No Country for Old White Men: Living at the Boundary of Blackness

Sharon P. Holland (bio)

A review of Bennett, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Harvard UP, 2020.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020.

No one will dispute that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has set the stage for deeper engagements with our collective feelings about racial disparity and the natural world. Black scholars are at the forefront of thinking through these perilous times into a future that might, finally, be able to hold us. In Joshua Bennett’s spare and gorgeously written Being Property Once Myself, we are asked to begin this journey through “a black aesthetic tradition” that “provides us with the tools needed to conceive of interspecies relationships” (4). He asks: what are the ethical concerns that come forward from negated personhood, legally and philosophically? The title of Bennett’s book is taken from a Lucille Clifton poem in which kinship with the natural world produces black life. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson travels brilliantly in the same psychic life of blackness in Becoming Human, which shares similar objects and theoretical underpinnings; both texts explore the impactful nature of an antiblack world. As Jackson states in her “Introduction,” she wants to take note of “our shared being with the nonhuman without suggesting that some members of humanity bear the burden of ‘the animal'” (12). Her text strives to unmake the terms of the debate itself, offering up even its title as an oxymoron in black thought, as the works of African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual artists “displace the very terms of black(ened) animality as abjection” (1).

Bennett’s work reads across the canon, and reimagines sociality, interiority, and feeling through the prism of black studies, ecocriticism, and affect theory as he engages in extensive and rewarding readings of literature, focusing on the ways in which these authors “render animal life” (9). His text is not interested in the “undertheorized plight of nonhuman animals.” Rather, Bennett’s analysis wants to draw attention to animal life as “a site of recognition and reckoning” (11). Each chapter is devoted to thinking with animal life as a figure for a remapping of black interiority. The first chapter, “Rat,” explicates Richard Wright’s attention to animal life as a mediation of black death. Beginning with Tara Betts’s poem, “For Those Who Need a True Story,” Bennett deftly navigates the complexity of non-human animal life and black life and the significance of the language of pests, infestation, and vermin that demonstrates the meaningful co-habitation of black human and animal life. Students of Wright’s work will immediately understand the originality of Bennett’s reading as he utilizes Wright’s purposeful foreclosure of sympathy for Bigger as a way to understand what actually subtends an antiblack world. In this reading, Bennett is quick to remind us that we judge Bigger’s actions as his “natural inclination toward cruelty” rather than as a “sociological problem.” Wright wants to lay bare this problem in writing about Bigger’s predicament: “Bigger is more violent than he is kind, and that is precisely the point. He is in the world and of it” (39). His reading of Wright’s literary critics is nothing short of brilliant. Along the way, he exposes the flawed infrastructure obscured by a one-to-one correlation between Bigger and the rat: that the relationship between these two beings is one of contestation. That contest is at issue in Bennett’s work. In this theatre, rat and human co-create—out of contestation, perhaps, but what then happens to that ethical life as a potentiality for the kind of kinship, rather than objectification, that Bennett seeks to engage? If Bigger’s future might be bound with the symbol of the rat but the rat’s future cannot be seen or told, does the consideration of non-human animal life still rest upon a contestation that produces a human/animal distinction? This is the deeper problem of representation that Bennett’s reading yields and that proponents of pessimism engage: “relation always occurs within representation” (Wilderson 315). And in this scene of contestation, of animal life, of black feeling, I wonder too about Bessie—the black female who cannot be taken with Bigger or left behind, and whose death is made in the reflection of the primal “pest” that begins Wright’s narrative. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with a stunning reading of Wright’s unpublished Haiku, where the imaginary landscape for the insurgent figure of the rat imagines a world otherwise, “an open space” as “respite from the unrelenting danger of the domestic sphere” (65).

Perhaps the gnawing feeling left in the wake of Bessie’s death propels itself into Bennett’s substantial contribution to masculinity studies in the chapter titled “Cock.” Here, he is “interested in working through and against discourses that imagine little else for black men beyond the grave.” Forging “a theory of the black masculine,” Bennett begins with one of the authors of our collective interiority, Toni Morrison (67). As he reminds us, Morrison’s works—Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and particularly Beloved—reveal a noticeable gendering of the “properties of animals” (68). Following on the theorizations of the affective life of blackness in works like Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, Bennett explores “unreciprocated affection” and “burden without release” (73), beginning with Morrison’s insurance agent in Song of Solomon, Mr. Smith. Remarkable in this chapter is the way Bennett demonstrates that he is both a critic in the pessimist tradition and a critic of it, as he turns to forms of embodiment in black literary production—like Milkman’s limp and his relationship to his own physicality—opening up a space where the body and its affective life can and do count. Quoting from a 1977 interview with Morrison in which she cites her interest in black men “almost as a species” (100), Bennett crafts this distinction in Morrison as primarily one of masculinity’s relationship to property—the provenance of whiteness. In doing so, Bennett’s argument leaves room for the ways in which this “white-supremacist patriarchy acts differently … on black men and black women” (107). Bennett is right to emphasize a persistent problem in black literary criticism: that gender difference (politically speaking) is elided so that the project of black uplift can cohere. One of the chapter’s most compelling arguments is actually left unspoken: Bennett doesn’t try to parse his use of the term “cock,” preferring instead to compel us to be smart(er) about this male figure and fantasy as he tracks black male feeling.

