The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall

This article examines the utopian and anti-anthropocentric possibilities of imagining nonhuman perspectives through a close reading of “We Were Here First” (1947), an episode of Wyllis Cooper’s radio series Quiet, Please (1947-1949). The episode’s insect narrator and its distinctive use of radio horror conventions invite listeners to “become insect,” temporarily displacing the human perspective and recasting humanity as the monstrous other in an interspecies war. Yet this apparent reversal of anthropocentrism ultimately reproduces its central logic: the insect world is imagined almost entirely through its antagonistic relationship to humanity, leaving little conceptual space for forms of nonhuman meaning that do not center the human. Nevertheless, by exposing the inability of the anthropocentric imagination to achieve genuine access to another species’ umwelt, “We Were Here First” reveals the limits of human mastery, opening alternative possibilities for interspecies co-becoming.