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Abstract
This essay combines visual studies, history, literature, and theory to traverse the nature of colonial, postcolonial and decolonizing thought through the eyes of a tiger. In what ways and through what images, the author asks, was tiger hunting central to the maintenance of colonial authority? What does a postcolonial tiger look like? Now, in light of new work in the field of postcolonial environmentalism, what does it mean to decolonize the tiger? The essay is written with a lightness of touch, but the author defends the necessity of laughter, subversion, and irony in our efforts to undo the enduring structures of colonial thought and myth.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2019).
2 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2000), p. 162; see David Fieldhouse, “For Richer, for poorer,” in PJ Marshall, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 108–146, 132.
3 Gilmour, Curzon, chapter 18.
4 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1901] 2011).
5 Raja Deen Dayal, “Lord Curzon hunting,” 1901. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lord_Curzon_Hunting_1901.jpg.
6 Deborah Dixon and John Grimes, “Capitalism, Masculinity and Whiteness in the Dialectical Landscape: The Case of Tarzan and the Tycoon,” GeoJournal 59, no. 4 (2004): 265–275; Joseph Sramek, “‘Face Him like a Briton:’ Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800–1875,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (2006): 659–68; Nick Cheesman, “Bodies on the line in Burma's criminal law reports, 1892–1922,” in Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar, ed Melissa Crouch and Tim Lindsey (London: Hart, 2014), 77–93.
7 For example, William Perry Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (DS Brewer, 2006).
8 See James Howe, “Fox Hunting as Ritual,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 2 (1981): 278–300; Michael Aradas, “The Etiquette of Social Violence: Hunting and the Nobility in Early Modern France” (Unpublished PhD diss., Purdue University, 2001), https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI3043698/.
9 See Matthew Whittle, “Lost trophies: Hunting Animals and the Imperial Souvenir in Walton Ford’s Pancha Tantra,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51, no. 2 (2016): 196–210; William Storey, “Big Cats and Imperialism: Lion and Tiger Hunting in Kenya and Northern India, 1898–1930,” Journal of World History 2, no, 2 (1991): 135–173. See also Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, “Reading the Trophy: Exploring the Display of Dead Animals in Hunting Magazines,” Visual Studies 18, no, 2 (2003): 112–122; Matt Cartmill, “Hunting and Humanity in Western Thought,” Social Research 62, no. 3 (1995): 773–786; Edward Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006).
10 John Mackenzie, Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Rajarshi Mitra, “Shooting Tigers in Early 20th Century India,” Imperial & Global Forum, 2018 https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2018/09/17/shooting-tigers-in-early-20th-century-india/. See William Rice, Tiger Shooting in India (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857); Captain Henry Shakespear, The Wild Sports of India (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860); Julius Barras, India and Tiger Hunting, 2 vols. (London: Rastall & Son, 1883).
11 Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1991), 124.
12 Ibid., 155.
13 Esp. Sramek, “Face Him like a Briton.”
14 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, [1952] 1986), 13.
15 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 64.
17 George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” in Essays (London: Penguin, 2000), 18–24, in Whittle, “Lost Trophies,” 207.
18 Merrick Burrow, “Things and Souvenirs: Imperial Masculinities,” Journal of Victorian Culture 18, no. 1) (2013): 72–92, 73, 83-5.
19 Whittle, “Lost Trophies,” 199.
20 See Storey, “Big Cats and Imperialism.”
21 See, amidst a large literature, Mahmood Mamdani, “Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform,” Social Research (1999): 859–886.
22 Photographer unknown, “George Curzon with His Wife Mary, Hyderabad, April 1902.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Curzon_with_his_wife_posing_with_a_hunted_Bengal_tiger,_1903.jpg
23 Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode, dirs.., Tiger King, 8 eps. (Netflix, 2020).
24 Colonialism and globalization.
25 Jean and John Comaroff, eds., Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jean and John Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 291–343; Jean and John Comaroff, eds., Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
26 Ken Hiltner, ed., Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (London: Routledge, 2015); Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry and Ken Hiltner, eds., Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2011).
28 David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
29 The case studies of Siam’s southern regions, and the Japanese in Formosa, are indicative: Paul Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s ‘Savage Border’, 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), Introduction; Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), chapter 3.
30 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 1–15.
31 The relationship between mythology, orientalism, and modern law is dissected with considerable aplomb in Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992).
