Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (review)

Budding scholar and artist (and my dear friend) Justin C. Moore once said, “So much about love and desire are about recognition.” Their words left a lasting impression on me and transformed my thinking about the meaning and purpose of recognition among Black(ened) people who live in a world that continually tells us that our existences are wholly devoid of significance. Through its precise analysis, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World has yet again transformed how I—and likely all scholars reading it—might rethink the importance, function, and structuring logics that undergird conceptions of recognition, inclusion, and so much more. Becoming Human offers a capacious revisioning of questions central to Western science and philosophy including notions of the human, animality, recognition, materiality, Blackness, and being. Jackson’s text departs from intellectual preoccupation with understanding how twentieth-century African diasporic cultural production, specifically in art and literature, might fit within prevailing ideas of the human-animal distinction—key to discourse on liberal humanism. Instead, Jackson’s central argument asserts that the work of artists and writers including Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, Audre Lorde, Nalo Hopkinson, Wangechi Mutu, and Octavia Butler disrupts the human-animal differentiation and its implicit raciality, and in so doing conjures unruly conceptions of being and materiality.

In critiquing foundational Western philosophical beliefs about the human-animal distinction and its relation to the animalization of Blackness, Jackson does not simply eschew the bestialization of Black(ened) people; rather, she delineates how said formulations are inherently anti-Black because they fail to address that Blackness’s animalization remains fundamentally reliant on gender, sexuality, and maternity made evident through Black female flesh. Such an argument enables Jackson to advance two adjoining assertions: that Eurocentric humanism requires that Blackness be a prop in order for it to define whiteness; and that scholars of Black study must necessarily move beyond the pursuit of full human recognition as the solution to the bestialization of Blackness. Becoming Human persuasively demonstrates why scholars must revisit the work of the aforementioned thinkers and creatives who refuse to define their humanity (being) through animal abjection or by appealing to liberal humanist frameworks of recognition and inclusion as the solution to racialization. Jackson’s focus on the artistic work of those within Black expressive culture brilliantly underscores striking similarities between literature and art, science and philosophy, despite scientific claims of objectivity and broad philosophical authority. Further, Jackson’s engagement with and privileging of Black art and literature demonstrates how critical theory might inform and revise historical materialist approaches to foundational conundrums—namely, animality and bestialization—that concern artists and writers within Black expressive culture.

Among Jackson’s numerous theoretical contributions in Becoming Human, I found especially generative her theorization of ontologized plasticity—a mode of transmogrification characterized by the fleshy being of Blackness that is infinitely experimented with along both biological and lexical registers such that Blackness becomes sub/super/human simultaneously. Jackson’s theorization of Blackness being at once sub/super/human not only places her in direct conversation with esteemed scholars including Hortense Spillers (especially her notion of fungibility), Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira DaSilva, and Christina Sharpe, it also forges a path for future scholars of Black study, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and philosophy to concern themselves with matters beyond an appeal to liberal humanist discourse altogether, such as Black(ened) people’s denied humanity. In this way, ontologized plasticity offers both a theory and praxis of Black expressive culture’s capacity to offer transformative visions of a future conceived by and for Black(ened) people beyond those privileged or imagined within the current social order.

Each chapter of Becoming Human expounds on various aspects of Jackson’s aforementioned claims. Chapter 1 engages Frederick Douglass’s 1845 memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved to...