Lions, leopards and liminal spaces:Representations of Biosociality in the Writings of Katy Payne, Linda Tucker and Gillian van Houten

Abstract

This paper considers Linda Tucker’s Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God (2003) and Gillian van Houten’s The Way of the Leopard (2003), as well as referring to Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder: The Hidden Voice of Elephants (1999). All three writers implicitly challenge humanism in their representations of large feline predators as kin. While Tucker, van Houten and Payne are privileged white women engaging with ‘wild’ animals in Africa, they locate themselves within a postcolonial context. The texts are not without contradictions, however, at times echoing what I term ‘wilderness’ discourse that recurs in eco-tourism’s commodification of African animals as timeless and Edenic, thus promoting a ‘spiritual’ experience for the tourist.. On the other hand, the writers examined here imagine relationships with nonhuman animals very different from that conceptualised by Jacques Derrida, whose domestic cat might be capable of addressing the human self, but is still the “absolute other”. Shamanism, which Tucker and van Houten aspire to, engages with the nonhuman animal on a liminal level as the human “becomes-animal”. Yet van Houten’s representative strategies tend to appropriate animal subjectivities, even as all three writers foreground the intrinsic value of African indigenous ‘wild’ lives.