Blackness and Animality beyond Recognition

Increasingly, liberal humanist ideals and the modern regime of human rights seem at best ineffective and at worst positioned to facilitate the proliferation of contemporary forms of domination. On the one side, "new" systems of violence afflict the marginalized humans this human rights regime is supposed to protect, as evidenced by increasing carcerality in liberal democracies. On the other, placing humanity at the center of ethical concern has enabled the destruction of ecosystems around the world, runaway climate change, and the most horrifying system of animal slaughter the world has ever seen. Both lines of domination closely connect to the afterlives of colonial and plantation societies that structured both a racial order and nonhuman lives and ecologies.¹ In these times, then, the ethical and ontological value of the category of the human has come under scrutiny. What to do with this figure, one that conjoins so many systems of domination and simultaneously inspired so many liberation struggles? Hold fast to its emancipatory potential? Turn away and reject it entirely? Render it inoperative? Resignify and displace its meaning?

Both Black studies and "posthumanism"—each of which traverses a variety of fields—have provided some of the most provocative responses to these questions, albeit through very different avenues.² Black studies scholarship has shown how the modern category of the human and the attendant concept of liberal personhood emerged from transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism, which treated white men as the implicit model for proper humanity and enslaved black people as the paradigm of subhumanity.³ Similarly, posthumanist scholarship in animal studies has drawn attention to the European West's consistent domination of and separation from nonhuman forms of life.⁴ If Black studies shows that blackness is the "inside-outside" of human civil society, to borrow Frank Wilderson's description of the field,⁵ some forms of posthumanism also describe how non-Homo sapiens constitutes its inverse "outsideinside." The trio of books under review—Bénédicte Boisseron's Afro-Dog, Lindgren Johnson's Race Matters, Animal Matters, and Cristin Ellis's Antebellum Posthuman—explore these tensions in the specific context of the relationship between anthropocentrism and slavery in the antebellum United States. These authors join a growing list of writers interested in the relationship between antiblackness and the domination of animals, including Zakiyyah Jackson, Syl and Aph Ko, Claire Jean Kim, Breeze Harper, Christopher Sebastian McJetters, Che Gossett, and Lori Gruen.⁶ The publication of three monographs on this subject, all within a year of each other, may signal the consolidation of an alternative, multidimensiona l approach to the question of humanism: one that posits the co-constitutive roles of anthropocentrism, slavery, and colonialism, beginning from the intertwined presences of marginalized humans and nonhumans in specific historical contexts. As such, these texts resist confinement to any one discipline and are relevant to a wide variety of fields.

Despite similar objects of critique, antiracist and antianthropocentric scholarship have not always traveled well together. A central tension revolves around the post-in posthumanism. Some critics—especially those inspired by Sylvia Wynter's work, which charts the colonial emergence of the Western figure of "Man"—charge that the attempt to go beyond or after "the human" moves too quickly over the plight of those never considered properly human in the first place. To throw out human-centered concern risks prematurely pulling in a life preserver for marginalized humans just when they may need it most. It risks treating humanity as a monolithic agent of violence, overlooking the multiple ways of being human concealed by hegemonic conceptions of the human. Zakiyyah Jackson, in a review of texts also examining the intersection of race and posthumanism, argues that instead of taking "'the human's...