Animality as border: Humans, Coloniality and the Zoopolitical

This article interrogates the human–animal divide as a foundational border in Western political thought, revealing its role in securing colonial sovereignty and subjectivity. Drawing on critical theory and decolonial scholarship, it argues that the category of the human is not ontologically given but produced through violent exclusions, particularly of racialised, colonised, and migrant lives rendered as animal. The concept of the zoopolitical, as articulated by Derrida and Vaughan-Williams, frames the border as a translating machine that disciplines alterity into legible forms for governance. Through literary analyses of Kafka and Armfield, the paper explores how subjectivity dissolves the imagined threshold of the human, exposing the instability of this border. Rather than advocating inclusion, it foregrounds the epistemic violence of machine translation and the fictionality of human coherence. Ultimately, the article calls for a critique of the politics of bordering that shape contemporary life.