Unlike some books that take on the subject of literature and biopolitics only to forget about the former in a deep dive into the latter, Ron Broglio's newest book, Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism, remains firmly focused on romantic-era writing and art even while it expands our understanding of Foucaldian biopolitics. And for Broglio, it is decidedly the Foucauldian brand of biopolitics rather than the Agambenian that is worth examination, mainly because “Foucault's early work on disciplinary societies accounts for the regulation of labor practices as a regulation of bodies” (6). Foucault of course located the origins of biopower and biopolitics in the Enlightenment, arguing that its technologies of discipline and regulation marked a transition from an old-guard identification of humans as individual bodies to modernity's realization of “man-as-species” and a new investment in the state's ability to “make live or let die” in order to manage and perpetuate the species' continuance (7, 5). While modern climate change studies reveal the gaping fantasy of Foucault's claims—it is because humans do not self-conceptualize as a species that they find themselves unable to globally battle climate change—Foucault's account of biopolitics, as Broglio points out, does offer an astute framework for understanding labor practices in the English countryside during the romantic and post-romantic periods. Beasts of Burden departs from Foucault's biopolitics, though, in that it toils in another of Foucault's blindspots: as Broglio puts it, “what [Foucault] leaves out—but what I take up in this book—is how food and the labor of producing it are also implicated in biopower, and particularly so during the early formation of the biopolitical systems in Britain” (7).
Broglio's book intersects with Nicole Shukin's Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009) and Cary Wolfe's Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2013), both of which have done much to think through the tendency of biopolitics to include animals (paradoxically) by means of their exclusion. Animals are crucial to the human species' life, but their biopolitical industrialized slaughter is justified precisely because they are not part of the human species. Building on and extending Shukin's and Wolfe's work, in Broglio's words, his “project considers how the life and liveness of the subject resists and exceeds the frameworks used to render subjects units of operation within the dispositif of capital and state” (8). “The goal,” he tells us, “is to find moments early in the formation of biopolitics where other modalities of living and dwelling were at odds with the biopolitical regime that continues to the present” (8). Broglio discovers such moments of defiance in the poetry and artwork of British romanticism, specifically the laboring class peasants and the animals they put to work (his examples are horses and sheep dogs) as well as “lions and polar bears that do social and political work through their wildness” (8). In focusing on both literature and visual art from the period, Broglio continues the work begun in his earlier books, Technologies of the Picturesque (2008) and Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art (2011), deepening our knowledge of artists in the period while reminding us of the various media flourishing in the romantic period beyond our sometimes limited circumscription of it as an era of poetry first and foremost. In attending to class via his explication of these media instead of race, as Foucault does, Broglio grounds his book historically in a fashion that often eludes Foucault and that the ahistorical Agamben simply foregoes altogether. And, indeed, this grounding makes historical sense given the extensive processes underway throughout England during this time to enclose and redistribute land in order to ensure agricultural yield could supply a nation adequate food to keep its members alive (these were not strictly species concerns, then, but national ones invested in policing class boundaries even while “making live,” another blind spot in Foucault's conceptualization).
The book is essentially organized into two groups of chapters, the first clutch of which deals with labor-class writing in the work of Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, and James Hogg (along with other figures like Thomas Batchelor and William Cobbett). While in those chapters Broglio performs fine readings of under-studied writers, in the second set of chapters he does truly innovative work, taking up the art of Thomas Bewick, George Stubbs, and Edward Landseer. Broglio's study of Bewick and Stubbs proves highly illuminating as he turns to their “encyclopedic works on animals,” and these figures and texts represent the book's shift from spotlighting humans as the objects of biopower in the works of the above-named peasant poets to highlight animals as the subjects of biopolitical defiance (67). As Broglio remarks in the chapter on Landseer, “what gets lost in the symbolization of the animal is the animal itself,” a process that, as Broglio argues, these artists refuse, using their illustrations and paintings instead as spaces that show how animals resist and evade “human mastery” (95, 68). Stubbs, for instance, emerges here as something of a Deleuze-and-Guattari type of theoretician and artist, thinking being beyond species in his non-static representations of humans and animals that can, and do, change and transform into other beings. That is, for Stubbs, as Broglio shows us, being is a process of becoming, which, as Broglio says, twists natural history into a medium that can be harnessed in opposition to state-run biopolitical processes meant to stake out clear species boundaries that privilege the human. Landseer's work provides a way of connecting Broglio's book to Gillen D'Arcy Wood's Tambora (2015) and Siobhan Carroll's An Empire of Air and Water (2015) in that all three discuss strange polar voyages like the Franklin expedition of 1845. Broglio's interest lies in Landseer's painting of the event, Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864), which depicts polar bears chomping down on the remains of the lost crew and demonstrates an anti-humanism that “disposes and levels the cultural intrusion of human history” into the inhuman mysterious land of the bears' arctic home. These readings of romantic artwork open our eyes to how the visual aspects of overlooked romantic texts perform as retaliatory forces against human biopolitical apparatuses. It is at this point that the Broglio swerves into “Afterword: Romanticism in the Dust of This Planet,” a brief survey of some key canonical romantic poems and novels that think in terms of human-less and inhuman worlds. This chapter, while mainly a suggestive sketch, will dialogue well with other works forthcoming on speculative realism and romanticism.
Scholars interested in some of the ignored romantic poets and artists will find much of interest in this book, as will those who are continuing, like Broglio, to explore how to attenuate the effects of biopolitics on humans and animals alike, whether via new materialist feminism, posthumanism, or any of the various speculativisms that are flourishing at present. One of Beasts of Burden’s real strengths is that Broglio offers a new look at romanticism from unexpected vantages. From these prospects, the book does fulfill one of its larger stated aims to “question” the “basic concepts of Romantic scholarship concerning the individual and the citizen,” even while it is unclear whether the book does successfully question “the limits of history and historical scholarship and finally,” even, “the limits of reason” (14). In this regard, although the book does illuminatingly dwell with so-called minor figures in the romantic landscape, for this reviewer, it would need a lengthier treatment of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings within romanticism that ground what Broglio's calls its “experiments” before it results in a genuine “thinking Romanticism otherwise” (14). But this book is certainly an intriguing and successful-on-its-own-terms beginning to such a project.
