Unsettling Arts of Extinction in Henrietta Rose-Innes' Green Lion

Abstract:Henrietta Rose-Innes' novel Green Lion illuminates how art participates in human-animal relationships and impacts the lives and deaths of animals. As it narrates the demise of the Cape lion, the novel reveals the continuing influence of settler-capitalist ideologies and practices of preservation on representations of and responses to lions. This essay explores Rose-Innes' turn to taxidermy as inspiration for both the form and content of her novel, arguing that she crafts a work that resonates with new taxidermy in visual arts as she deploys narrative strategies that expose the consequences of images that neglect nonhuman life worlds and conceal death to offer consoling illusions of perpetual presence. Rather than recovering stories of lost animal worlds, Green Lion repositions animal images within histories of multispecies entanglements, exemplifying how literary texts can reframe animal lives and deaths to confront feelings of grief and guilt and reckon with legacies of settler-capitalism that have been obscured by images of timeless nature.