Antiblackness and Humanism : toward a Re-Thinking of Interspecies Relations

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In their latest works, poet and scholar Joshua Bennett and literary scholarZakiyyah Iman Jackson critique the animal-human distinction drawing on per-spectives from African diasporic literature. InBecoming Human: Matter andMeaning in an Antiblack World, Jackson explores the writings of Toni Morrison(Beloved), Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring), Octavia Butler (“Bloodchild”)and Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals) as well as the visual works of New York-based Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. The goal of Jackson’s study is to“generateunruly conceptions of being and materiality”(p.1). In the course of this project,Jackson succeeds in drawing a complex, multi-layered picture of how antiblackdiscourses shape our understanding of humans and animals. In the same vein,Bennett stipulates inBeing Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Manthat African diasporic writing carves out new modes of comprehending animalityand humanity.“What does the Animal promise? Nothing short of another cosmos.A radically different set of relations is possible,”he emphasizes (p.4). Referringto the works of Richard Wright (Native Son), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon),Zora Neil Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Jesmyn Ward (Salvage theBones) and other authors and texts complementing the core corpus, he singles outliterary figurations of animals to explore this cosmos.