Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

Being Property Once Myself is a book that explores the complex ways African American authors have written about animals, subverting racist comparisons and challenging dominant claims about the limits of personhood. It suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 25 February 2022
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize “This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennetts analysis,Richard Wright,Toni Morrison,Jesmyn Ward,and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration....An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post For much of American history,Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons,a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself ,prize-winning 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. 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. 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. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. “A gripping work…Bennetts lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.” — LSE Review of Books “These .

Dimension: 210 x 140 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780674271166