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Representing Zoo Animals: The Other-than-Anthropocentric in Anthony Browne's Picture Books

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2019.0002

1080-6563

Chengcheng You,

Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

Representing Zoo Animals:The Other-than-Anthropocentric in Anthony Browne's Picture Books Chengcheng You (bio) Anthropomorphizing nonhuman creatures is an important hallmark of Anthony Browne's picture books, in which gorillas are a striking presence. His gorilla characters appear dressed up like middle-class gentlemen or as whimsical schoolboys, or as zoo animals behind bars. These images are often anthropomorphic, zany, or surreal, constituting an outlandish landscape in which human-animal identities are defamiliarized and called into question. Whereas most of Browne's anthropomorphic gorilla figures are portrayed to creatively and playfully engage young children in their self-discovery and the world around them, zoo animals consisting chiefly of the gorilla family, with few exceptions, are represented as unenthusiastically exposed to eager human viewers. Browne's visual representation of captive animals, at one level or another, draws attention to the worrying status of nonhuman animals as enslaved, objectified, and gradually diminished in the Anthropocene, an age when human beings are the principal agent of changes mostly detrimental to the animal world and to the Earth system. The term "Anthropocene" draws to our notice that human actions have deleterious effect on rapidly shrinking range of wild species. Early in his seminal essay "Why Look at Animals," John Berger asserts that public zoos, in which animals are turned spectral, mechanical, and "immunised to encounter" (28), are "a monument" to progressive alienation of animals and "an epitaph" to the pre-industrial human-animal relationship (21). The spectrality and marginalization of animals is further extended in Akira Mizuta Lippit's insight that the image of the animal characterizes the spectacle of modernity. "Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity's habitat," Lippit writes, "and by the reappearance of the same in humanity's reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and [End Page 22] technological media such as the telephone, film, and radio" (2–3). That animals are present in our thoughts but withdrawn from our daily experience is a part of a modern cultural sensibility, or insensibility. Within children's market today, Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart also note that "An important aspect of cultural insensibility to the processes of objectification is the saturation of culture with representations of living animals who function as repositories of affect and sentiment, alongside products (real or representational) of (hidden) exploration, many of which are also loaded with affective meanings ('comfort food', etc.)" (21). In other words, the affective sensibility evoked by those cultural referents is nevertheless derived from the objectification of animals in a complicated network of cultural production and consumption. Suffice it to say that today's young readers are often more likely to fall under the popular media spell of Bambi, Winnie the Pooh, or Peppa Pig, than to appreciate the charms of real deer, bears, or pigs in their natural habitats. With the animal and its paradoxical absence and presence at the crux of the anthropocentric culture, the focus of interest here is how the representation of animal others, especially captive wild animals, can provide a venue for engaged questioning of topics of ethical importance for young readers, and whether the depth and breadth of depicted animal experience can challenge human-centred cultural norms and values. Despite the developing body of scholarship on Browne's picture books, scant attention has been paid to the underlying dynamics between aesthetics and animal ethics, wrought through anthropomorphism, in his representation of zoo animals in Gorilla (1983), Zoo (1992), and Little Beauty (2008). Through the lens of zoo ethics, and specifically, posthuman ethics in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming-animal" and Donna Haraway's conceptualization of "contact zone" and "companion species," I will analyze how captive animals are portrayed in Browne's picture books, asking the following questions: What representational and ethical positions are canvassed through contemporary picture book animals to respond to the disappearance of wild animals? Do contemporary anthropomorphic bestiaries represent a part of a miniature world that symbolically parallels children's reality without addressing real conditions of animals? With a focus on the aesthetic and ethics of anthropomorphism, this paper will argue that the selected picture books display Browne's departure from conventional anthropomorphism and towards...