32 Edward Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 175–192, 180; see also the discussion of imaginary geographies in Paul Milbourne and Kelvin Mason, “Environmental injustice and post-colonial environmentalism: Opencast coal mining, landscape and place,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 1 (2017): 29–46, 33.
33 Burrow, “The Imperial Souvenir,” 73–4.
34 Desmond Manderson, “Metastases of Myth: Legal Images as Transitional Phenomena,” Law and Critique 26, no. 3 (2015): 207–223.
35 Barthes, “Myth Today,” 143.
36 The references are of course to the key phrases associated with The Phantom.
37 John Hearne, “The Snow Virgin: An Inquiry into VS Naipaul’s ‘Mimic Men’,” Caribbean Quarterly 23, no. 2/3 (1977): 31–37, 32.
38 V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 146. See Rob Nixon, London Calling: VS Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
39 Homi Bhaba, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33, 130, 128.
40 John Smith, “The US South and the Future of the Postcolonial,” The Global South 1 no. 1 (2007): 153–58. See for example Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2015).
41 Michael Billig, “Commodity Fetishism and Repression: Reflections on Marx, Freud and the Psychology of Consumer Capitalism,” Theory & Psychology 9, no. 3 (1999): 313–329; Guido Schulz, “Marx’s Distinction between the Fetish Character of the Commodity and Fetishism,” Studies in Social and Political Thought 20 (2012): 25–45.
42 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish II – The origin of the fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring, 1987): 23–45; Alan Bass, “On the History of Fetishism: De Brosses and Comte,” The Undecidable Unconscious 2 (2015): 19–45; John Warne Monroe, Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).
43 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17; Donald Donham, “The Concept of the Fetish,” in The Erotics of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 28–32; Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism (Springer, 2016).
44 In addition to sources cited above, see Jean Michaud, ‘Incidental’ Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880–1930 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (LA & Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007).
45 See esp. Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish”; Bass, “On the History of Fetishism”; Donham, “The Concept of the Fetish.”
46 Homi Bhaba, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 131-2; Vivek Dhareshwar, “Self-fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul’s ‘The Mimic Men,’” Criticism 31 no. 1 (1989): 75–102, 78.
47 Bhaba, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 131–2.
48 Burrow, “Things and Masculinities.”
49 Rowland Ward, tiger armchair, in William Fitzgerald, ‘Animal Furniture,’ Strand Magazine 12 (1896): 273–80, 277; Burrow, “Things and Masculinities,” 84–89.
50 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) (New York: International Publishers, 1963).
51 Bhaba, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 130.
52 VS Naipaul, The Mimic Men, 250; Robert Greenberg, “Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul's Political Fiction: The Case of The Mimic Men,” Twentieth Century Literature 46 no. 2 (2000): 214–237.
53 Howard Clark, “Killing of Cecil the Lion Sparks Debate Over Trophy Hunts,” National Geographic, (2015). http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150728-cecil-lion-killing-trophy-hunting-conservation-animals.
54 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 36.
55 Christopher Loar, Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Antony Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century International Law,” Harvard International Law Journal 40 (1999): 1; Nusret Evcan, “Hobbesian Instinctual Reason versus Rousseau’s Instinctual Innocence: Backstage Logic of Colonial Expansions and Origin of the Left–Right Political Dichotomy,” Interventions 21, no. 7 (2019): 977–997.
56 In a very broad and comprehensive literature, see Bruce Buchan and Mary Heath, “Savagery and Civilization: From Terra Nullius to the ‘Tide of History’,” Ethnicities 6, no. 1 (2006): 5–26; Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (2007): 1–15.
57 E.g., Anthea Vogl, “Sovereign Relations? Australia’s ‘Off-Shoring’ of Asylum Seekers on Nauru in Historical Perspective,” in Against International Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2017), 158–174.
58 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chapter 2.
59 Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standiong? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Margaret Davies, “The Consciousness of Trees,” Law & Literature 27, no. 2 (2015): 217–235; Christine Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals,” (2005); JörgLeimbacher, Die Rechte der Natur (Basel und Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1988); Visa Kurki, A Theory of Legal Personhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
60 Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Australia), s. 487; Law of the Rights of Mother Earth 2010 (Bolivia); Paris Agreement, United Nations Treaty Collection, 8 July 2016.
61 Seth Appiah-Opoku, “Indigenous Beliefs and Environmental Stewardship: A Rural Ghana Experience,” Journal of Cultural Geography 24, no. 2 (2007): 79–98; Jeremy Firestone, Jonathan Lilley, and Isabel Torres de Noronha, “Cultural Diversity, Human Rights, and the Emergence of Indigenous Peoples in International and Comparative Environmental Law,” American University International Law Review 20 (2004): 219.
