Animal Metropolis brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle: orca captivity in Vancouver, polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba, fish on display in the Dominion Fisheries Museum, and the racialised memory of Jumbo the elephant in St Thomas, Ontario. Others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces: the regulation of rabid dogs in Banff, the maternal politics of pure milk in Hamilton and the circulation of tetanus bacilli from horse to human in Toronto. Another considers the marginalisation of women in Canadas animal welfare movement. The authors collectively push forward from a historiography that features nonhuman animals as objects within human-centered inquiries to a historiography that considers the eclectic contacts, exchanges, and cohabitation of human and non-human animals.
Joanna Dean is associate professor of History at Carleton University, where she teaches animal history and environmental history. Darcy Ingram teaches in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, where he works on social movements, environmentalism, and environmental governance. Christabelle Sethna is an historian and associate professor who teaches in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on reproduction, colonialism, and, more recently, representations of animals.
Contributors:
- Kristoffer Archibald
- Jason Colby
- George Colpitts
- Joanna Dean
- Carla Hustak
- Darcy Ingram
- Sean Kheraj
- William Knight
- Sherry Olson
- Rachel Poliquin
- Christabelle Sethna