A prize-winning 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 antiblackness 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.
