The beast within: race, humanity, and animality

Recent years have seen efforts to critique the dichotomy of ʹnatureʹ and ʹsocietyʹ in Western thought, and to demonstrate their coconstruction under specific material conditions. As yet, however, little work has uncovered the discourses of animality that lie buried within a social field whose ontological status until recently has been securely ʹhumanʹ. In this paper, I show how Western concepts of animality have circulated across the nature border and into a politics of social relations. Concepts of savagery and vulgarity can, in particular, be found within racialised representational systems with whose historicity, I will be suggesting, we can make fresh critical engagements. In much recent work on colonial power formations, ʹotheringʹ practices have been implicitly conceived within a psychoanalytic frame -- one in which the white selfʹs ʹinterior beastsʹ are anxiously displaced onto an externalised other. Whilst not refuting the efficacy of repression I wish to historicise the workings of a peculiar western model of the Human self, ʹsplitʹ into physical ʹanimalʹ and cultural ʹhumanʹ. This is done both through an extended theoretical account, followed by a microstudy of geographies of savagery and civility in Sydney, Australia.