Nagai, Kaori. Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Series eds. Susan McHugh, John Robert McKay, and John Miller. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN 978-3-030-51492-1.
Reviewed by Taylin Nelson
Human-animal encounters were an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reality. The voyages of Captain James Cook and botanist Joseph Banks were oriented toward expanding the British nation’s knowledge of hitherto unknown plants and animals. Meanwhile, natural historians began to record and classify these findings, presenting them to a broader reading public. If encyclopedias and natural histories sought to define and control the definition and representations of animals, then a natural consequence of such colonial ventures was domestication. Menageries and zoos offered exotic animals to the public as spectacles and symbols of monarchical power. Likewise, the commodification of exotic pets as luxury objects furthered these causes. It’s no coincidence that during this significant rise in so-called New World encounters that sciences of complexion and species arose from Westerners seeking to understand, and often dominate, the humans and nonhumans with whom they came into contact.
All of these scientific advancements, natural and philosophic investigations, cultural exchanges, and colonial pursuits brought beasts into the public discourse. And while much has been written on these categories of empire-building, not many studies have examined the role of the animal fable in state formation, postcolonial and posthuman critiques, and genre studies of the Georgian and Victorian periods. Kaori Nagai’s Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire (2020) explores a less-studied, though just as important, genre emerging from these human-animal encounters. Coining the genre “imperial beast fables,” Nagai turns away from traditional Aesopian fables as a reference point. Instead, she looks toward non-European folklore, oral narratives, and traditional fables “collected” in the late eighteenth century by European missionaries, colonial settlers, and naturalists. Nagai’s goal is for readers to understand how these fables, as “site[s] of colonial translation and appropriation,” inherently contradict imperial translations via the “shifting zone[s] of race, species, and language” (p. 7).
Nagai’s book is structured around a set of repeating themes and arguments concerning the intricate relationship between animal fables and imperial ideologies. The first half of the book deals with the advent of imperial beast fables in non-Western texts and the erasure of the native informant figure or narrator in Western translations of such fables. Instead, an animal figure replaces and ultimately overwrites Indigenous knowledge-production and cultural histories (p. 24). From chapter 4 onwards, the focus shifts to how both canonical and less familiar fables can offer reclamation through language, the blurriness of identity and perspective, and resistance. In her introduction, Nagai explores the “double-tongued” nature of fables, arguing that the fable is “both anthropocentric and biocentric,” at once supportive and subversive (p. 6). By highlighting the complex interplay between human and nonhuman, European and non-European, cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism, Nagai suggests that we can read beyond the confines of borders and boundaries set by imperial nations.
Nagai is correct in her assessment that animals in fables are “good to think with,” to loosely quote Claude Levi Strauss, because they help humans to better understand themselves.1 While anthropomorphism has garnered a bad reputation over the years, it is equally important to recognize the critical problems involved in refusing animals the possibility of cognition, emotions, and social structures similar to that of humans. This refusal, labeled “anthropodenial,” has the potential to be “[t]he most harmful thing about … the ban on anthropomorphism” because it disavows, as Nandini Thiyagarajan clarifies, “us[ing] anthropomorphism to speculate about our connections to animals and imagine what might be going on in their worlds.”2 Nagai’s own stakes in this argument highlight how critical it is for scholars of the British empire and animal studies to be open to these inherent tensions in the genre. While animals in fables often symbolize a set of moral or cultural values that readers are meant to heed, Nagai argues that beast fables also disrupt or intervene against “the violence of sovereign power” (p. 195).
Consistently strong throughout her case studies, Nagai is at her best when she examines Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), a series deeply indebted to traditional Indian beast fables. Here, readers will find new arguments about the much-studied Jungle Book, as Nagai brings other texts into the conversation. Nagai is clearly well-read, providing all the relevant sources for these discussions—however, I wish that she had engaged more with Srinivas Aravamudan’s scholarship in chapter 1. While Nagai briefly mentions the influence of Enlightenment Orientalism (2011) on this book, engagement with Aravamudan’s article “Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues” would have given her an additional tension for arguing how to read Kipling’s state-formation fables against the grain.3
I would recommend this book to students or teachers interested in finding accessible ways to consider the British empire and its texts beyond the confines of strictly British canon. Those especially invested in non-Western perspectives can engage with less canonical works alongside more canonical or popular texts.4 As a scholar of eighteenth-century literatures and histories, I found Nagai’s argument on the entanglement of ecology and state formation in chapter 1 especially compelling. Overall, Nagai’s themes are true to her subtitle: animal-centered texts and perspectives; cosmopolitanism, used by the British Empire to reconfigure these texts; and the double-edged nature of how fables, like cosmopolitanism, acted to master non-Western knowledges while also subverting empire’s goals.
NOTES
1 Claude Levi Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 89.
2 In 1999, Frans B. M. de Waal coined the term “anthropodenial,” and claimed that it is necessary for the “a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist.” Anthropodenial, she writes, “is a blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves” (“Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial: Consistency in Our Thinking About Humans and Other Animals,” Philosophical Topics 27, 1 [Spring 1999]: 255–80). Nandini Thiyagarajan, “Inevitable Lives: Connecting Animals, Caste, Gender, and the Environment in Perumal Murugan’s The Story of a Goat,” South Asian Review 42, 4 (Spring 2021): 356–71, 361.
3 Srinivas Aravamudan, “Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues,” in “Derrida’s Eighteenth Century,” ed. Jody Greene, themed issue, ECS 40, 3 (Spring, 2007): 457–65.
4 For example, readers can consider the first English translation of the Sanskrit Hitopadesha (circa 800–950 CE), titled Hitopadesha: Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit (1787), prepared by Charles Wilkins, or the Arabic One Thousand and One Nights (800–1300 CE), first translated unabridged, unexpurgated, and complete into English by John Payne as The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (1882), alongside works by Robert Browning or Rudyard Kipling.
Taylin Nelson is a PhD candidate researching eighteenth-century Atlantic literatures and histories at Rice University. She currently works for SlaveVoyages.org and formerly was Senior Copyeditor at SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. Her most recent publication, titled “The Sounds of Cetacean Revolution Through History,” can be found in ECOZON@. Also be sure to hear her hot takes on the historicity of queer piracy on Coffee House Perspectives, Coffee House Perspectives, an eighteenth-century culture podcast.
Cover image: From the Archive of the British Library, Shelfmark 1876.a.30
This review was solicited by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. A review copy of Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) was provided by the publisher.