ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Tania James's The Tusk that Did the Damage as an example of a recent novel that resonates with current multispecies scholarship and that reprises the creaturely aesthetic of the pre-9/11 novel. The Tusk That Did the Damage is remarkable for resembling pre-9/11 animal-themed fiction and at the same time resonating with contemporary multispecies scholarship, particularly with Anna Tsing's forest worlds of species interdependence and Ursula Heise's narratives of eco-cosmopolitan conflicts, in which people can read quests for multispecies justice. An accomplished short story writer, James gives this novella-length work three alternating narrative voices: Emma Lewis's in chapters entitled "The Filmmaker", Manu Shivaram's in chapters entitled "The Poacher", and a largely elephant-focalized third-person narration in chapters entitled "The Elephant". As well as a collection of intertwined narratives of elephants and the humans closest to them, The Tusk That Did the Damage is a revenge drama: Characters pursue their ends because of deaths, real or threatened, of others.
