Holland’s essay is part theory, part personal reflection, and thoroughly poetic in its engagement with Dave the Potter as both a historical figure, to be read and reflected upon, and as a provocation to interrogate the boundaries of our own historical moment. Holland’s brief essay touches on historical appropriation and the porosity of the human-animal bond. The essay begins by enclosing its writer within a typically anonymous space of academic prose, but then moves beyond academic conventions to perform transformations associated with Dave the Potter, whose troubling of the boundaries between life and death, human and animal Holland elucidates, examines, and contextualizes.
