Being Property Once Myself

aw_product_id: 
29570099413
merchant_image_url: 
https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9780/6749/9780674980303.jpg
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
28.95
book_author_name: 
Joshua Bennett
book_type: 
Hardback
publisher: 
Harvard University Press
published_date: 
29/05/2020
isbn: 
9780674980303
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Literature: history & criticism
specifications: 
Joshua Bennett|Hardback|Harvard University Press|29/05/2020
Merchant Product Id: 
9780674980303
Book Description: 
A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. 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. 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.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. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

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