Singha the Courtesy Lion and the Merlion, a touristic icon, are among several leonine symbols deployed by the Singaporean state in its persistent effort to manage national identity and police subjectivity. Artists have responded with playful and affective inscriptions of a “feline imaginary” that expands and contests the narrow terms of the official symbology.

In the cultural productions of contemporary Evangelical communities, a surfeit of cute—that is, infantilized and unthreatening—animal figures participate in and bolster a sacrificial logic of substitution that in turn underwrites a mode of violent apocalyptic thinking to which the secular public sphere is far from immune.

The methods by which animal performance is made legible to audiences depend upon a historically contingent set of material practices and social relationships among humans and animals: an “animal apparatus” that is distinctly “middle-brow” and implicated in constructions of bourgeois subjectivity. However, the fleshly presence of the animal also routinely causes it to exceed this order of signification, offering a site for an ethics of resistance to anthropogenic ideologies.

Three scenes of performance, corresponding to a parallel effort by Giorgio Agamben in his critique of the “anthropological machine,” suggest a strategy of “negative mimesis” to counter the stubborn anthropocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition.

The experimental art scene in post-Tiananmen China has featured an array of animal bodies, both living and dead, as well as interspecies encounters ranging from the playful to the sadistic, from the gently collaborative to the violently conflictual, which interrogate and destabilize contemporary constructions of the nature-culture binary.

The face-to-face encounter between human and animal, a key trope in the discourse of contemporary Animal Studies as well as of zooësis—the broad field of cultural animal representations—offers a way to chart the effect of the animal presence on traditional performance genres, including tragedy.

A close reading of two images paired by way of introduction to an important scientific/activist text reveals a century's worth of performative negotiations with the figure of the ape, from post-Darwinian “missing link” to genetic sibling.

The most successfully integrated of humanity's animal “others,” the dog surpasses all other animals in the length and complexity of its relationship to human beings. To initiate a “cartography of the canine” is both to remember a rich history and to envisage, along with many artists, new possibilities for this enduring companionship.