This book offers an innovative conceptualization of “animality” as a historical and theoretical paradigm that reshapes what we thought we knew about human–animal relations in the Progressive Era. The book takes risks as it aims to make important critical interventions. At its core, The Birth of a Jungle argues that we have failed to recognize the hegemonic power and counterhegemonic potential of “animality” as it emerged at the intersection of Freudian and Darwinian thought. The book examines the discourse of the jungle that emerges between 1894 and 1914. “Animality” invites us to develop a more nuanced understanding of how sexuality, class and race (in that order in the book's organization) emerge as contested categories during this period. Drawing methodologically on historical context and close reading, the book positions itself at the intersection between literary studies, critical race theory, sexuality studies, animal studies and American studies. The book contributes valuable insights to each. It carves out a unique niche for itself by challenging us to consider how “animality” pushes us past our own current conceptual and critical categories for thinking about human–animal bonds.

This book is not only a welcome addition to the emerging field of animal studies, but one that examines the key mechanisms of field formation as such. Shifting animal studies’ intellectual frame from philosophy to discourse analysis, the book reveals how animality could operate as a form of constructed essentialism. The book insists that we need to engage with “real” animals and not already see “the animal” as metaphor for “the human” if we want to understand the nuances of these relationships. At the same time, it does not adapt the specific framework of advocacy that runs through much work in “animal studies,” and instead turns its critical lens – especially in the provocative chapters that read humane societies in conjunction with lynching violence – on the ways in which animal advocacy is itself enmeshed within the history this book traces.

The Birth of a Jungle shows how a particular cultural formation came into being when Darwinian and Freudian theory collided in the American context, and how their shared concerns with sexuality, gender, race and class produced animality as an instinct-driven quality that human beings and animals shared but possessed to varying degrees. The book maps the “growing hegemony of the Darwinist–Freudian jungle” (16), but even though the history that it tells is doomed to the telos of hierarchizing and abjection that forms around the discourse of species, it also sees animality as offering alternative sexual and subject formations.

The book begins with the intersection between animality and queer formations in Henry James and Jack London. A stunning chapter on James reads the epistemology of the closet as the epistemology of the jungle. The chapter aims to show “why sexuality and animality shift at roughly the same time” (31–32). This reading recovers a moment before sexuality and animality become yoked into survival-of-the fittest determinism, and illuminates the far more radical potentialities of human–animal sexuality and cross-species intimacy. It fully explores those in the provocative chapter on Jack London, which takes seriously the possibilities for cross-species physicality, and enables us to consider what happens when we see dogs as dogs and not as men in furs.

The book demonstrates how the jungle functions as an elastic discourse, yet it also self-consciously focusses on male or masculinist definitions of species and sexuality. There are brief references to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and a longer discussion of Ida B. Wells's antilynching activism, but by and large the jungle is man's domain even when it ceases to be reserved exclusively for mankind. The book declares at the outset,

The Birth of a Jungle opens up critical space for inquiring into the births of other jungles. For instance, we may wonder how Native American populations are mapped onto, and how they counter, the discourse of the jungle. The Romanticized vision of the “noble savage” seems an important reference point for the chapter that reads Tarzan. The introduction acknowledges as one of the historically relevant titles Charles Alexander Eastman's Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904); and this text, alongside Native Americans’ sophisticated uses of “animality” as a discourse that precedes and in many ways exceeds Darwin and Freud, might be fruitful territory for further inquiry. Josephine Baker performing in the banana skirt offers a powerful provocation, especially since her performances in 1925–26 coincided with the Scopes “Monkey Trial” with which the book ends. Theoretical dialogue might open up between “animality” and the “creaturely” investigations of Julia Lupton Reinhart and Eric Santner. The Birth of a Jungle offers helpful paradigms for how such analyses might be undertaken in their own right, and how critical dialogue with these other discourse formations might be possible. Scholars will find it a useful model, and find in it opportunities for further engagement.