The body of the creature

The recent rise in animal histories of colonial Asia has contributed mostly to our understanding of the imperial control of human populations. Histories examining hunting, vermin eradication, cow protection, veterinary science and laboratory experimentation have revealed how imperial attempts to regulate human-animal interactions shaped ‘political rationalities’ in India (Adcock, 2010; Chakrabarti, 2010; Hussain, 2012; Mishra, 2011; Pandian, 2001; Rangarajan, 1998). But in the wider field of animal studies, historians and geographers have urged scholars to go further and to take account of the materiality and even the agency of animals. Some have argued that today's scientific understandings of animals’ sensory worlds can enable us to explore the subjective experience of animals in the past (Fudge, 2013; Hribal, 2003; Philo and Wilbert, 2000b; Ritvo, 2004; Rothfels, 2010). These calls raise particular challenges for those of us influenced by Foucauldian approaches and thus habitually wary of reifying the products of historically contingent arrangements of power–knowledge. This chapter addresses this issue of animal subjectivity through imperial representations of elephants in colonial Burma – creatures often noted to be playful, clever and occasionally, vindictive. By returning to Foucault's work, particularly through Judith Butler's reading of his ‘political anatomy’, I argue for a reconceiving of the problem of animal subjectivity as a process of materialisation.

First, in order to illustrate the problem of animal subjectivity, I begin, as Foucault might have, with a body in pain: