Karen M Morin: Cattle Trails and Animal Lives, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

"Cattle Trails and Animal Lives can best be described as "early western Americana meets critical animal studies." This work shifts the narratives of the Old West cattle kingdoms from cowboys, ranchers, cattle barons, and other enterprising entrepreneurs to the lived experiences of cattle caught within the rural 'carceral archipelago' of the emergent US beef industry. The work focuses on these animals' forced movement over land and sea, their experiences, lives, and agency as formerly free-roaming animals who were captured, enclosed, moved, and eventually shipped by railroad to awaiting slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond. The spatial nodes and sites of the carceral archipelago include the open range, the ranch, the cattle trail, and the cattle town and the intense human carceral controls enacted within them through development of carceral structures, practices, infrastructures, technologies, and tools. The work further interprets how these animal lives are culturally re-narrated to contemporary audiences in museum exhibits featuring material carceral artefacts, through living history sites, through other touristic and artistic re-creations of historic cattle drives, and through Hollywood westerns. Together these not only perpetuate heroic myths of the Old West but normalize and even celebrate the carceral experiences of animals"-- Provided by publisher.