Susan Nance is a historian of animals and the environment, with a focus on the history of live entertainment. She is Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario and received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003. She has since published on the histories of parades, civic festivals and the business of tourism, the American circus, the wild animal trade, horse racing, and more. Historians tend to be very good at predicting the future. Susan predicts that animal welfare / rights will be one of the most important social justice issues of the 21st century. So, her work asks a very important question: "Does animal experience matter to history?" (Yes, it does!)
Her latest book project: "Rodeo and the Western Myth of Animal Consent" Address: www.susannance.com
www.uoguelph.ca/history/history-susan-nance
"Elephants and the American Circus," in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth Ames ... more "Elephants and the American Circus," in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth Ames and Matthew Wittman (New York: Yale University Press/Bard Graduate Center, 2012), 232-49. > collection named Choice outstanding academic title, Theatre and Dance category
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
This Introduction first defines Keith Thomas’ concept of the human dilemma of modern life wherein... more This Introduction first defines Keith Thomas’ concept of the human dilemma of modern life wherein people benefited materially from but were conflicted about the mass killing and exploitation of animals. It then critiques the historical literature on modernity for excluding consideration of how modern phenomena have shaped animal life, then reviews Animal Studies work on human- animal relationships in modernity, and historical literature documenting particular elements of nineteenth-century human-animal relations. Next, animal modernity is defined as a theoretical advance that addresses a broad human population to explain how people coped with Thomas’ human dilemma. Thereafter, the 1880s life and material history of Jumbo the elephant provides the book’s case study of animal celebrity – the apex of animal modernity – which linked modern animals to global consumerism.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
Chapter 1 examines how British consumers in the early 1880s made Jumbo an international celebrity... more Chapter 1 examines how British consumers in the early 1880s made Jumbo an international celebrity by expressing interest in him as a sentient individual whose experience was a matter of public concern. By a letter-writing campaign and visits to the elephant, women and children, Londoners in particular, defined the London Zoological Society’s sale of the elephant to P. T. Barnum as “cruel” because it denied the elephant’s presumed wishes and needs. News coverage of Jumbo’s behavior and its assumed meaning additionally facilitated consumer generation of animal celebrity, that is, a comforting anthropocentric parasocial relationship of Jumbo with the public. The “Jumbo affair” also generated criticism about how Jumbo’s fans labored over his fate while overlooking slaughter of elephants in Africa to supply ivory for consumer products.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
Chapter 2 documents how media-driven interest in Jumbo in North America flattered citizens as pre... more Chapter 2 documents how media-driven interest in Jumbo in North America flattered citizens as preeminent global consumers. After Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson imported the elephant to New York, circus publicity and advertising positioned Jumbo as natural wonder, trophy of Barnum's victory over British public opinion, and also the gentle pet of handler Matthew Scott. The chapter then compares the elephant's publicity to the behind-the-scenes reality of working with the elephant. Public understandings of Jumbo as a celebrity are further examined through analysis of how trade card printers appropriated Jumbo's image for advertising aimed at women. Hence, Jumbo, and all pet animals, became domesticated as knowing and equal participants in consumerism, which facilitated the elephant's later transformation into an icon of innocent whimsy and abundance.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
Concluding remarks reintroduce animal modernity as demonstrated by Jumbo's journey from captive w... more Concluding remarks reintroduce animal modernity as demonstrated by Jumbo's journey from captive wild animal, to celebrity and marketing icon, to early death, raw material and toy. Jumbo's case is compared to Berlin Zoo polar bear, Knut, who recently underwent a similar process from circus to zoo and toy icon. Like Jumbo, zoo management had Knut's carcass stuffed, to much public disgust. Similarities between Jumbo and Knut indicate that we are still living in the periodization the book has defined as animal modernity, wherein citizens still primarily employ the consumer paradigm in determining the value and uses of animals in order to ignore how human activity is destroying autonomous animal populations. The conclusion thereafter calls for future research examining what "animal post-modernity" might mean by referring to the current majority-captivity status of tigers.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
