LittLe Monsters race, sovereignty, and Queer inhumanism in Beasts of the southern Wild Tavia Nyong’o introduction: Where the Wild things Were Four hundred years ago, the king of Poland presided over the first recorded attempt at wildlife preservation. A relative of the domestic cow, the wild aurochs once thrived across Europe, India, and North Africa. But hunting and human encroachment slowly reduced its habitat to, finally, just the Jaktorowska forest in Poland. For several hundred years, the last of the aurochs survived as property of the Polish crown. Only the king had the right to hunt them. As they dwindled further, the king himself abstained from their hunt, charged the local village with protecting the aurochs, and sent an inspector to perform a regular audit. This sov- ereign act was an early assertion of what Michel Foucault would later name bio- politics: the “power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” 1 As such an early assertion, it was weak and experimental, and it ultimately failed. For when King Zygmunt’s inspector arrived in 1630, he learned that the last of the aurochs had died years earlier, in what we today classify as “the first documented anthro- pogenic extinction.” 2 The horned relics of the last male aurochs were brought to the king, in whose keep they remained until carried off as a trophy to a rival’s armory in Stockholm, where they remain on view today. 3 What might this fable of the sovereign and his wild beast teach us today, as we confront the current threat of anthropogenic climate change? At a time when queer studies is confronting the posthumanist spatiotemporal scales suggested by the bringing into humanist analytical focus of the Anthropocene? 4 What happens GLQ 21:2 – 3 DOI 10.1215/10642684-2843335 © 2015 by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Published by Duke University Press