Performing Animals

This volume, edited by Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld, takes advantage of the growing field of animal studies by assessing what it means for an animal to ‘perform’. Using diverse methodologies from a wide range of sources, ten case studies are presented in which animals ‘act’ for the entertainment of a human audience. The aim is to challenge our understandings of both animals and performance as constructed categories, often involving issues of gender, class, race and national identity. The chapters sweep across a broad time-frame, from the early modern period through the nineteenth century, each taking a slightly different approach to notions of performing, agency and human-animal intra-relations. Karen Raber kicks off the volume with a fascinating piece on Renaissance eating practices. By focusing on meat’s position as an actor in the performance of a feast, Raber brings to light the theatrical qualities of flesh and meat, and even life and death, which ultimately collapse the distinctions between them. Using materialist theories, and particularly those of Jane Bennett, Raber asks what ‘makes meat’ and concludes that it functions as both symbolic and figurative matter, becoming a thing in itself. Yet the making and eating of such creations, Raber argues, celebrates human control over nature while simultaneously revealing its limits by giving animal flesh a type of agency

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Entertainment · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Flesh · Identity (music · Materialism · Media studies · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy