top of page

Diverse "Animal Encounters" at the SAA


I think of the Shakespeare Association of America as a kind of intellectual home: it’s a place where I go to hear papers that reflect the current state of the field but it’s also a place where I go to share my work-in-progress. The tension between these two aspects of the conference—the morning panels where well-known scholars present their research to large audiences as well as the smaller afternoon seminars where scholars discuss pre-circulated work—is productive, even if my last post suggested it needs tweaking to make it a space more hospitable for all.

This was my tenth Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting. Though its singular focus can sometimes be a bit overwhelming, I like that most of the attendees have a shared common ground other than the hierarchy of academia, even if it has meant that the only thing connecting my paper to others in a seminar was its focus on “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” I found that liberating when I was first attending and knew no one; I still do. But I also like that Shakespeare Studies has come to include a wide array of methods and critical approaches and that a seminar offered here on animal studies can draw independent scholars, graduate students, and senior scholars because of our shared focus. In my last post, I outlined my interest in organizing the seminar. But others joined with a wider set of interests and with a much wider set of creaturely encounters than I anticipated. The limits of my question about periodization, for instance, were thrown into relief when I read an excellent paper on the material history of early modern dragons! How does that history continue to matter? And is it a part of critical animal studies?

Karl Steel and I wanted to grapple with these questions from an expanded historical view, without having to construct them into a single narrative across the longue durée. We invited others from different fields and disciplines join us. (I’ve done this before—I’m proud to say mine was the first panel at SAA to include a primatologist. See her take on the conference here). And this meant that we spent a good bit of time explaining all the things we take for granted in our work, like, say, the way early modernists invoke Descartes as both a historical end point as well scapegoat. This was good.

Both of our seminars had a wide range of participants and both were well attended by auditors. Professor Karen Raber’s seminar had almost thirty people auditing it—a testament to both its subject as well as to its fearless leader!

This auspicious start set the tone for our seminar: engaged, focused, and lively, their discussion was one that left me thinking deeply about how animal bodies mattered in the past. Namely:

  • Does scale or size matter?

  • What might interspecies cooperation look like in the past?

  • How is a swarm different than a herd?

  • When does “flesh” become “meat”? (See Karl’s post about this aspect of the seminar here).

  • Is sympathy an ethical position?

  • Are we “experts” on the animals at the center of our work and should we be?

  • And what are the ethics of gaining such “expertise” especially if it involves a practice like hunting?

These are not easy questions to answer, but it is a testament to Professor Raber and the seminar participants of “Animal Materialism” that they inspired such thoughtful and diverse responses. Karl and I left engaged and excited for our seminar the next day.

Our seminar picked up where Karen’s left off. And perhaps because ours was on the last day of the conference or because we knew we were off to a celebratory dinner soon afterwards or maybe because everyone in the room was either in her seminar or mine, our conversation became a bit less formal. Folks continued to ask important questions about the current state of the field and, more importantly, to engage with others’ answers to them; but we also started to disagree with one another about the boundaries of the field. For whom are we speaking when we write about animals? Should our work actively contribute to improving animal lives? What do we mean by the term animal? Does it matter if we are using literary sources to talk about “real” animals?

This made sense, given that our papers grappled with dragons, basilisks, witch’s familiars, trained bears, and human

characters like Othello and Caliban who are described as bestial. At one point, an auditor bravely asked us to raise our hands if we’re working on “real” animals, which inspired both vociferous objections to such a categorization even as some of us raised our hands. This shaped how we returned to questions about ethics and hunting from Friday’s seminar, this time reframed by a paper on the gendered implications embedded in killing deer in plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost. We lingered on shared human and animal suffering, given that one paper described (among other things) a weasel’s heroic failed attempt to detain Tarquin from raping Lucrece in Shakespeare’s poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” And we dwelt in the uncomfortable knowledge that animal suffering is ongoing and in some ways transhistorical, given the nineteenth-century history of Grizzly Adams and his trained bear Benjamin Franklin, a bear whose history was eerily similar to Sackerson, the famous bear of the Paris Garden mentioned in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” We ended the seminar wondering what Shakespeare Studies and its wide penumbra of methods and entanglements might offer critical animal studies. We had no clear answer.

For me, the stakes are this: I want to think with these people about the creatures they care about in spaces that allow us to dwell deeply in the paradoxes latent in our work. Shakespeare studies, or more truthfully, the SAA allowed me to do this, if briefly, and with the important caveat that not all who wanted to participate could afford to join us. If one of the important takeaways for me was that the term animal is one with a wide history of creatures embedded within it then surely we need the same sense of capaciousness for the kinds of conversations we have about our scholarly work.

On this point, and on so many others, Karl was inspiring: his indefatigable energy for academic engagement and his, well, hope for possibilities of a different history in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary left me grateful for this experience. Likewise, Brett Mizelle and Tobias Menely’s willingness to attend a conference far afield from their research speaks to their intellectual generosity. Finally, my thanks go to all those who shared their excellent works-in-progress as participants in the seminar: Chris Clary, Jan Stirm, Catherine Lisak, Sean Henry, Rebecca Ann Bach, Elizabeth Mathie, Steven Swarbrick, Erin Kelly, Tobias Menely, and Brett Mizelle. And thanks most of all to Dr. Miranda Nesler, whose public intellectual work around so many of these issues inspires so many of us, including me.

__________________________________________

This post is a portion of Performing Humanity's ongoing collaboration with Dr. Holly Dugan and the SAA seminar "Animal Encounters." Readers interested in commenting or sharing ideas from any angle -- academic or non-academic -- are invited to join here or on Twitter with @trickyholly @karlsteel and @performhumanity using hashtags #shakeass15 and #animalstudies.

_________________________________________

RSS Feed
bottom of page