Rahul Rao

Project title

What Whales Want: a whale-oriented world order

Research question

How would imagining a world order constructed around the needs of animals, and specifically whales, unsettle our thinking around core preoccupations in social and political theory?

Project description

Whales have a uniquely unstable place in sociopolitical thought. Figured as Leviathan – the sea monster – the whale represents absolute surrender to God in the Book of Job and to the state in Hobbes’s eponymous text. But whales have also been treated as a natural resource ‘harvested’ by an industrial capitalism that hunted them to commercial extinction. In a post whaling moratorium world, the very societies that once hunted whales now regard them as totems for intelligence and emotional depth, in a belated and weak echo of Indigenous cosmologies that have long centred whales. Whales thus trouble the categories of humanist and posthumanist inquiry alike, simultaneously appearing subhuman, somewhat human and more-than-human.

Drawing inspiration from the more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences as well as a discernible interest in aquatic life in queer and trans studies, Rahul Rao asks how taking seriously the strivings of whales might unsettle thinking around core preoccupations of social and political thought. More specifically how have the interactions and entanglements between humans and whales forced them to revise and reconceive their worldmaking projects?

Humpback whale, photo by Conor Ryan

Selected publications

• The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2025).
• Out of Time: the queer politics of postcoloniality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).