Animal Histories

I have long been hesitant to embrace the turn to studies of animals in history. It has a long trend, to be sure. But there has been a bit of an acceleration recently. Last year the standout success of Alison Bashford’s The Huxleys made me pay some attention to it. Three titles in particular are on my plate at the moment. This is a small gasp of outside reading before I hunker down and tackle new titles during the semester (more on that in a bit). First up is Bob Morrissey’s People of the Ecotone. It makes the case, very powerfully, about how we can see and think about colonialism differently. At its most basic level, it invites us to think about who is an agent in history, and why. Each chapter is wonderfully revisionist while being readable and short. I’m turning next to two titles that begin to think about human difference, and kinds of inheritable difference we might call “race,” in context of animal histories. Marcy Norton’s The Tame and Wild offers a framework of extraction and familiarization, instead of (or in addition to) colonial encounter and exchange. She shows very well the interrelation between forms of extraction that included animals along with so many other forms of exploitation. Mackenzie Coolie’s The Perfection of Nature takes a different approach to give a pre-history of eugenics and shows how categories like species, genus, taxon (which were mainstays of scientific racism) had a history connected to animals that long pre-dated their more notorious nineteenth century history.

All three have given me a lot to think about, and I think they will all appear on a syllabus before too much longer so I can really come to terms with these wonderful histories.