Details

ISBN-10: 0674980301
ISBN-13: 9780674980303
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publish Date: 05/12/2020
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.70" W, 0.80" H

Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

Hardcover

Price: $38.00

Overview

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize

A prizewinning poet argues that Blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.

Throughout US history, Black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure–the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark–in the works of Black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people–all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find Black and animal life in fraught proximity.

Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

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Reviews
Being Property Once Myself is destined to be an event. Exhilarating and original, it is as much a work of literary history as it is of literary theory, as much a poetic invocation as it is critical intervention, and as much about animals as it is about people, elegantly uniting the many singularities that constitute, collectively, black literary culture.–Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
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Details

ISBN-10: 0674980301
ISBN-13: 9780674980303
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publish Date: 05/12/2020
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.70" W, 0.80" H
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