ICS Seminar - Dallas Rogers

Presenter: Dallas Rogers

Discussant: Emma Power

Chair: Therese Hall

Abstract

Snakes feature in early colonial histories of Australia—where they feature at all—at the intersections of colonial expansion, settler violence and Indigenous resistance. Yet, snakes often fade from view soon after, as settler-colonial theorists follow the colonists and First Nations peoples through the various shifts in how land was, and still is, stolen, restoried and used. But what if we used a different analytical tactic at this critical moment of land theft, alienation and settlement? What if we followed the snakes and their venom as two related but different ontological agents? What types of conceptual vistas does a focus on one of the most despised and persecuted animals in the world—the snake—open for us? To engage with these questions, this talk follows six groups of snakes as they slither across the landscape(geography) and through time (history), as their bodies are attacked, and their venom is extracted, processed and commodified. From the hollow logs of the colonial frontier and the specimen jars of the colonial natural science network to the commercial venom, antivenom, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic laboratories of contemporary settler-colonial countries today, this other-the-human analysis positions snakes as a key actor — albeit a highly persecuted and increasingly commercialised actor — in ongoing settler-colonial capitalism. By following these snakes and their venom, we become alert to not only the interactions between settlers, Indigenous peoples and animals but to the broader restructuring of colonial institutions and science, and their contemporary linage and morphology, therein bolstering our understanding of the ever-shifting triplicate relations of land, flora and fauna as property.