's *Reading Slaughter*, which analyzes slaughterhouse narratives as sites of invisibility and empathy, and introduces the author’s own monograph that theorizes literary form as central to understanding human–animal relations. Collectively, these works underscore animal studies’ ongoing commitment to historicizing and critiquing human–animal entanglements across diverse contexts.