Refiguring the Animal: Race, Posthumanism, and Modernism
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Date
2019-04-30
Authors
Curry, Elizabeth
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections in early-twentieth-century American literature. While animals, with their physical and behavioral features and subordinate status within Western cultural frameworks, were fundamental figures in the US racial imaginary, which relied on dehumanization as a weapon of control, animals (and conceptions about them) also curiously offered a way around and outside of the categorically demeaning declarations of “the human.” Through literary explorations of the nonhuman, the writers in this project reveal forms of interspecies affinity and understanding that affirm biotic connection and also make fantastically strange creatures with whom humans share domestic and proximal space. The figure of “the human” as separate, above, and radically distinct from other life becomes not only strange as well through these readings, but becomes visible as a prominent obstacle to social egalitarian and ecologically cooperative ways of living. I build on research in animal studies and critical race studies approaches to posthumanism to observe how race inflects literary animal representations while also tracking how animality interacts with various notions of personhood. While animalization often coincides with racialized and dehumanized personhood status, writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Zitkala-Ša rupture those associations and engage the animal (comparisons to it and becomings with it) as a fundamentally humanizing figure. On the flip side, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how a racialized animalization trope operates in the novel to defend the killing of a black man. These writers all collapse the binary between human and animal while demonstrating how that binary operates in concert with racial binaries in an American context that extols the human. Reading animals through a lens that acknowledges how race and animality intersect ultimately opens routes for rethinking what it means to be human and defining how we view the nonhuman.
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Keywords
African American literature, American literature, Animal studies, Modernism, Native American literature