TOWARD AN AFRICAN ANIMAL STUDIES TOWARD AN AFRICAN ANIMAL STUDIES: ON THE LIMITS OF CONCERN IN GLOBAL POLITICS By JESSE ARSENEAULT, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Jesse A.J. Arseneault, May 2016 McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2016) Hamilton, Ontario (English and Cultural Studies) TITLE: Toward an African Animal Studies: On the Limits of Concern in Global Politics AUTHOR: Jesse Arseneault, B.A. (Brock University), M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Helene Strauss NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 268 ii LAY ABSTRACT This thesis responds to the question of how we show concern for animals in postcolonial, globalized, and postconflict worlds. Drawing on the example of multiple texts in African literature, film, and other media, it explores how Africa itself has long been construed in the global imagination as a zone associated with animality. This association appears in texts produced within the West and Africa whose accounts of the continent imagine it to be outside the realm of human ethical concern. Demonstrating how exclusive human ethical concern is for African lives, both human and animal, this thesis argues for an ethics of concern that does not revolve around exclusively the human in postcolonial African studies. iii ABSTRACT This project attempts to bridge conversations between the predominantly Western canon of animal studies and the frequently humanist approach to postcolonial African studies. Drawing on these sometimes incompatible fields, this thesis proposes two premises that emerge from close readings of African cultural texts. First, “Africa” as a discursive construct has long been associated with animals, animality, and the category of the nonhuman, evident in, to give some examples, the current touristic promotion across the globe of African wildlife as an essential part of its continental identity, local and global anxieties over zoonotic transmissions of disease, and the history of race science’s preoccupation with animalizing black and indigenous African bodies. My second premise suggests that in postcolonial and especially African contexts ostensibly “human” concerns are inextricably tied to both the categorical limitations imposed by imperial paradigms of animalization and the precarious existence of nonhuman animals themselves, concern for whom is often occluded in anthropocentric postcolonial discourse. In my dissertation, I examine the role that texts play in directing affective relations of concern locally and globally, reading fictional texts as well as news media, conservation literature, and tourist advertisements. Through these works I examine the complex and often cantankerous politics of cultivating interspecies concern in postcolonial contexts, ranging from the globalized commodification of African wildlife and the dubious international policies that ostensibly protect it, the geography of the North American safari park, the animalization of queer bodies by African state leaders, textual representations of interspecies intimacy, and accounts of the Rwandan genocide. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I offer my thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, McMaster University’s Department of English and Cultural Studies, the University of the Free State’s Department of English, and Concordia University’s Department of English. All of these organizations provided invaluable intellectual support and the funding that realized this project. There are a range of people without whose input this project would never have been completed. Most important were those mentors whose enthusiasm and guidance— not to mention the long hours of reviewing my work—brought me to the end of the PhD. I owe thanks first and foremost to Helene Strauss for sticking with me through two degrees. I also thank Susan Spearey for first awakening my interest in postcolonial studies. To my committee members, Susie O’Brien and Anne Savage, I offer thanks for their generous commentary on my writing. All of the above shaped my own enthusiasm for this project and lent their support through its most difficult points. I offer my thanks as well to Rosemary Collard and Julia Freeman, both for making Montreal feel like home for me and the hopefully-evident traces of Friday cinq à sept conversations in this work. It is difficult to think of this thesis as being my own. To my mind, it belongs to those without whom it wouldn’t have been possible, the family, friends, colleagues, and communities that give life to my ability to write anything at all. They, in various ways, provided the raw materials for this work. Of my family I thank my mother, Sue Arseneault, first and foremost. Her generosity knows no bounds. I also thank my father, Joel Arseneault, as well as my sisters, Leah, Anna, and Emily. I also thank my close v friends: Rachel Cunningham, McKinley Raham, John Athanassiades, and Monica Drenth. I look forward to the long-overdue visits that will accompany the submission of this manuscript. To my fellow students at McMaster, graduated, still-to-graduate, and those having already escaped academia for their own reasons, I wish all the best: I thank Erin Julian, Sarah D’Adamo, Kasim Husain, Melissa Carol, Nick Buffo, Christina Brooks, and Cassel Busse in particular. I thank Jessica Carey for being my family and confidante in Hamilton, and for many delicious vegan meals. I hope there are more to come. To both of my fourth-year classes at Concordia University, “African Animalities” and “Global Animalities,” I am grateful for the weekly discussions and the inspirations we drew from one another in crafting our various projects. Chapters Two and Three of this thesis found their early stages in an article of mine published in ESC: English Studies in Canada, and I am grateful for the input of their editors and their consent to let me draw on portions of that article. For their commentary on the Rwanda sections of this paper and for helping me manage to turn what began as a 12-page essay into a two-chapter consideration of animal representation in genocide, I also offer my thanks to David Clark, Karyn Ball, and Melissa Haynes. Two nonhuman animals have accompanied me through this project, and they deserve recognition for compelling me beyond the limits of humanness. I thus offer my thanks to Harper and Hawksley as well. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my partner, Bernard Lansbergen, for loving and living alongside me through this project and beyond. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………. 40 African Animalities: On Postcolonialism, Visual Culture, and the Image of Africa Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………. 82 What Puts the “Human” in “Humanitarian?”: Species Sovereignty and Narratives of the Rwandan Genocide Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………… 126 Sovereignty’s Strays: Animal Rights, Canicide, and Concern Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………….. 173 Intimacy, Intercorporeal Cohabitation, and African Zones of Interspecies Contact Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….. 238 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………… 245 vii Ph.D. Thesis – J. Arseneault; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies Introduction Animals are my concern. Whether in the form of a figure or not. They multiply, lunging more and more wildly in my face in proportion as my texts seem to become autobiographical, or so one would have me believe. (Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am [More to Follow]” 403) How does one show concern for other-than-human animals in contexts where human life is precarious? This is the question from which the bulk of this inquiry into African animal life and death derives, though it merits some scrutiny. The question, focusing on shows of concern, is already interested not in concern as such, but in how it enters the field of visibility. This signals perhaps one of the most challenging facets of analyzing concern, in that—as an affect—it is presumably apparent only through the material-semiotic responses it motivates, even as those responses may be the very things that render concern intelligible, circulate it, or produce it. The question of how concern is mediated by various actions and texts will form a substantial part of this project. In interrogating the question of concern, the project will be interested in how the affective dimensions of it manifest in actions directed toward animals, and in the various institutions dedicated to liberating, regulating, killing, exploiting, or defending animal life in African spaces. Asked at the start of a project focused on Africa, the question perhaps presumes too much about the relation between that geographical zone and precarity, and the work that follows will resist as much as possible any simple account of this relation. It is, however, partly because of the persistence of narratives that make Africa the place on the globe most associated with precarity that this project focuses on that location. 1 Ph.D. Thesis – J. Arseneault; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies But there is another unstable relation at work in that question: the one drawn between human life and shows of concern for animals, as if the world in which human precarity exists did not always already intersect with the worlds in which other-than- human animals live and die. In zones of widespread structural precarity, those in conflict or facing an