Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Celestial Bodies
- Part I Extraction and Abstraction
- 1 Theorizing Black Bodies
- 2 The Black Body and the Medical Archive
- 3 Laboring Bodies
- 4 Animalia Americana
- 5 Black Ecological Insurgencies
- 6 The Black Body in Nature
- Part II Black Optics
- Part III Quare Bodies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
4 - Animalia Americana
from Part I - Extraction and Abstraction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Celestial Bodies
- Part I Extraction and Abstraction
- 1 Theorizing Black Bodies
- 2 The Black Body and the Medical Archive
- 3 Laboring Bodies
- 4 Animalia Americana
- 5 Black Ecological Insurgencies
- 6 The Black Body in Nature
- Part II Black Optics
- Part III Quare Bodies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
“Animalia Americana” foregrounds an examination and critical analysis of the historical, literary, and theoretical correlations between Blackness and animality to assess how these correlations, specifically the ways in which animals are found “running free” within a Black literature, might guide us toward more ethical practices. This chapter reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha as illuminating the dominant strains of how pest animals have appeared in twentieth-century African American letters: Not only as markers of the gratuitous violence which both marks and mars Black life in modernity, but as figures through which Black writers articulate the ways of thinking about feeling, and sociality, that surviving such violence have produced. From the ways in which K-9 police dogs were unleashed upon Black people during the Civil Rights Movement as a violent form of sociopolitical suppression to the significance of animals in Black communal and familial units emblematized through the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and DMX’s love for his American pitbull terrier, this chapter complicates the relationship between Blackness, animality, and humanity.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024