62 “Postcolonial Studies: Special Issue, Decolonizing the State 23 no. 2 (2020).
63 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222; Val Plumwood, “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature,” in William Adams and Martin Mulligan, eds., Decolonising Nature: Strategies for Conservations in a Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge, 2002); Jennifer Wolch, “Zoöpolis,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 7, no. 2 (1996): 21–47.
64 John Robert McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2016); Libby Robin and Will Steffen, “History for the Anthropocene,” History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694–1719.
65 See esp. Mount & O’Brien, “Postcolonialism and the Environment”; Bruno Latour, “What is to Be Done? Political Ecology!” in Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 221–28.
66 Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2015).
67 Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” in Ania Loomba, Ania, et al, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 233–51; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Graham Huggan & Helen Tiffin, “Green Postcolonialism,” Interventions 9, no. 1 (2007): 1–11, Dana Mount and Susie O’Brien, “Postcolonialism and the Environment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 21.
68 John McLeod, “Postcolonial Environments,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51, no. 2 (2016): 192–195, 193.
69 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
70 Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 197–8.
71 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide (London: Routledge, 2015).
72 Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 203.
73 Robert Miller, “Speaking with Forked Tongues: Indian Treaties, Salmon, and the Endangered Species Act,” Oregon Law Review 70 (1991): 543; Conrad Fjetland, “The Endangered Species Act and Indian treaty rights: a fresh look,” Tulane Environmental Law Journal 13, no. 1 (1999): 45–70.
74 Huggan and Tiffin, “Green Postcolonialism,” e.g. 9–10.
75 Bhim Gurung, James L. David Smith, Charles McDougal, Jhamak B. Karki, and Adam Barlow, “Factors associated with human-killing tigers in Chitwan National Park, Nepal,” Biological Conservation 141, no. 12 (2008): 3069–3078. See Euan Ritchie, and Christopher Johnson, “Predator Interactions, Meso-Predator Release and Biodiversity Conservation,” Ecology Letters 12, no. 9 (2009): 982–998; John Terborgh and James Estes, eds., Trophic Cascades: Predators, Prey, and the Changing Dynamics of Nature (Island Press, 2013).
76 Aditya Joshi, Srinivas Vaidyanathan, Samrat Mondol, Advait Edgaonkar, and Uma Ramakrishnan, “Connectivity of tiger (Panthera tigris) Populations in the Human-Influenced Forest Mosaic of Central India,” PLOS one 8, no. 11 (2013): e77980; Linda Kerley, John M. Goodrich, Dale G. Miquelle, Evgeny N. Smirnov, Howard B. Quigley, and Maurice G. Hornocker, “Effects of Roads and Human Disturbance on Amur Tigers,” Conservation Biology 16, no. 1 (2002): 97–108; Timothy O’Brien, Margaret Kinnaird, and Hariyo Wibisono, “Crouching Tigers, Hidden Prey: Sumatran Tiger and Prey Populations in a Tropical Forest Landscape,” Animal Conservation 6, no. 2 (2003): 131–139.
77 Latour, Politics of Nature; Casper Bruun Jensen, “Review Essay. Experimenting with Political Ecology,” Human Studies 29 (2006): 107–122.
78 Latour, Politics of Nature, 223.
79 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015); Sophie Berrebi, “Jacques Rancière: aesthetics is politics,” Art & Research 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–5; Jacques Rancière, La partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2000).
80 Enrique Galvan-Alvarez, Ole Birk Laursen and Maria Ridda, “Decolonising the State: Subversion, Mimicry and Criminality,” Postcolonial Studies, 23, no. 2 (2020): 161–169.
81 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 42; Diego Millan, “Wit’s End: Frantz Fanon, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Black Laughter,” in Special Issue, “Black Trans-Nationalism and the Discourse(s) of Cultural Hybridity,” South Atlantic Review 82, no. 4 (2017): 9–30.
82 See the discussion of epidermalization above.
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Desmond Manderson
Desmond Manderson is jointly appointed in the ANU Colleges of Law and of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He directs the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, designing innovative interdisciplinary courses with English, philosophy, art theory and history, political theory, and beyond. His books include From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993); Songs Without Music (2000); Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies and Critique (2018) and Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (2019). His latest play, Twenty Minutes with the Devil (with Luis Gomez Romero) premiered at The Street Theatre last year.