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Animal Extractions

Session will present: In-Person

The animal turn in ecocriticism offers scholars of the long nineteenth century productive new tools for investigating, critiquing, and disrupting visual representations of our relationship with animals. Visual and material cultures witness the ways we have engaged with, used, and abused animals: from food, clothing, labor, and transportation to scientific research to entertainment and companionship. Aside from the foundational works of John Berger and Jacques Derrida, recent contributions to critical animal studies challenge our inquiries into the aesthetics of human-animal encounters. Rethinking the scope of “natural resources,” this panel examines the extraction of animals and their status as coveted resources; as objects of exploitation, exchange, and profit; and as materials and motifs in the histories of art, craft, and design. How, we ask, is the history of art also a history of our relationship with animals? Why is the nineteenth century a time of change—or crisis—in a long history of living with and alongside animals? How would centering animals force us to reorient the ways we practice ecocritical art history?

Topics might include:

  • Intersections among animal extractions, the fur trade, the logging industry, agriculture, and settler colonialism
  • Animal products and materials: fur, feathers, bone, skin, oil, etc.
  • The visual and literary cultures of whaling, sealing, and fishing
  • Animal consumption
  • Indigenous relations to animals
  • Disappearance and extinction
  • Animal labor; animals as machines
  • Animals and mining
  • Animals as luxury materials in fashion and interior design
  • Breeding
  • Domestication and captivity
  • The pet trade
  • Zoological gardens
  • Interspecies relations
  • Animal agency
  • Animal cruelty/welfare movements

Field(s) of Study:
Time Period: Nineteenth Century
Time Period: Modern (1800-present)
Animal Studies
Topics: Environmental Art
Food Studies

Chairs:
Maura A. Coughlin, Northeastern University and Ivana Dizdar, University of Toronto

Arsenic and Old Hides: Plunder, Preservation, and Edward Kemeys’ Last Buffalo
Anne Ronan, Virginia Tech
Negotiating Modernity: The Cultural Role of Fur in Architectural Modernism of Fin de Siècle
Nathan Shui, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Architecture
Avian Histories of Photography
Daniel Peacock, George Eastman Museum
Feathered Gems: Martin Johnson Heade’s Hummingbirds and the Nineteenth Century Feather Industry
Francesca Soriano
Abstract Submissions Closed
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