On Bennett’s cover, an anonymous sharecropper and horse plow a dry, weedy field the line of the horizon underscores that the figures are connected by labor and are literally on the same level, with the man’s hat and horse’s upright ears both silhouetted against the sky. Each of the books under consideration here suggests ways in which Blackness is inextricable from a vital set of human-animal questions.īeginning with their front covers, these books ask you to reflect on points of contact. Joshua Bennett, in Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (2020), offers an eloquent image of the “all-too-fraught proximity between the enslaved black person and the nonhuman animal.” 1 He points to a “kinship born of mutual subjugation, yes, but also the shared experience of opacity mistaken for emptiness.” 2 That is, the ways in which Black people have been dehumanized for generations present artists and activists with radical opportunities to consider other devalued beings. Black studies, animal studies, human-animal relationships, literature, diasporic literatureĪnimal studies and Black studies are linked in ways that critics had, until recently, almost entirely overlooked.
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