Decolonizing Elephants

The growing call to decolonize Animal Studies, and Environmental Humanities more broadly, is overdue and welcome. The imperative to decolonize enables scholars in the field to better recognize the underlying hierarchies, biases, and occlusions in our research, encouraging us to find creative ways of reconceptualizing our work anew. Nevertheless, there is something of a tendency in the literature towards considering decolonization as an abstract process and a predominantly epistemological problem. This divorces decolonization in the academy from social and political histories of decolonization. By looking at what happened to Burmese elephants during the collapse of British imperialism in Myanmar, in this article I argue that historical struggles for decolonization can help to ground and hone what it means to decolonize our studies.