ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books (1894–1895) established the feral child as a passing phase for the white boy on his journey toward European manhood. According to the literary trajectory influenced by Mowgli–one that includes Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Roy Rockwood's Bomba–this transitory stage argues for the permanence of its obverse and endpoint: the mature agent of consolidated political power over both animals and non-white peoples. But this anthropocentric and imperialist fantasy may not be The Jungle Books’ most enduring legacy. Rather it the possibility of fully realized animal kinship that is repeatedly revived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly by authors of colour working within the feral tale. This chapter traces the figure of the feral child from The Jungle Books through Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Hari The Jungle Lad (1924), Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House (1999), and Sophie Anderson's The Girl Who Speaks Bear (2019). While Tarzan and Bomba exploit the jungle as a proving ground for its white male hero's unassailable authority, the recent characters who take up Mowgli's mantle–Mukerji's Hari, Erdrich's Omakayas, and Anderson's Yanka–embrace ferality and discover a more expansive, empowering, and empathetic personhood, in so doing, these novels break the exclusively human bounds of “family.” Facing European colonialism, extractive capitalism, and ecological exploitation as exigent crises, these feral children create families that incorporate the more-than-human world and find allegiances beyond race, nation, and species that are capable of encompassing all organic beings who share our home on earth.
