an other

Description

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon Patricia Holland thinks through the human animal divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals and spotlighting those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press. How to Read This Book  xi
Primer: What the Animal Said  xv
1. Vocabularies : Possibility  1
2. Companionate : Species  51
3. Diversity : A Scarcity  90
4. Love : Livestock  139
5. Horse : Flesh  165
6. Sovereignty : A Mercy  222
The Open : . . .  254
Acknowledgments  257
Abbreviations  261
Notes  263
Bibliography  303
Index  317