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Accepted Paper:
Decolonising animals: elephants and the end of empire in Myanmar
Jonathan Saha
Looking at what happened to Burmese elephants during the collapse of British imperialism in Myanmar, I argue that historical struggles for decolonisation can help to ground and hone what it means to decolonise Animal Studies.
Paper long abstract:
The growing call to decolonise Animal Studies, and Environmental Humanities more broadly, is overdue and welcome. The imperative to decolonise enables scholars in the field to better recognise the underlying hierarchies, biases and occlusions in our research, encouraging us to find creative ways of reconceptualising our work anew. Nevertheless, there is something of a tendency in the literature towards considering decolonisation as an abstract process and a predominantly epistemological problem. This divorces decolonisation in the academy from social and political histories of decolonisation. By looking at what happened to Burmese elephants during the collapse of British imperialism in Myanmar, in my contribution to the panel I argue that historical struggles for decolonisation can help to ground and hone what it means to decolonise our studies.