Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. 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. 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. 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. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience.

Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals.īeing Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood.

The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people-all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Each chapter tracks a specific animal-the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark-in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. In Being Property Once Myself, prizewinning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human.

Being property once myself