Her entry begins:Right now I'm reading things that I hope will make my next manuscript materialize as readable and intelligent as possible. My new project is a history of rodeos and the various myths of the North American West they perform/ed. So I'm plowing through all the canonical big surveys of Western history like Richard White's It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West, Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken History of the American West, Michael Johnson's Hunger for the Wild: America's Obsession with the Untamed West and Richard Slotkin's trilogy Gunfighter Nation, Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment, among others. These books are all monumental and very intimidating, thick books covering big time spans and diverse territories and peoples. Yet they all come up with a unified and profound argument that ties all that history together. Violence, poverty, hubris and...[read on]About Entertaining Elephants, from the publisher:
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species.Learn more about the book and author at Susan Nance's website.
Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of showbusiness as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Nance's study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
Writers Read: Susan Nance.
--Marshal Zeringue
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