Imperial Creatures

Imperial Creatures

Author: Timothy P. Barnard

Publisher: National University of Singapore Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789813250871

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One of the areas of fastest-growing interest in the humanities and social sciences in recent years has been the history of animals. Imperial Creatures fills a gap in that field by looking across species at animals in a urban colonial setting. If imperialism is a series of power relationships, Timothy P. Barnard argues, then it necessarily involves not only the subjugation of human communities, but also of animals. What was the relationship between those two processes in colonial Singapore? How did interactions with animals enable changes in interactions between people? Through a multidisciplinary consideration of fauna, Imperial Creatures weaves together a series of tales to document how animals were cherished, monitored, employed, and slaughtered in a colonial society. All animals, including humans, Barnard shows, have been creatures of imperialism in Singapore. Their stories teach us lessons about the structures that upheld such a society and how it developed over time, lessons of relevance to animal historians, to historians of Singapore, and to urban historians and imperial historians with an interest in environmental themes.


The Animal Estate

The Animal Estate

Author: Harriet Ritvo

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780674037076

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Harriet Ritvo gives us a vivid picture of how animals figured in English thinking during the nineteenth century and, by extension, how they served as metaphors for human psychological needs and sociopolitical aspirations.


Colonizing Animals

Colonizing Animals

Author: Jonathan Saha

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1108839401

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A pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942 populated by animals.


Creatures of Empire

Creatures of Empire

Author: Virginia DeJohn Anderson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780195304466

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Renaissance Beasts

Renaissance Beasts

Author: Erica Fudge

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0252091337

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Animals, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain. Taking as its starting point the popularity of speaking animals in sixteenth-century literature and ending with the decline of the imperial Ménagerie during the French Revolution, Renaissance Beasts uses the lens of human-animal relationships to view issues as diverse as human status and power, diet, civilization and the political life, religion and anthropocentrism, spectacle and entertainment, language, science and skepticism, and domestic and courtly cultures. Within these pages scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss numerous kinds of texts--literary, dramatic, philosophical, religious, political--by writers including Calvin, Montaigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Through analysis of these and other writers, Renaissance Beasts uncovers new and arresting interpretations of Renaissance culture and the broader social assumptions glimpsed through views on matters such as pet ownership and meat consumption. Renaissance Beasts is certainly about animals, but of the many species discussed, it is ultimately humankind that comes under the greatest scrutiny.


The Forum

The Forum

Author: Lorettus Sutton Metcalf

Publisher:

Published: 1915

Total Pages: 816

ISBN-13:

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Current political, social, scientific, education, and literary news written about by many famous authors and reform movements.


Alien Kind

Alien Kind

Author: Rania Huntington

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1684173825

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To discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.


Imperial Beast Fables

Imperial Beast Fables

Author: Kaori Nagai

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 3030514935

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This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.


Imperial Nostalgia

Imperial Nostalgia

Author: Peter Mitchell

Publisher:

Published: 2021-07-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781526161314

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A short, polemical study of the persistence of imperial nostalgia in modern British culture, politics, heritage and media.