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"Wild by Nature answers the question: how did indigenous animals shape the course of colonization in English America? The book argues that animals acted as obstacles to colonization because their wildness was at odds with Anglo-American legal assertions of possession. Animals and their pursuers transgressed the legal lines officials drew to demarcate colonizers' sovereignty and control over the landscape. Consequently, wild creatures became legal actors in the colonizing process--the subjects of statutes, the issues in court cases, and the parties to treaties--as authorities struggled to both contain and preserve the wildness that made those animals so valuable to English settler societies i...
Hunting for Empire offers a fresh cultural history of sport and imperialism. Greg Gillespie integrates critical perspectives from cultural studies, literary criticism, and cultural geography to analyze the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature. In doing so he produces a unique theoretical lens through which to study nineteenth-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives from the western interior of Rupert's Land. Sharply written and evocatively illustrated, Hunting for Empire will appeal to students and scholars of culture, sport, geography, and history, and to general readers interested in stories of hunting, empire, and the Canadian wilderness.
Mark Moss's The Media and the Models of Masculinity details the impact that the mass media has upon men's sense of identity, style, and deportment. From advertising to television shows, mass consumer culture defines and identifies how men select and sort what is fashionable and acceptable. Utilizing a large mine of mediated imagery, men and boys construct and define how to dress, act, and comport themselves. By engaging critical discussions on everything from fashion, to domestic space, to sports and beyond, readers are privy to a modern and fascinating account of the diverse and dominant perceptions of and on Western masculine culture. Historical tropes and models are especially important in this construction and influence and impact contemporary variations.
A critical assessment of how evidence in biological anthropology is discovered, collected and interpreted.
A fascinating look at how a commercial market for birds in the late nineteenth century set the stage for conservation and its legislation. Between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s, the United States witnessed the creation, rapid expansion, and then disappearance of a commercial market for hunted wild animals. The bulk of commercial wildlife sales in the last part of the nineteenth century were of wildfowl, who were prized not only for their eggs and meat but also for their beautiful feathers. Wild birds were brought to cities in those years to be sold as food for customers' tables, decorations for ladies' hats, treasured pets, and specimens for collectors' cabinets. Though relatively s...
"Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was t...
For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change. This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.
The Coloniality of Animal Monstrous Othering in Children’s Books, Films, and Toys examines how the portrayal of animals as physically distorted, behaviorally depraved, and intellectually defective serves to justify their debasement, violation, and destruction in materials directed toward young consumers. The author argues that this animal monstrous Othering arises from the Eurocentric belief in humans’ natural superiority over animals and the right to categorize animals in accordance with a scale of worthiness that parallels the subjugation of racialized persons. The chapters examine a variety of canonical figures like the dissolute wolf of Red Riding Hood stories and the disfigured titular character of the Wonky Donkey picture book alongside non-canonical animals including reprobate pigs, degenerate sharks, self-centered flamingos, and wicked piranhas. To counter this animal debasement, Varga juxtaposes these readings with an examination of materials that articulate harmonious animal-human interrelationships without dependence on styles of anthropomorphism that diminish animality.
The Lake Nipissing area is best known as a voyageur route between the Ottawa River and Georgian Bay visited by explorers, missionaries, and fur traders. All of these travellers, however, were on a journey elsewhere. This book focuses on the less well-known story of the area's transformation into a tourist destination between 1875 and 1955.
An environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, examining indigenous and settler knowledge of life in the cold.