Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition by Antoine Traisnel (review)

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition by Antoine Traisnel is a thoughtful, poignant, and ethically driven study that characterizes a transformation in the cultural imagination of hunting, killing, and representing animals in the context of US expansion in the mid-late 19th century. Hunting practices shifted from subsistence hunting to spectacle sport to finally an environmental consciousness of preservation that Traisnel differentiates as "capture." Traisnel examines this idea of capture as a hegemonic capitalist notion under a Foucauldian framework of biopolitics and White settler colonialism to eradicate indigenous peoples and animals because of land management programs that were given full life under the maxim Manifest Destiny. He argues that capturing animals to preserve them ultimately resulted in their exploitation and extinction. He states, "[It] worked to invisibilize and naturalize the violence visited on both animals and animalized human subjects—violence that contributed not only to the extinction of wildlife and the exploitation of animals on an industrial scale but also to the relentless expropriation of black lives under chattel slavery" (p. 4).

Animal loss was "captured" in the various forms of self-effacement (in paint, taxidermy, novels, film, and science) by literary and visual artists. So too, early American painters of the Hudson River School such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand were sensitive to the idea of a vanishing landscape as progress moved westward. But Traisnel argues that "to capture something from nature is to sacrifice the very naturalness that one sets out to secure or preserve" (p. 14). Thus, capture endowed by and for American naturalists, taxonomists, and US museums, presumably all for the public good, is a semantic term for rationalizing control and captivity at best and seizing and killing at worst (p. 18).

Two methods of support help the reader along the unveiling of White settler hegemony and biopower in the regime of capture. First, a table provides clarity of the language of "The Hunt Regime" versus "The Capture Regime" in the categorical divisions of five axioms (p. 13). And second, three sections of the text are divided by various images of birds, amphibians, and sea creatures, taken from the published artwork of 19th-century zoologist Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen. In Haeckel's Art Forms of Nature, 100 detailed multicolor illustrations of animals are more telling of his artistic license rather than taxonomical renderings. These organic yet heavily abstracted forms that would influence the arabesque of the Art Nouveau artistic movement support Traisnel's claim that the representative iconography of the new animal condition demonstrates only a lifelessness in farcical memorials promoted by biopolitical regimes. Central in the text are four color plates that are dedicated to the close reading of John James Audubon's portrait as a hunter and his painting Golden Eagle (1833). Both heroize as well as ostracize an artist caught up in the conflict of sustaining and exploiting the western frontier. In addition, 28 interesting black-and-white illustrations range from scientific experiments to cinematic film studies that support each chapter's arguments.

Traisnel's claims are also supported by many references to economic theorists, yet they complicate the text in weighing down and stalling arguments from points already clearly made. However, an examination of the intentions or moral dictates of naturalists such as the Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, Georges Cuvier's epic classification Tableau, and Darwin's zoological expedition (1831) are richly explored for what they were: a continuation of the hunt transformed into the pretext of "capturing."

Part I, titled "Last Vestiges of the Hunt," is a romantic nod that focuses on the waning days of the hunt paradigm through an examination of the illustrations and writings of John James Audubon and the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Both Audubon's The Birds of America and Cooper's The Prairie are fascinating...