Antoinette Burton

Renisa Mawani

The contributors to Animalia analyze twenty-six animals--from yaks and vultures to whales and platypuses--that played central roles in the history of British imperial control.

An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times

Animalia

Rita Dhamoon

Davina Bhandar

Satwinder Kaur Bains

In 1914, the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver Harbour and was detained for two months. Most of its 376 passengers were then forcibly returned to India. Unmooring the Komagata Maru challenges conventional Canadian historical accounts by drawing from multiple disciplines and fields to consider the international and colonial dimensions of the voyage. By situating South Asian Canadian history within a global-imperial context, the contributors offer a critical reading of Canadian multiculturalism through past events and their commemoration. A hundred years later, the voyage of the Komagata Maru has yet to reach its conclusion.

Charting Colonial Trajectories

Unmooring the Komagata Maru

Encounters among Aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations generated a range of racial anxieties that underwrote colonialism in BC. By focusing on these points of contact, this book forges critical links between histories of migration and dispossession. The book highlights the legal and spatial strategies of rule mobilized by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who sought to restrict crossracial encounters. Mawani illustrates how interracial proximities in one colonial contact zone inspired the production of juridical racial truths and modes of governance that continue to linger in the racial politics of contemporary settler societies.

Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

Colonial Proximities

From yaks and vultures to whales and platypuses, animals have played central roles in the history of British imperial control. The contributors to Animalia analyze twenty-six animals—domestic, feral, predatory, and mythical—whose relationship to imperial authorities and settler colonists reveals how the presumed racial supremacy of Europeans underwrote the history of Western imperialism. Victorian imperial authorities, adventurers, and colonists used animals as companions, military transportation, agricultural laborers, food sources, and status symbols. They also overhunted and destroyed ecosystems, laying the groundwork for what has come to be known as climate change. At the same time, animals such as lions, tigers, and mosquitoes interfered in the empire's racial, gendered, and political aspirations by challenging the imperial project’s sense of inevitability. Unconventional and innovative in form and approach, Animalia invites new ways to consider the consequences of imperial power by demonstrating how the politics of empire—in its racial, gendered, and sexualized forms—played out in multispecies relations across jurisdictions under British imperial control. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Peter Hansen, Isabel Hofmeyr, Anna Jacobs, Daniel Heath Justice, Dane Kennedy, Jagjeet Lally, Krista Maglen, Amy E. Martin, Renisa Mawani, Heidi J. Nast, Michael A. Osborne, Harriet Ritvo, George Robb, Jonathan Saha, Sandra Swart, Angela Thompsell

Renisa Mawani

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