This chapter follows Jumbo's post-mortem transformation from celebrity circus captive to raw mate... more This chapter follows Jumbo's post-mortem transformation from celebrity circus captive to raw material for naturalists. Correspondence between Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson circus and Henry Ward's Natural History Establishment shows how circuses and zoologists resisted with public perceptions of animals while treating them, not as sentient individuals, but as raw material. Both interpretations of animals, as pets and raw material, were necessary functions of modernity. Jumbo made an uneasy transition to taxidermic specimen because the high points of circus history and educational taxidermy in North America intersected in the 1880s. Still, many found the "2 Jumbos"-his preserved skeleton and skin-awkward since taxidermy was usually employed with anonymous creatures. Therefore, people again transformed Jumbo into toy and household companion in order to obscure human complicity in his species' near-extermination that century.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
The concept of 'modernity' is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susa... more The concept of 'modernity' is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susan Nance answers this question through a radical reinterpretation of the life of Jumbo the elephant. In the 1880s, consumers, the media, zoos, circuses and taxidermists, and (unknowingly) Jumbo himself, transformed the elephant from an orphan of the global ivory trade and zoo captive into a distracting international celebrity. Citizens on two continents imaged Jumbo as a sentient individual and pet, but were aghast when he died in an industrial accident and his remains were absorbed by the taxidermic and animal rendering industries reserved for anonymous animals. The case of Jumbo exposed the 'human dilemma' of modern living, wherein people celebrated individual animals to cope or distract themselves from the wholesale slaughter of animals required by modern consumerism.
* shortlisted for the 2015 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association
... more * shortlisted for the 2015 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species.
Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Nance’s study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the "East"--wi... more Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the "East"--witness the popularity of the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. In this captivating volume, Susan Nance provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America until the Great Depression.
According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream."
The recent success of Disney's Aladdin movies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial ci... more Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In "Entertaining Elephants" Susan Nance examines elephant behavior - drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications - to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species. "Entertaining Elephants" is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather. Nance's study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
This essay considers how one’s ability to see animals as “performers” seeking to flatter a human ... more This essay considers how one’s ability to see animals as “performers” seeking to flatter a human spectator lies at the very root of modern experience, which developed in the nineteenth century. As a case study, it explores the development of the game racehorse, an equine character perceived as a knowing, willing participant in the then masculine cultures of competitive horse breeding, racing, and gambling. Elaborating J. J. Clark’s literary model of “horseface minstrelsy,” it examines how the habits and conventions of the racing community celebrated those horses who produced desirable behavior on the track and winning offspring in the stable as noted individuals and honorary whites who endorsed human control and competitive goals. Finally, the essay argues that the ideologies of elite and victorious lineage articulated through interspecific performance with celebrated individual horses further served to naturalize broader human hierarchies of race, gender, and class.
This article examines US flag display practices among American tourists in the Ottoman Empire bet... more This article examines US flag display practices among American tourists in the Ottoman Empire between 1835 and 1870. These practices emerged from the intersection of the domestic American market for depictions of citizens abroad, Ottoman regulation on foreign nationals in the ...
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 2002
In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches w... more In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches were “a general nuisance. Neither their appearance nor their character warrants the respect of the Community.” Mortified, he described the founders of these informal assemblies: “He conducts his Services on such days as he feels disposed mentally and indisposed financially. To this gentleman of the cloth… the church is a legitimate business.” More to the point, he described his perception of the many southern migrants who aspired to found their own churches and religions, recounting how one “young swain” had announced to the leadership of a large traditional black congregation that he had had a dream. “In this dream a still small voice told him to ‘G. P. C.’ and when he heard it he knew that he was instructed to ‘Go Preach Christ.’ After further questioning by the Council, the chairman told him that he had misinterpreted his dream, for it certainly meant ‘Go plant corn’” For many educated...
"Elephants and the American Circus," in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth Ames ... more "Elephants and the American Circus," in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth Ames and Matthew Wittman (New York: Yale University Press/Bard Graduate Center, 2012), 232-49. > collection named Choice outstanding academic title, Theatre and Dance category
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
This Introduction first defines Keith Thomas’ concept of the human dilemma of modern life wherein... more This Introduction first defines Keith Thomas’ concept of the human dilemma of modern life wherein people benefited materially from but were conflicted about the mass killing and exploitation of animals. It then critiques the historical literature on modernity for excluding consideration of how modern phenomena have shaped animal life, then reviews Animal Studies work on human- animal relationships in modernity, and historical literature documenting particular elements of nineteenth-century human-animal relations. Next, animal modernity is defined as a theoretical advance that addresses a broad human population to explain how people coped with Thomas’ human dilemma. Thereafter, the 1880s life and material history of Jumbo the elephant provides the book’s case study of animal celebrity – the apex of animal modernity – which linked modern animals to global consumerism.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
Chapter 1 examines how British consumers in the early 1880s made Jumbo an international celebrity... more Chapter 1 examines how British consumers in the early 1880s made Jumbo an international celebrity by expressing interest in him as a sentient individual whose experience was a matter of public concern. By a letter-writing campaign and visits to the elephant, women and children, Londoners in particular, defined the London Zoological Society’s sale of the elephant to P. T. Barnum as “cruel” because it denied the elephant’s presumed wishes and needs. News coverage of Jumbo’s behavior and its assumed meaning additionally facilitated consumer generation of animal celebrity, that is, a comforting anthropocentric parasocial relationship of Jumbo with the public. The “Jumbo affair” also generated criticism about how Jumbo’s fans labored over his fate while overlooking slaughter of elephants in Africa to supply ivory for consumer products.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
Chapter 2 documents how media-driven interest in Jumbo in North America flattered citizens as pre... more Chapter 2 documents how media-driven interest in Jumbo in North America flattered citizens as preeminent global consumers. After Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson imported the elephant to New York, circus publicity and advertising positioned Jumbo as natural wonder, trophy of Barnum's victory over British public opinion, and also the gentle pet of handler Matthew Scott. The chapter then compares the elephant's publicity to the behind-the-scenes reality of working with the elephant. Public understandings of Jumbo as a celebrity are further examined through analysis of how trade card printers appropriated Jumbo's image for advertising aimed at women. Hence, Jumbo, and all pet animals, became domesticated as knowing and equal participants in consumerism, which facilitated the elephant's later transformation into an icon of innocent whimsy and abundance.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
Concluding remarks reintroduce animal modernity as demonstrated by Jumbo's journey from captive w... more Concluding remarks reintroduce animal modernity as demonstrated by Jumbo's journey from captive wild animal, to celebrity and marketing icon, to early death, raw material and toy. Jumbo's case is compared to Berlin Zoo polar bear, Knut, who recently underwent a similar process from circus to zoo and toy icon. Like Jumbo, zoo management had Knut's carcass stuffed, to much public disgust. Similarities between Jumbo and Knut indicate that we are still living in the periodization the book has defined as animal modernity, wherein citizens still primarily employ the consumer paradigm in determining the value and uses of animals in order to ignore how human activity is destroying autonomous animal populations. The conclusion thereafter calls for future research examining what "animal post-modernity" might mean by referring to the current majority-captivity status of tigers.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
This chapter follows Jumbo's post-mortem transformation from celebrity circus captive to raw mate... more This chapter follows Jumbo's post-mortem transformation from celebrity circus captive to raw material for naturalists. Correspondence between Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson circus and Henry Ward's Natural History Establishment shows how circuses and zoologists resisted with public perceptions of animals while treating them, not as sentient individuals, but as raw material. Both interpretations of animals, as pets and raw material, were necessary functions of modernity. Jumbo made an uneasy transition to taxidermic specimen because the high points of circus history and educational taxidermy in North America intersected in the 1880s. Still, many found the "2 Jumbos"-his preserved skeleton and skin-awkward since taxidermy was usually employed with anonymous creatures. Therefore, people again transformed Jumbo into toy and household companion in order to obscure human complicity in his species' near-extermination that century.
Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma, 2015
The concept of 'modernity' is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susa... more The concept of 'modernity' is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susan Nance answers this question through a radical reinterpretation of the life of Jumbo the elephant. In the 1880s, consumers, the media, zoos, circuses and taxidermists, and (unknowingly) Jumbo himself, transformed the elephant from an orphan of the global ivory trade and zoo captive into a distracting international celebrity. Citizens on two continents imaged Jumbo as a sentient individual and pet, but were aghast when he died in an industrial accident and his remains were absorbed by the taxidermic and animal rendering industries reserved for anonymous animals. The case of Jumbo exposed the 'human dilemma' of modern living, wherein people celebrated individual animals to cope or distract themselves from the wholesale slaughter of animals required by modern consumerism.
* shortlisted for the 2015 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association
... more * shortlisted for the 2015 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species.
Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Nance’s study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the "East"--wi... more Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the "East"--witness the popularity of the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. In this captivating volume, Susan Nance provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America until the Great Depression.
According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream."
The recent success of Disney's Aladdin movies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial ci... more Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In "Entertaining Elephants" Susan Nance examines elephant behavior - drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications - to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species. "Entertaining Elephants" is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather. Nance's study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
This essay considers how one’s ability to see animals as “performers” seeking to flatter a human ... more This essay considers how one’s ability to see animals as “performers” seeking to flatter a human spectator lies at the very root of modern experience, which developed in the nineteenth century. As a case study, it explores the development of the game racehorse, an equine character perceived as a knowing, willing participant in the then masculine cultures of competitive horse breeding, racing, and gambling. Elaborating J. J. Clark’s literary model of “horseface minstrelsy,” it examines how the habits and conventions of the racing community celebrated those horses who produced desirable behavior on the track and winning offspring in the stable as noted individuals and honorary whites who endorsed human control and competitive goals. Finally, the essay argues that the ideologies of elite and victorious lineage articulated through interspecific performance with celebrated individual horses further served to naturalize broader human hierarchies of race, gender, and class.
This article examines US flag display practices among American tourists in the Ottoman Empire bet... more This article examines US flag display practices among American tourists in the Ottoman Empire between 1835 and 1870. These practices emerged from the intersection of the domestic American market for depictions of citizens abroad, Ottoman regulation on foreign nationals in the ...
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 2002
In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches w... more In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches were “a general nuisance. Neither their appearance nor their character warrants the respect of the Community.” Mortified, he described the founders of these informal assemblies: “He conducts his Services on such days as he feels disposed mentally and indisposed financially. To this gentleman of the cloth… the church is a legitimate business.” More to the point, he described his perception of the many southern migrants who aspired to found their own churches and religions, recounting how one “young swain” had announced to the leadership of a large traditional black congregation that he had had a dream. “In this dream a still small voice told him to ‘G. P. C.’ and when he heard it he knew that he was instructed to ‘Go Preach Christ.’ After further questioning by the Council, the chairman told him that he had misinterpreted his dream, for it certainly meant ‘Go plant corn’” For many educated...
Abstract: This paper proposes a ''facilitated access'' model to describe how ... more Abstract: This paper proposes a ''facilitated access'' model to describe how local people make and have made use of tourism. Although Western travel accounts of the Arab Middle East have been studied by various disciplines, the Ottoman Empire has not been treated from a tourism studies approach. Travel narratives from 1835 to 1870 are used to reconstruct how, and tentatively why, Ottoman subjects adapted existing tourism services and expertise to the new Western tourists of the era. It is argued that Western tourism in the empire flourished in the foundational period before Cook Company tours began in 1869 because some Ottoman subjects could thus increase their own autonomy.
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Books by Susan Nance
> collection named Choice outstanding academic title, Theatre and Dance category
book’s case study of animal celebrity – the apex of animal modernity – which linked modern animals to global consumerism.
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species.
Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Nance’s study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream."
The recent success of Disney's Aladdin movies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.
Papers by Susan Nance
> collection named Choice outstanding academic title, Theatre and Dance category
book’s case study of animal celebrity – the apex of animal modernity – which linked modern animals to global consumerism.
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species.
Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Nance’s study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream."
The recent success of Disney's Aladdin movies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.