Making kingdoms out of beasts: animals and the British Raj

Restricted until 07 Aug. 2011. In Ornamentalism, David Cannadine asks the question: "What did the British Empire look like?" and proceeds to a detailed analysis of the manner in which the Raj presented and visualized itself. However, Cannadine's focus remains essentially human-centered, and almost completely ignores some of the strongest markers of the Raj: the tigers, elephants, boars, furs, and feathers that highlighted or obscured the human beneath and behind them, and that were such an important part of creating and maintaining the hierarchies that were the cornerstones of the Raj.; "Making Kingdoms Out of Beasts: Animals and the British Raj" explores the presence of the animal in the creation of the ideologies and spectacle that formed the British empire by uncovering the ways in which this animal not only reflected various colonial manipulations but was often, in fact, foundational to such manipulations. In this dissertation, I discuss the production and circulation of animal narratives in colonial India as a means of attending to the practices of knowing how constructs of beasts played into -- and were in turn influenced by -- a variety of forms of othering taking place in England during its imperial venture. I analyze the manner in which a variety of colonial animals were imagined and constructed in an attempt to understand both the reasons for, as well as the results of, such constructs.; Drawing upon a range of literary and other textual forms (hunting narratives, poetry, photographs, paintings, and cartoons, as well as the fiction of Kipling and Forster), this dissertation examines imperialism as manifested during the Raj through a posthumanist critique that uses postcolonial deconstruction in conjunction with an animal studies and eco-critical perspective. I argue that race, class, gender, age, and species do not exist in isolation, but must be read in intimate relation to one another if we are to have a fuller understanding of the writing and believing of colonial narratives. Given that the human/animal distinction is fundamental to most philosophies, investigating the presence of the animal in discourses of the Raj allows for a fascinating and unexpectedly naked access to the writing and believing of colonial narratives.