Materialities of the Non-human Animal and the Species Matrix of Postcolonial Remains in Selected Contemporary Writing

Abstract

Postcolonialism, much like Graham Harman’s well-wrought hammer, does not exist because it can be used, it can be used because it exists. The well-wrought hammer of postcolonialism is worked upon on selected contemporaneous but disparate narratives, Vicki Constantine Croke’s Elephant Company (2014) and Tania James’ The Tusk that did the Damage (2015), to crack them open for an assessment of the extent to which as-yet invisible but already-present traces of former imperialism remain embedded in the texts. Though Croke’s androcentric account is more obviously revelatory in its projection of the colonial war hero, even James’ emphatically anti-correlationist standpoint does not appear entirely free of the colonial gaze. Additionally, materialities of the non-human animal assert themselves despite their discrepant local manifestations in the two texts: Croke’s elephant is the loyal servant in a mystic relation with an apparently loving master, whereas James’ is the enraged subaltern in rebellion against an abusive one. Yet, in both accounts, the physicality of the elephant as well as its behavioural singularities generate an interruptive encounter with the non-human animal, foregrounding its capacity for autonomous living, substantive human interaction, and an equal relationship when the human imposes itself on the non-human. Neither the non-human animal nor the human beings in the narratives are a monolithic block. An elephant may be a worker, a source of ivory, or an object of sympathy for activists; the human cast is a diverse collection of poachers, smugglers, forest officials, corporate managers, and an American film crew. Each group, whether animal or human, establishes a distinct relationality with the others. When the entire ensemble is gridded in Cary Wolfe’s species matrix, latent, implicit, power relations become visible which in turn reveal the postcolonial remains of violence and subjugation in selected twenty-first-century writings.