elephant in the room: empire, animals, and visual culture in interwar London.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20316376

Ideologies of imperialism, othering, and difference do not exist in a vacuum nor do they end after the formal construction and maintenance of empires. Instead, imperialism infiltrates domestic culture and the day-to-day lives of even those citizens most isolated from policy- and decision-makers. From the household to the church and chapel, scholars of the British Empire have analyzed imperial influence at home as one of the many sites where empire was re- imagined and rearticulated. Moreover, popular visual culture serves as an important vehicle for the cultivation and transmission of dominating ideologies. Analyzing visual culture properly is an ethical exercise because visual culture not only depicts but also guides and changes both popular culture and dominant ideologies. My dissertation focuses on the intersections of imperialism and animal imagery in London's visual and popular culture during the interwar era. Analyzing exotic animal imagery in propaganda posters produced by the Empire Marketing Board, poster advertisements for the London Underground, popular and political cartoons, and the Official Guides to the Regent's Park Zoo, I argue that the design and display of these visual objects was profoundly influenced by British imperialism and served to reinforce and normalize this ideology at home. In the process, I reveal some of the ways in which humans represent non-humans-and other humans as non-humans-and explore the disconnect between the imagined and experienced geographies of empire. Accordingly, I demonstrate the ethical considerations of a popularized and mass- produced imperialism in the metropole, the strategies and consequences of representing animals in a human way, or humans in an animal way, and the immediate and lasting effects of this taken for granted result of imperial ideologies infiltrating and transforming visual and material culture at home.