Animals in the American Imagination

ABSTRACT

This introduction to this special issue of Comparative American Studies outlines the significance of animals - in particular animal representations - to the US imagination. As the two national animals, the bald eagle and the American bison encapsulate some of the paradoxes characteristic of American animals: charged with symbolic force but nearly driven to extinction - only to become part of American success stories of conservation and restoration.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal representations
• American studies
• anthropocentrism
• animals
• US national imaginary

American Icons: An Encyclopedia of the People, Places, and Things That Have Shaped Our Culture (2006) includes over a hundred entries on historical figures such as General Custer and Martin Luther King, film stars such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, musicians such as Tupac Shakur and Elvis Presley, star athletes such as Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali, places such as the US–Mexico border and Route 66, and commodities and objects such as guns and Harley Davidson motorcycles. In their preface to the collection, Dennis and Susan Hall explain that an icon (a) ‘generates strong responses; people identify with it, or against it’; (b) ‘stands for a group of related things and values’; (c) ‘has roots in historical sources, as various as folk culture, science, and commerce’; (d) ‘can be reshaped within its own image, or extended in updated images by its adaptations or imitators’; (e) ‘moves or communicates widely, often showing the breakdown of former distinctions between popular culture and art or historic American culture’; (f) ‘can be employed in a variety of ways, and used in visual art, music, film, and other media’; and (g) ‘is usually successful in commerce’ (2006, xvii–xviii).

Based on the selection presented in the collection, three animals meet these criteria: the bear, the dinosaur, and the horse. One may wonder why the bald eagle, which has been enshrined in the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and the American bison, which was designated the United States’ second national animal in 2016, are not deemed iconic, but one may just as much wonder about the editors’ decision to include entries on Las Vegas and Miami but none on New York City or Los Angeles – perhaps they did not want to opt for the most obvious examples, but this is not a satisfying explanation for why some seemingly quintessential American icons are not featured in the collection. However, speculating about the reasons that led to the final selection of American icons is a moot point; what promises to be more insightful is the question what makes the bear (not Ursus americanus – that is, the American black bear – nor one of the North American varieties of the brown bear, the grizzly and Kodiak bear), the dinosaur (not a specific species that inhabited what today is US territory, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops horridus, and Brachiosaurus altithorax), and the horse (not, say, the mustang) specifically American icons.

In the entry on the bear, Richard Sanzenbacher acknowledges the bear’s significance in Native American cultures before suggesting that the bear functions both as an ‘icon of […] savage wilderness’ (2006, 61) and an emblem of cuteness and cuddliness. Sanzenbacher illustrates the latter point through not only teddy bears but also the bear phenomenon in gay subcultures (see, e.g. Wright 1997). On the one hand, the bear’s Americanness thus seems to be anchored in the animal’s role in Native American cultures; on the other, the bear is intimately tied to Anglo-American civilization’s quintessential Other: wilderness, in the context of which the discourses of cuteness and cuddliness become means to domesticating the beast, controlling its wildness. To be sure, depending on the specific Native American culture one focuses on, bears are life-givers, life-renewers, and master foragers, among others (see, e.g. Rockwell 1991), but similar observations may be made about various pre-Christian cultures in Europe and Asian cultures: ‘The Alaskan brown bear and its close relative the grizzly are considered by most North American Indians as very powerful “people”, on a level with shamans in their ability to control the supply of animals, to heal, to prophesy the future and govern the seasons’, Robert Bieder explains and continues, ‘Some Asian people today hold similar ideas about the brown bear’ (Bieder 2004, 38–39).

