Representing Zoo Animals: The Other-than-Anthropocentric in Anthony Browne's Picture Books

Abstract

Anthropomorphizing nonhuman creatures is an important hallmark of Anthony Browne's picture books, in which gorillas are a striking presence. His gorilla characters appear dressed up like middle-class gentlemen or as whimsical schoolboys, or as zoo animals behind bars. These images are often anthropomorphic, zany, or surreal, constituting an outlandish landscape in which human-animal identities are defamiliarized and called into question. Whereas most of Browne's anthropomorphic gorilla figures are portrayed to creatively and playfully engage young children in their self-discovery and the world around them, zoo animals consisting chiefly of the gorilla family, with few exceptions, are represented as unenthusiastically exposed to eager human viewers. Browne's visual representation of captive animals, at one level or another, draws attention to the worrying status of nonhuman animals as enslaved, objectified, and gradually diminished in the Anthropocene, an age when human beings are the principal agent of changes mostly detrimental to the animal world and to the Earth system.The term "Anthropocene" draws to our notice that human actions have deleterious effect on rapidly shrinking range of wild species. Early in his seminal essay "Why Look at Animals," John Berger asserts that public zoos, in which animals are turned spectral, mechanical, and "immunised to encounter" (28), are "a monument" to progressive alienation of animals and "an epitaph" to the pre-industrial human-animal relationship (21). The spectrality and marginalization of animals is further extended in Akira Mizuta Lippit's insight that the image of the animal characterizes the spectacle of modernity. "Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity's habitat," Lippit writes, "and by the reappearance of the same in humanity's reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and