Abstract
by Shun Kiang, Stetson University
What Bagheera the black panther says to Mowgli, “‘Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle’”—prior to their attack on the village that has held captive the man and wife for showing kindness and giving shelter to the “Devil-child” in the chapter “Letting in the Jungle”—is representative of an impasse that has confounded the affective relationships between Mowgli, the Free People, Bagheera the panther, and Baloo the bear. Throughout the two Jungle Books, the impulse to pin Mowgli’s identity as a human or animal is constant, and this obsession to categorize a life’s proper sphere of existence and affiliation is the cause of Mowgli’s subsequent distancing from both animal and human communities, to both of which he possesses the language and cultural knowledge to belong.
In my paper, I look at Mowgli’s physical distancing away from animal and human communities as an attempt to render intact his affective ties to both realms. Imagining these communities as part of an ecological interconnectedness, which the animal and human characters fail or refuse to see, Mowgli, I argue, becomes a mediating figure that seeks to patch over ontological fissures that preempt the condition of possibilities for animal-human coexistence. Akin to what Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter refers to as “an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes,” or as “[a]ssemblages . . . that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (20-24), the kind of thinking and affective gestures that Mowgli displays throughout The Jungle Books is, as my paper will make explicit, the will of a subject—who sees himself also as an inter-subject—to finding a space therein animals and humans are not distinct but part of a larger livingness rooted in the experiential and relational, not the epistemological and self-containing.