As much as the connection to Native American cultures acknowledges certain universal tendencies in imagining bears among non-Christian cultures, the cultural fascination with the bear’s ferocity is not unique to the United States, either. ‘The bear’s destructive force and power could be used to turn a profit’, and bears were thus transformed into ‘a popular form of “entertainment”’ in medieval Europe, Bieder notes (2004, 104). However, the Lewis and Clark expedition provides a particular connection between the then-‘unconquered’ territory of the West and grizzly bears. In their journal entries of May 5, 1805, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis portray the grizzly as a ‘verry large and a turrible looking animal’, which was ‘extreemly hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts he swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar […]. We had no means of weighing this monster; Capt. Clark thought he would weigh 500 lbs. [… H]e measured 8 Feet 7½ Inches from the nose to the extremety of the hind feet […]; his tallons which were five in number on each foot were 4⅜ Inches in length’ (1805). Upon examining the dead creature up close, Lewis concluded that the animal was a ‘monster’. Lewis and Clark’s descriptions may be considered the beginning of depicting the grizzly bear ‘as a ravening, snarling, bloodthirsty beast’ that opposes the white man’s conquest of the continent (Schullery 2002, 101).

Mark A. Wilson (2006) introduces the dinosaur as a means for popularizing science and an exemplar of how science evolves – reflected in how the image of the dinosaur has changed since the British scientist Richard Owen noticed shared traits in the anatomies of a group of extinct creatures, for which he ‘propose[d] the name of Dinosauria’ (Owen 1842, 103). In many ways, the dinosaur, as Michael Freeman has put it, ‘stood proxy for a whole range of currents within early and mid-Victorian thought’ (Freeman 2004, 4), arguably making it an icon of Victorian England before fossil hunters on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean began to uncover the remains of prehistoric creatures ‘of incredibly huge proportions, and, in many cases, more weird and strange than the imagination would conceive’ (Hutchinson 1893, xi). The dinosaur’s Americanness – which Richard Fallon so convincingly illustrates in his study of the transnational (scientific and literary) development of the dinosaur, in which he demonstrates how ‘an array of writing on dinosaurs – fiction and non-fiction, scholarly and popular’ (Fallon 2021, 2) transformed dinosaurs from ‘British lizards to multiform American monsters’ (Fallon 2021, 7) between the 1880s and 1910s – remains rather implicit in Wilson’s elaborations.

Barrett Shaw’s contribution on the horse makes explicit that ‘Equus couldn’t be more American’, as ‘[i]ts earliest ancestor […] inhabited the jungles of what is now the United States 50 million years ago’ (Shaw 2006, 349) before spreading across the world and vanishing from the Americas around 10,500 BC (Kavar and Dovč 2008). However, the horse ‘made a triumphant return to its homeland on the vessels of the Spanish conquerors’ (Shaw 2006, 349). Shaw’s word choice (‘triumphant return’) is troubling not only because the horse was deployed as a tool of colonial conquest but also because the horses that Europeans brought to the Americas and which escaped or were set free were – and are – invasive species. And invasive species tend to have negative impacts on native species: studies suggest that free-roaming horses decrease plant diversity and impact native wildlife’s use of water resources (David and Boyd 2019).

Returning to Shaw’s chapter, after outlining the history of the horse and human –horse relationships across the globe, he briefly focuses on horse-racing before turning his attention to how literature and popular culture have imagined the human–horse relationship, in particular how it oscillates between one of ownership/the horse as commodity and a very intimate bond between the domesticated animal and the human (in this context, see Justyna Włodarczyk’s contribution to this special issue). Interestingly, Shaw never mentions the horse as an icon of the American West, which would not only further cement the connection between the horse and colonialism established by the notion of its ‘triumphant return’ to the Americas on European ships but also help further explain the horse’s distinctive Americanness.

Even though none of the three chapters on animals in American Icons succeeds in convincing us that the bear, the dinosaur, or the horse are American icons, all three essays testify to how bears, dinosaurs, and horses permeate the popular imagination. From figuring as sports team mascots and their plastic and plush miniature models functioning as toys to their constant presence in film and television, these animals have varied meanings and functions in American culture, including some that may be easily forgotten: horses work as ranch horses, police horses, and therapy horses, among others, while bears may reduce human bodies to sources of protein, spectacularly imagined not only in horror movies but also television documentaries (see Fuchs 2018). In this context, one may think of Werner Herzog’s fascinating yet (or, rather, because) extremely contentious Grizzly Man (Herzog 2005), in which the German director/voice-over narrator critiques the film’s pathetic and miserable (as constructed by Herzog) protagonist Timothy Treadwell for his unfettered romanticism and attendant naivete that he could live in harmony with grizzlies (and other wildlife) in Alaska, opining that ‘the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder’. In the documentary, the fatal encounter between Treadwell and a bear comes to epitomize this worldview.

The binary between the romanticization of nature and what might be considered the reality of life on a planet indifferent to (yet exposed to and altered by) the presence of humans that Herzog constructs reflects the role of animals in human cultures on a more general level. Kari Weil has explained that ‘the idea of “the animal” […] has functioned as an unexamined foundation on which the idea of the human’ has been based (Weil 2012, 23). Animals, some scholars have suggested, are ‘radically other’ (Oliver 2009, 4).¹ Indeed, in Jacques Derrida’s reflections on his cat looking at his naked body, the cat’s gaze becomes ‘the point of view of the absolute other’ and a marker of the cat’s ‘absolute alterity’ (Derrida 2006, 26; our translation). This (purportedly) unconditional otherness reveals human limitations and renders possible the construction, and consequent recognition, of ‘the human’. In addition, the cat’s gaze, Derrida suggested, draws attention to how the construction of ‘the human’ is contingent upon ‘the animal’, which, in turn, implies the interdependence between, and the mutual co-production of, the human and the animal. Through the animal, the human produces itself and recognizes parts of itself that it seeks to suppress or repress. At the same time, however, positive traits associated with animals may also be projected onto humans (and vice-versa). Consider these four brief episodes about human–animal encounters and relationships in American history.

On 15 August 1648, ‘Mr. Allen of Dedham’ delivered a sermon in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While he was ‘preach[ing] out of Acts 15’, a snake suddenly appeared. Although the reptile’s appearance first caused some disorder, one of the elders quickly stepped on its head while another man killed the creature using a pitchfork. For the congregation, ‘it [was] out of doubt’ that ‘the serpent [was] the devil’. ‘The devil’, John Winthrop stressed, ‘had formerly and lately attempted [the Puritan community’s] disturbance and dissolution, but their faith […] overcame him’ (Winthrop [1630–1649] 1996] 1996, 342). The Puritans believed that the creature was the Devil in disguise, trying to prevent their communion with their god. The snake was a monster they had to extinguish to prove not only their faith in God but also their divine ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’ (Gen. 1: 26 KJV). Over the course of the next 150 years, this Christian notion of human dominion over the planet would evolve into the Anglo-American belief that it was white settlers’ ‘manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the [North American] continent which Providence had given [them] for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government’ (O’Sullivan 1845, 12), which made possible the westward expansion of the nineteenth century.

While the Puritans’ encounter with a snake in the mid-1600s could be said to epitomize America’s desire to dominate the nonhuman world, a very different beast played a key role in the formation of the national identity after the American Revolution. As early as 1705, colonists excavated a five-pound fossilized mastodon tooth near Albany, New York. The American incognitum (as the mastodon was frequently referred to at the time) became a source of fascination in post-revolutionary America, and its ‘bones began to take their place in the nation’s public culture, celebrated in American literature and displayed in the nation’s first natural history museums’ (Semonin 2000, 186). Thomas Jefferson considered the mastodon the ideal vehicle to counter Georges-Louis Leclerc’s (more widely known by his title, Comte de Buffon) argument concerning the New World’s natural degeneracy – ‘that nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than […] on the other’, as Jefferson paraphrased the idea (Jefferson [1785] 1832, 44). The American incognitum was ‘a prehistoric monster’ whose ‘mighty jaws symbolized simultaneously the savagery of prehistoric nature and the American nation’s dominion over the natural world’ (Semonin 2000, 135). In other words, the extinct creature became a symbol of the fledgling nation’s imagined abundance, force, and vitality. However, the animal ‘did not maintain this iconic status, as the fact of its extinction became firmly established [in the first half of the nineteenth century], probably because its fate augured ill for the young republic’s future’ (Sweet 2021, 2).