In many ways, Bennett continues this work on gender in his chapter on “Mules,” recalling a representation of the mule in Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a representation of “invisibilized interiority” in “a black feminist apositionality” (117). There is an important reading of Hortense Spillers (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”) in this chapter that parses “flesh” and its relationship to culture—to the “vestibulary” nature of the black female’s place in the ordering of gender and of animal life. Bennett observes: “ungendering is also a transformation at the level of species; it is how one is forcibly removed from the province of the human and placed elsewhere” (122). This particular argument has great implications for black feminist praxis and moves the dialogue about human/animal relation forward. What it also brings to the fore is the nagging presence of suffering as a kind of mutual bond in the dreamscape of ethical relation. This is a component of utilitarian praxis embedded in Animal Studies that produces the animal as object through a simile that cannot hold if ethical action is our stated goal. Nevertheless, Bennett comes closest to unraveling this dialectical trauma when he ends with this thought: “there is no communion to be had with the animal without the possibility of death” (139).

Bennett’s study ends with the chapters “Dog” and “Shark.” His readings of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and the trope of the Middle Passage in African-American creative thought only add to the stunning arguments laid out in previous chapters. To say that Being Property Once Myself is an achievement is an understatement. It is a paradigm-shifting work that does justice to the stuff, the stardust from which all being emerges.

In Becoming Human, Jackson’s thoroughgoing argument is that those African-descended peoples who traffic in representations of blackness are neither striving for a bankrupt humanity nor negotiating a set of terms upon which their humanity will be recognized; instead, they gesture to another way of being altogether. I couldn’t agree more with this assessment, and scholars in Animals Studies should take note that a much more interesting engagement with animal life is here to stay. This study destabilizes the dominance of philosophical and scientific thought on the animal by taking seriously “alternative conceptions of being” in Africanist thought (3). The focus here is more decidedly on “black female flesh … as the limit case of ‘the human'” (4). Jackson’s is the most systematic critique of the ways in which philosophical texts persistently misread blackness and are unclear on the effects of sex/gender upon modes of worlding since Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract.

By positing a renewed theory of plasticity, Jackson changes the terms of the playing field. She offers us a critique of plasticity that sees its “somatic potential” in the ability to mold a substance while maintaining some form of life as grounded in the work of antiblackness and the black form as “infinitely mutable” (11). And there is no other work more important to this prevailing negation than that of producing terms like “mother,” “woman,” or “female body” (11). We are reminded here that the biopolitical is the substantiation of the thought that the African is animal, and not the commonly held idea that the African symbolizes the animal (14). While I do not think that many critics would balk at this pronouncement, claims that “animalizing discourse that is directed primarily at people of African descent” might become ungrounded if we think of colonization across other regions and peoples of the globe (15). Despite these more universalist claims for the study of blackness, Jackson’s necessary critique settles on the controversy, debate, and dissention of an assumed and settled humanity (16). She sees the question of whether the black is a human being as fundamentally flawed, and asks instead: “If being recognized as human offers no reprieve from ontologizing dominance and violence, then what might we gain from the rupture of ‘the human’?” (20). For Jackson the discourses of animality and antiblackness forge each other so that we cannot talk about animal life without giving way to antiblack thought, and her precise readings of Hume, Hegel, Jefferson, and Kant bear fruit on this point.

