Centering Animals in Latin American History ed. by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (review)

Centering Animals in Latin American History, edited by Zeb Tortorici and Martha Few, is an important, innovative volume. At its core, it is an attempt to “write animals into” Latin American colonial and postcolonial histories. This is a wide-ranging book, including essays on locust extermination campaigns in colonial Guatemala (Few), canine baptisms and weddings in Bourbon Mexico (Tortorici), indigenous medicinal uses of animals in colonial Peru (Warren), animal labor and protection in Cuba (Monzote), and other rich and compelling sets of stories that serve to expand our thinking about politics, culture, health, religion, labor, science, and empire in Latin America and beyond.

The project to center animals in history, to foreground nonhuman life, is in some ways a radical move. There are some scholars, even in this collection, who are skeptical about the utility and perhaps even the possibility of “writing animals in.” Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the “animal turn” has become an important and influential current in the Humanities and Social Sciences. As Erica Fudge notes in her foreword to the volume, this book is part of the growing scholarship on the significance of nonhuman animals, which calls attention to the crucial role of animals as social and political actors, as laborers and agents. This is a dimension of political, cultural, and social histories that, with some key exceptions, has not previously been the focus of our sustained attention. I should note that while the emphasis is on nonhuman animals, there is also fascinating work in these pages on insects (Few) and viruses (McCrea), pushing us to consider nonhuman life more broadly.

But this volume does not “just” offer a new look at animals; rather, it offers nuanced discussions of the ways that refocusing on the nonhuman illuminates historical accounts of humanity. The editors and contributors explain that this project should be about both offering rich, full historical accounts (centering animals lets us see the human in new ways) and showing the importance of thinking about animals themselves as subjects of life (as thinking, feeling beings with rich emotional lives and their own histories). While in some ways the project cannot avoid the anthropocentric nature of writing histories of animals (it is the humans who are doing the “centering”), this volume is a bold and coherent attempt at writing the nonhuman actor into history.

As many readers will already be aware, this work is situated within the vibrant interdisciplinary field of animal studies, post-humanist scholarship, multispecies ethnography, and recent scholarship on “life itself.” While the field is diverse, scholars are thinking just as much about decentering the human as they are finding ways to center nonhuman others. This does not mean worrying less about humans, but rather complicating our understandings of humanity and animality and showing us how race, sex, species, and other markers of difference are intimately entangled (chapters by Derby, Few, García, Garagarza, and McCrea do this particularly well). This volume, along with other works, invites us to consider political scientist Claire Kim’s proposition that race can be a metric of animality and that there are neither “race-free” spaces nor “species-free” ones.¹¹

There is a wide range of engagements and approaches in this volume to centering animals. While in some of the essays the animal remains largely symbolic or a vehicle for understanding human histories, most are concerned with the animal as both figure and flesh. That said, there are some productive tensions in the book between projects vested in highlighting the exploitation of animals and nature and those more interested in theorizing and denaturalizing the human/animal binary; between scholars vested, theoretically and methodologically, in the project of centering animals, and those who remain skeptical of such an intellectual and political move.

Few and Tortorici address these tensions thoughtfully and directly in their introduction, noting that “while animals play significant roles in all of the essays included in Centering...