In 1913, William T. Hornaday reflected on ‘the development of the American colonies of 1712 into the American nation of 1912’ and noted that ‘when the American people received this land from the bountiful hand of Nature, it was endowed with a magnificent and all-pervading supply of valuable wild creatures’ (Hornaday 1913, 1). Of course, this notion of the vastness of the North American continent and its abundant natural resources (wildlife included) goes farther back than 1712, being expressed in letters by early Spanish and then British and French explorers. For example, in Description of New England (1616), John Smith concludes, ‘Heer nature and liberty affords us that freely, which in England we want, or it costeth us dearely’ (1616, 38). While Hornaday viewed critically the ongoing extermination of birds, cautioning his fellow Americans ‘not rush blindly on until we perpetrate a continent destitute of wild life’ (Hornaday 1913, 6),² an animal particularly close to his heart was the American bison. When Hornaday wrote a book devoted to the bovid a few years prior to Our Vanishing Wild Life (Hornaday 1913), he imagined that ‘the early pioneers of the last century thought buffalo were abundant’ in the eastern states, but ‘the herds which lived east of the Mississippi were comparatively only mere stragglers from the innumerable mass which covered the great western pasture region from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Rio Grande to Great Slave Lake’ (Hornaday 1889, 388). However, by the early twentieth century, the American bison was ‘saved from being wholly extinct as a wild animal by the remnant of about 300 head in northern Athabasca, and 49 head in the Yellowstone Park’ (Hornaday 1913, 9). Hornaday concluded that ‘[t]he primary cause of the buffalo’s extermination, and the one which embraced all others, was the descent of civilization, with all its elements of destructiveness, upon the whole of the country inhabited by that animal’ (Hornaday 1889, 464). Indeed, despite (or maybe because of) being a symbol of the American West, the bison was killed en masse in the latter half of the nineteenth century.³ Estimates suggest that at least thirty million specimens were killed between the 1830s and 1890s (Morris 2015, 73) – which is about the number of cattle slaughtered annually for the meat industry in the United States today – even if ‘”[s]ixty million bison” ha[d] long been as close to religious dogma as a secular society’s beliefs can be’ (Lott 2002, 69). After President Obama had signed the National Bison Legacy Act, which turned the American bison into the United States’ second national animal, news outlets pointed out that part of why the bison was named the national mammal was because its (hi)story ‘represents the country’s first successful foray into wildlife conservation’ (Izadi 2016), effectively turning the story of the near-extermination of the bison into an American success story.

During the tenure of President Obama’s successor, the United States was not only hit by the COVID-19 pandemic but also witnessed the appearance of the first specimens of the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) on US soil. Coinciding with the second wave of the ‘Chinese virus’, scientists discovered the first nest of ‘murder hornets’ in Washington state in early October 2020. Most news outlets were quick to point out that murder hornets kill fewer people in Asia than bees, wasps, and hornets do in the United States, but they also highlighted the actual threat that the invasive species poses: ‘they decapitate native honey bees, which are critical to the overall food chain and agriculture’ (Scientists in Washington 2020; emphasis added). In this context, one should remember that Europeans introduced Apis mellifera to North America in the early seventeenth century; that is, the honeybee is, in fact, not native to the United States (e.g. Whitfield et al. 2006, 643).

Similar to white settler-colonialists claiming nativity in the New World (in particular vis-à-vis later immigrants), the discourses surrounding the murder hornet threatening the honeybee reflected nativist sentiments. In Strangers in the Land (Higham 1955), John Higham defines nativism as an ‘intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e. “un-American”) connections’ (Higham 1955, 4). In a later essay, he specifies that ‘nativism always divided insiders, who belonged to the nation, from outsiders, who were in it but not of it’ (Higham 1999, 384). Although Higham’s notion of ‘belonging to the nation’ may not seem to apply to animals, the emphasis on honeybees’ significance to agriculture and various ecosystems in discourses about the murder hornet cements honeybees’ imagined Americanness. And the invasive Asian murder hornets threaten these American bees’ lives, American ecosystems, and part of the American economy.

The ultra-low-budget horror movie Murder Hornets (Ferguson 2021) taps into this discourse. Accompanied by uplifting – perhaps even ‘cute’ – music and images of honeybees on various kinds of plants, a calm voice-over notes in the film’s opening moments, ‘Imagine, if you will, a sweet, innocent, little American honeybee, just buzzing around, pollinating flowers, doing bee shit. The bee stops on a beautiful rose, it dips its sweet, little mandibles into the delicious pollen when’ – suddenly, the visual and sound design change dramatically. An exaggeratedly aggressive (to the point that it becomes ridiculous, but that’s in the nature of these types of movies) voiceover continues, ‘[I]t’s attacked, torn limb from limb and shooed into a sticky paste by an awful, evil beast of a creature: the murder hornet […]. The Asian giant hornet […] is the world’s largest hornet. It’s native to mainland China and parts of the Russian far-east’ (Ferguson 2021). While the giant hornet does, indeed, inhabit China and Russia, its geographic distribution is not limited to these two countries, using the somewhat ambiguous descriptor ‘Asian’ to leverage fears and anxieties related to Russia and China. As a matter of fact, the voiceover zeroes in on the latter outside threat, explaining, ‘In March of 2020, a swarm of murder hornets came into contact with a dangerous military chemical created by the Chinese government’ that led to mutations and made them more aggressive (Ferguson 2021), feeding off conspiracy theories that associated the emergence of COVID-19 with experiments by the Chinese government. Although the movie accordingly acknowledges the material effects of the giant hornet’s invasion of US territory on honeybees’ lives, this is merely a springboard for a narrative that reduces the murder hornets to vehicles for negotiating US Americans’ xenophobic anxieties.

This question of how representations necessarily project anthropocentric concepts and ideas onto animals concern many of the authors contributing to this special issue. Brett Mills confronts this problem head-on by imagining a shark’s response to how various discourses, in particular in Jaws and discourses surrounding Steven Spielberg’s iconic shark movie, frame the shark. A creative-academic hybrid, ‘Jaws, from the Shark’s Point of View’ exposes the anthropocentrism of (in particular cinematic) discourse, asking us to find ways to represent sharks in ways that do not conform to the Hollywood-created stereotype of a maneater that is not only reduced to its dorsal fin and jaws but also becomes particularly meaningful in its moment of death. Kirsten Møllegaard’s article, ‘Shark Tales: Hawaiian Epistemologies and Indigenous Resistance in Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues and Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors’, takes up this task. By exploring the two contemporary novels mentioned in its subtitle, Møllegaard’s contribution to this special issue highlights the interrelationships between sharks and humans in Hawaiian culture. Rejecting Western ideas of what sharks are while celebrating indigenous epistemologies and narrative traditions, Shark Dialogues (1994) and Sharks in the Time of Saviors (2020), Møllegaard argues, connect traditional Hawaiian knowledge and forms of storytelling to the realities of contemporary Pacific islander life, emphasizing our obligation to take care of the ocean, marine life, and the entire planet.

