Winner, 2021 Gloria E.
Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies
Association
Winner,
2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature
Association
Winner,
2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies
Argues
that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and,
ultimately, the human
Rewriting
the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality
in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human:
Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the
rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism.
Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo
Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu
and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman
Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has
dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing,
Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and
maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future
thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.
Jackson
argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning
of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building
against a history of the bestialization and thingification of
Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty
vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition
of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the
animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of
thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of
the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy
but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the
specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a
radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one
that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."