Lost trophies: Hunting animals and the imperial souvenir in Walton Ford’s Pancha Tantra

This article argues that the work of contemporary American artist Walton Ford stages the paradoxical role that trophy hunting played in both establishing and undermining the strict racial, biological and ecological hierarchization of colonial environments. American Flamingo (1992) and Lost Trophy (2005), from the 2009 collection Pancha Tantra, foreground how the tradition of nineteenth-century naturalist art, characterized by John James Audubon, and popular narratives of trophy hunting expeditions, such as Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935), are complicit in colonialist domination. In doing so, Ford’s watercolours of hunted animals, which adopt many of the tropes popularized by Audubon, point to the Spivakian notion of “epistemic violence” behind an ostensibly innocuous, taxonomic art form. At the same time, the painting Lost Trophy recalls the writings of Joseph Conrad and George Orwell, investing animals with the power to unsettle the assumed superiority of the colonial hunter. My interdisciplinary analysis adopts literary strategies for reading artistic works, allowing for a broader understanding of the growing relationship between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism

Everybody Has It : Syphilis and the Human Condition in the Writings of Ernest Hemingway

On Hemingway’s frequent references to venereal disease throughout his canon, reflecting not only a lack of personal sexual responsibility but also the larger consequences of modernity itself. Tyler examines the author’s association of the disease with culturally conditioned definitions of masculinity and the pain of untreated depression. Draws from “One Reader Writes,” The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, Under Kilimanjaro, and elsewhere