The next four articles explore the intersections between science and storytelling/representation. In the first contribution to this section, ‘Maritime Encounters in the American Midwest’, Alison Fields discusses two inland exhibitions of whales in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the declining whaling industry and developments in natural history and curatorial practices of the time, the two exhibitions confronted the complex issue of displaying the respective whale. Although both exhibitions embraced the spectacle that the gigantic, dead bodies provided, Fields emphasizes their differences: beyond different approaches to transporting and displaying the whales, the Pioneer Inland Association’s exhibition aimed to provide what today might be called ‘edutainment’, while the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition was a decidedly scientific endeavor, funded by the US government. In ‘Discovering the Living Fossil Short Story in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Richard Fallon examines two early examples of short stories in which modern humans encounter prehistoric creatures. Against the backdrop of the growing acceptance of extinction in scientific and popular discourses and the then-prevailing notion that early humans might have co-existed with dinosaurs, Fallon observes that Harry Danforth’s ‘The Last Dragon’ (1871) just as much incorporates narratives about human encounters with savage animals in colonial settings as it upsets natural order by placing a prehistoric creature into a modern setting (albeit a colonial setting that is forever suspended in the past) and challenging nineteenth-century classifications of animals. Wardon Allan Curtis’s ‘The Monster of Lake LaMetrie’ (1899), on the other hand, reflects the crisis of masculinity of the era: urbanized and softened, the story’s protagonist seems ill-prepared for his encounter with a prehistoric creature in the West. Theo Joy Campbell likewise explores the intersections between science and nineteenth-century fiction, looking in particular at the intersections of species discourse in natural history and the establishment of racial categories in the early United States. In ‘Brom Bones Meets the Count de Buffon: Race, Biopower, and Natural History in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”,’ they discuss Washington Irving’s iconic short story, looking at how the narrator, Dietrich Knickerbocker, engages with Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804) to explore the intimately interconnected concepts of species and race. By rendering porous the line separating the human from the animal in the story, Campbell suggests, Irving questions the use of science to establish racial categories. In the final article that specifically focuses on the connection between animal representations and science, Brian James Leech draws on the real-world use of canaries in coal mines to indicate the presence of poisonous gasses. After providing a short history of the use of canaries in coal mines, Leech demonstrates how this real-world application of birds as portents of disaster has moved to the symbolic domain. Leech illustrates the symbolic use of birds as a warning sign in a variety of horror and science fiction films, such as The Birds (1963) and Arrival (2016), suggesting that the birds point at dangers that tend to be difficult to identify.

While the topic of human–animal relationships looms large over all contributions to this special issue, it becomes particularly prominent in the final three articles. As we already indicated above, Justyna Włodarczyk’s ‘Domestication Western-Style: Fantasies of Harmony and the Violence of Plasticity in Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka’ explores human–horse relationships in O’Hara’s novel, which simultaneously centers on the relationship, perhaps even love, between a particular boy and a particular horse and the process of domestication. Domestication is the violent subjection of animals to human ideas and institutions in order to make the animals useful to humans. Within the western setting, Włodarczyk suggests, the story of domesticating an untamed, seemingly indomitable mustang echoes in the violent conquest and colonization of inhospitable land, uncivilized humans, and wild animals: similar to how the wilderness will never be fully cultured, so will the domesticated animals never entirely shed their primal nature. Samantha Baugus’s essay ‘Press X to Pet: A Critical Analysis of Dog-Petting Mechanics in High-Profile (MMO)RPGs’ moves, as its title suggests, to the question of petting dogs in videogames, digital role-playing games, more specifically. Baugus argues that the expectations and mechanics of RPGs, which center on violence, are at odds with the players’ desire to pet dogs. This desire for ‘petability’, as she calls it, is closely intertwined with the ‘killability’ of animals in gameworlds – both exemplify anthropocentric dominance, as animals (or ‘anyone in the animal position’, as Baugus puts it) are objectified: killed and/or turned into objects for human use. This idea of objectification also plays a central role in the final article of this issue, Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s ‘Animal Ownership and Ecological Consciousness in Three American Horror Texts’. Exploring two movies and a comic series, van Leeuwen highlights the perceived superiority of Western civilization over the natural world. The three texts reveal different dimensions of this haunted relationship between humankind and animals. In Burning Bright (2010), owning a tiger to make money mirrors a white man’s relationship with not only the illegal workers he employs but also his family. In typical animal horror fashion, the tiger eventually takes revenge on the capitalist system by devouring the man. In Pet (2016), a woman rejects a man’s (who works in a dog shelter) advances, leading him to keeping her imprisoned like the dogs he cares for. After a turn of events, she turns the tables on him, indicating the dark outgrowths of devolving human relationships in the contemporary megacity of Los Angeles. Animosity (2017–2021), finally, raises the question of what would happen if animals could wield the power of human language and had agency equal to humans.