In the chapters that put these arguments and theories at play, Jackson beautifully articulates a grounding movement in black thought: we strive to “transform” rather than “assimilate.” Taking on the human as a heuristic model, Jackson’s reading of Morrison and Douglass is a masterful articulation of a mutually constituted sentimental and identity-based understanding of ethical engagement. Central to this work is the following understanding: “New World slavery established a field of demand that tyrannically presumed, as if by will alone, that the enslaved, in their humanity, could function as infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, at once sub/super/human” (47). Jackson clearly articulates the brutality of demanding a simultaneity in blackness, giving “form to human and animal as categories” (48). Reading Beloved against Derrida’s musings in The Animal that Therefore I Am, Jackson offers “that blackness is the missing term” (59) in his analysis, as his query into philosophical bestiary, a matter of origins, falls short of what it needs to understand itself. Derrida’s text may itself play with what is missing without naming it, just as the biography of the philosopher himself cuts through the text, submerged as it is in what he and his compatriots cannot see. Taking a look through the gaze of Mister (a rooster) and Paul D in Morrison’s text, the staging of ethical relation here is always already at the site of hum/animal relation—it is an ethics that looks outward for its muse. From this discussion we come to the importance of the slave’s “infinite malleability” (72), where plasticity gets its most sustained attention. Jackson’s point is that “trans-species correspondence, rather than oppositional difference,” is the mode of black thought (73).

The next chapter, “Sense of Things,” soars as Jackson confronts the messy obligation to nothingness that blackness seems to secure. Seeing blackness as a “profound intensification” of “a politics of sex-gender” (85), her readings move through the constructions of a hierarchical world in philosophical thought, rendering them bankrupt and noting some equivocation in Heidegger’s strict parsing of ontological boundaries. Central to the argument at this stage of this shape-shifting book and to her explication of Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring is that we cannot understand black relationship to the subject/object paradigm without taking into consideration “black peoples’ fungibility with objects” (112)—to consider blackness in this regard is to remake prevailing aesthetic arrangements. Indeed, “the nature of reality itself” is always already at stake (112). And the argument in this chapter and the next, “‘Not Our Own,'” where Jackson considers the importance of Octavia Butler’s work, rests upon what and how black womanhood figures for this artificial separation of subject and object, as she attempts to illuminate the ways in which the structured relationship of black femaleness to settled and archetypal philosophical ruses represents a kind of telling “inoperability” (117).

The move to Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction is well-timed. It opens up a realm of possibilities for work on flesh, matter, and meaning. Jackson notes that “Butler’s fiction. … radicalizes and transforms the aesthetico-affective-cognitive politics of embodied difference rather than attempt to overcome (the movement of) differentiation” (129). Her reading of Bloodchild and the “unusual accommodation” (qtd. in Jackson 149) made for a male character’s pregnancy is masterful, and when we land on “an articulation of embodied subjectivity that is typified by receptivity rather than mastery,” the stakes of the project deepen. At this point readers will perhaps want Jackson to move through the “network of relations” (150) outlined here—what are the terms of our being that cannot be dictated by the figure, presence, or will of the human? Instead, we move to a philosophical unpacking of the project of symbiosis across feminist and science fiction and its uncomfortable marriage of race and species. There is no race without species, no species without race. Perhaps the most interesting phrase in this stunning examination is “directionless becoming” (157)—but the queerness promised in this chapter’s reading of sex/gender and reproduction is a thread that still requires untangling at its close.

In the end, we have “body” and “flesh” (194) in the last chapter of the book, “Organs of War,” which focuses on Lorde’s Cancer Journals and the visual-cultural terrain of Wangechi Mutu’s work. Jackson saves her reading of Spillers’s most important and oft-cited moment in her famous 1987 essay for last, departing from some received understandings of “flesh” in Spillers’s thought as that which comes before the imprint of culture. This cultural lexicon allows Jackson to take on the medicalized language of health care, which does not meet its stated objective at all, in both Lorde’s and Mutu’s approach to the body’s shattered materiality. Again, what makes this work queer—besides the stated sexuality of the author(s) studied—remains at stake, and I can only imagine that Jackson’s next body of work will take up this important thread.

The animal as a trope or a symbol or even relation must be reimagined. Bennett and Jackson remind us that such reimagining has already taken place. There is no single event, only a process, and the time has come for philosophy and, yes, science to take a look beyond the scrim that has obscured even the terms of their forgetting. Taken together, these two books obliterate the literal ground upon which humanity or the humane gain purchase on and access to thought. They offer much needed and welcome insight into the complexity of black thought and our manner of engaging it. No discourse about hum/animal difference, alignment, or liberation can move forward without moving through the work of these scholars. And for that, I am exceedingly glad.

Sharon P. Holland is the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Raising The Dead: Readings Of Death And (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), and co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, UM, Ann Arbor) entitled Crossing Waters/Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory. Her next book, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, is under contract with Duke University Press. You can see her work on food, writing, and all things equestrian on her blog, http://theprofessorstable.wordpress.com.

Works Cited

Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke UP, 2010.