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 Bennett's
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...Bennett's lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes
for a thorough yet accessible read."
--LSE Review of Books
"These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed
ethics."
--Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog
"Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining."
--Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery
