A specter is haunting settler colonialism (its South): Anna C. Bills, ‘”The Ghosts of Predators Past”: Nonhuman Specters and Extinction in Henry Clay Lewis’s “Valerian and the Panther”‘, Mississippi Quarterly, 76, 3, 2024, pp. 327-345 | settler colonial studies blog

A specter is haunting settler colonialism (its South): Anna C. Bills, ‘”The Ghosts of Predators Past”: Nonhuman Specters and Extinction in Henry Clay Lewis’s “Valerian and the Panther”‘, Mississippi Quarterly, 76, 3, 2024, pp. 327-345

10Sep24

Abstract: Henry Clay Lewis’s “Valerian and the Panther” (1850) offers a rich source for thinking about the haunting discourses of animals, extinction, and human geographies in the Anthropocene channeled through the focus on North America’s infamous panther. The panther has become immortalized within the culture of the US South through both its significant role within the history of North America as well as its subsequent mythological construction as the American “ghost cat.” Lewis’s shadowy panther traverses the boundaries between life and death, between past and present, to haunt the swamp as the shadowy “ghost cat”—an effectively extinct animal whose continued place within the literary landscape is maintained by its spectral mythologization. Ultimately, this article argues that Lewis’s panther materializes as a ghostly omen of the ecological destruction wrought by settler colonialism and a testament to the consequences of this destruction felt in our present moment through the large-scale extinction and notable absence of key species.

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