Together, the articles included in this special issue demonstrate that animals ‘inform our ideas through an infinity of models, thematic variations, [and] existential possibilities’ to the point that ‘[o]ur life as humans […] is founded on animal signs’ (Marchesini 2016, 115). Indeed, animals, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously suggested, are ‘good to think’ (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2002, 118; our translation).⁴ From an animal studies perspective, Lévi-Strauss’s position testifies to an implied anthropocentrism that could (or even should) be challenged, for ‘[w]hat is at stake ultimately is our own ability to think beyond ourselves’ (Fudge 2002, 22). Although such posthuman sentiments emerge from some of our authors’ contributions and the diverse cultural artifacts that they explore, the role of animals in the American imagination is first and foremost a question of representation. In his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1977), John Berger asserts that ‘the essential relation between man and animal [prior to capitalism] was metaphor’ (Berger [1977] 1980, 5). In the nearly 50 years since its original publication, Berger’s essay has influenced generations of scholars because of how it probes the intertwined fates of humans and animals under the aegis of capitalism; however, Berger also romanticizes the pre-capitalist past, establishing a clear binary between a modern period of human-animal relations defined by alienation and the attendant marginalization of animals and an earlier, temporally indefinite period when animals ‘were with man at the centre of his world’ (Berger [1977] 1980, 1). The long-standing and pernicious assumption that has developed from this argument suggests that when animals (purportedly) began to disappear from Americans’ everyday lives in the nineteenth century, they came to inhabit the sphere of the imagination, largely ‘uninformed in any meaningful way by people’s interactions with actual animals’ (Mason 2005, 3). ‘[A]t the historical moment when they are receding from everyday view’, they become captured in images (Traisnel 2020, 2); they find ‘a proper habitat […] in the recording devices of the technological media’ (Lippit 2000, 25) as their numbers in the world outside dwindle. And while animal representations have most definitely been proliferating in the (audio)visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and we might be witnessing the dawn of the sixth mass extinction (or first mass extermination [McBrien 2019]), pets live in our homes, ‘pest species’ populate cities across the globe, and wild animals continue cohabiting Earth with us. But even that is significant.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Fuchs

Michael Fuchs is a postdoc in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. He is the co-editor of volumes such as The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture (Brill, forthcoming in 2024), Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and ConFiguring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity (Intellect Books, 2013). For more on his past and ongoing research, see www.michael-fuchs.info.

Anna Marta Marini

Anna Marta Marini holds a PhD from Universidad de Alcalá in Spain. Her research focuses on representations of the US-Mexico borderlands, Mexican American heritages, and Mexican politics, with a particular emphasis on states of exception, otherness, and identity re/construction, on which she has published extensively. She is the president of the PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies.

Notes

1. Cary Wolfe usefully reminds us that humans are ‘always radically other’ because of their ‘subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity’ (Wolfe 2008, 27).

2. It should be noted that Hornaday, for example, linked the decrease of migratory birds on which ‘farmers north and south depend for protection from the insect hordes’ and which are ‘the very birds that are most near and dear to the people of the North’ to ‘[t]he great increase in the slaughter of song birds for food, by the negroes and poor whites of the South’ (Hornaday 1913, x), in a way anticipating more recent self-righteous and culturally prejudiced (primarily white, middle- and upper-class, European, and North American) environmental movements.

3. This is a vast oversimplification, as the decimation of bison numbers started earlier. Historical bison numbers can only be estimated; however, Ernest Thompson Seton suggested that the number of American bison had already been reduced by a third between the arrival of European settlers and 1800, before then being cut in half in the next 50 years before the population was nearly wiped out in the next five decades (Seton [1924] 1953, 656–57).

4. Lévi-Strauss’s phrase is usually translated as ‘good to think with’, but he puns on ‘bonnes à manger’, which means ‘good to eat’; accordingly, ‘bonnes à penser’ means ‘good to think’ (or, arguably, ‘think about’) rather than ‘think with’.