Becoming Human

SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua
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Titles in the series include:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America
José A. Quiroga
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan
Black Gay Man: Essays
Robert F. Reid-Pharr
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
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Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious
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Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon B. Ross
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
J. Jack Halberstam
Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality
Dwight A. McBride
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American
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Robert Reid-Pharr
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural
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Lázaro Lima
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century
America
Dana Luciano
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Scott Herring
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the
African American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Karen Tongson
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading
Martin Joseph Ponce
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Michael Cobb
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the
Asias
Eng-Beng Lim
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law
Isaac West
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism
within US Slave Culture
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
Juana María Rodríguez
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism
Amber Jamilla Musser
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and
Posthuman Ecologies
Rachel C. Lee
Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men
Jane Ward
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and
Performance
Uri McMillan
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire
Hiram Pérez
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality
Katherine Franke
The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography
Ariane Cruz
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist
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Robert F. Reid-Pharr
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the
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Malik Gaines
A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain
Christina Crosby
The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy of
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Gayle Salamon
Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody
Melissa M. Wilcox
After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life
Joshua Chambers-Letson
Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance
Amber Jamilla Musser
Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life
Tavia Nyong’o
Queer Times, Black Futures
Kara Keeling
Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love
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Melissa E. Sanchez
Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-
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Robb Hernández
Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora
Keguro Macharia
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
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 Becoming Human
Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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For Derrick, my cosmic love
 Contents

On Becoming Human: An Introduction

1. Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the

(Neo)Slave Narrative

2. Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s

Brown Girl in the Ring

3. “Not Our Own”: Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia
Butler’s “Bloodchild”

4. Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization

in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde

Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
Color illustrations appear following chapter 2
 On Becoming Human

An Introduction

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World argues

that key texts of twentieth-century African diasporic literature and
visual culture generate unruly conceptions of being and materiality
that creatively disrupt the human–animal distinction and its persistent
raciality. There has historically been a persistent question regarding
the quality of black(ened) people’s humanity. African diasporic
literature and cultural production have often been interpreted as a
reaction to this racialization—a plea for human recognition.
Becoming Human takes a different approach, investigating key
African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual texts
that critique and depose prevailing conceptions of “the human” found
in Western science and philosophy. These texts move beyond a
critique of bestialization to generate new possibilities for rethinking
ontology: our being, fleshy materiality, and the nature of what exists
and what we can claim to know about existence. The literary and
visual culture studied in Becoming Human neither rely on animal
abjection to define being (human) nor reestablish “human
recognition” within liberal humanism as an antidote to racialization.
Consequently, they displace the very terms of black(ened) animality
as abjection.
Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production
does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion
into liberal humanist conceptions of “the human” but, rather,
frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and
engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of
a history of blackness’s bestialization and thingification: the process
of imagining black people as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a
nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of
colonial myths and racial hierarchy.1 Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nalo
Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer
Journals, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of
Uterine Tumors, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” Ezrom Legae’s
Chicken Series, and key speeches of Frederick Douglass both
critique and displace the racializing assumptive logic that has
grounded Western science’s and philosophy’s debates on how to
distinguish human identity from that of the animal, the object, and the
nonhuman more generally. In complementary but highly distinct
ways, these literary and visual texts articulate being (human) in a
manner that neither relies on animal abjection nor reestablishes
liberal humanism as the authority on being (human). Instead, they
creatively respond to the animalization of black(ened) being by
generating a critical praxis of being, paradigms of relationality, and
epistemologies that alternately expose, alter, or reject not only the
racialization of the human–animal distinction found in Western
science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and
material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its
authority. What emerges from this questioning is an unruly sense of
being/knowing/feeling existence, one that necessarily disrupts the
foundations of the current hegemonic mode of “the human.”
While we often isolate African diasporic literary studies from the
fields of science and philosophy, I contend that African diasporic
literature and visual culture introduce dissidence into philosophical
and scientific frameworks that dominate definitions of the human:
evolution, rights, property, and legal personhood. By reading
Western philosophy and science through the lens of African
diasporic literature and visual culture, we can situate and often
problematize authoritative (even if troubling) conceptualizations of
being and material existence, demonstrating that literary and visual
cultural studies have an important role to play in the histories of
science and philosophy. Using literature and visual art, my study
identifies conceptions of being that do not rely on the animal’s
negation, as repudiation of “the animal” has historically been
essential to producing classes of abject humans. Becoming Human
reveals that science and philosophy share many characteristics with
literature and visual art despite the espoused objectivity and
procedural integrity of scientific and philosophical discourses. In
debates concerning the specificity of human identity with respect to
“the animal,” science and philosophy both possess foundational and
recursive investments in figurative, and arguably literary, narratives
that conceptualize blackness as trope, metaphor, symbol, and a kind
of fiction. Instead of thinking of philosophy and science as separate
and unrelated sites of knowledge production, my study reveals their
historical entanglement and shared assumptive logic with regard to
blackness. As conceived by evolutionary theory and Western
Enlightenment philosophy, extending into legalistic conceptions of
personhood, property, and rights, antiblackness has sought to justify
its defacing logics and arithmetic by suggesting that black people are
most representative of the abject animalistic dimensions of humanity,
or the beast.
While many scholars have critiqued the conflation of black humans
with animals found in Enlightenment discourses, I argue that prior
scholarship has fundamentally misrecognized the logic behind the
confluence of animality and racialization. I reinterpret Enlightenment
thought not as black “exclusion” or “denied humanity” but rather as
the violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition—
of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very
humanity, whereby “the animal” is one but not the only form
blackness is thought to encompass. Plasticity is a mode of
transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is
experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and
biological matter, such that blackness is produced as
sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold:
potentially “everything and nothing” at the register of ontology.2 It is
perhaps prior scholarship’s interpretation of this tradition as “denied
humanity” that has facilitated a call for greater inclusion, as a
corrective to what it deems is a historical exclusion of blackness.
One consequence of this orientation is that many scholars have
essentially ignored alternative conceptions of being and the
nonhuman that have been produced by blackened people.
 This project examines how African diasporic literary and visual
texts generate conceptions of being that defy the disparagement of
the nonhuman and “the animal.” The terms of African diasporic art
and literature’s canonization have suggested that African diasporic
cultural production does little more than refute racism and petition for
assimilation into the very definition of humanity that produces racial
hierarchy or, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. would put it in The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism: “[T]he texts
of the slave could only be read as testimony of defilement: the
slave’s representation and reversal of the master’s attempt to
transform a human being into a commodity, and the slave’s
simultaneous verbal witness of the possession of a humanity shared
in common with Europeans” (Gates 140).3 Rather than seek an
assimilationist transubstantiation via the “Talking Book,” the texts in
my study are better understood as providing unruly yet generative
conceptions of being—generative because they are unruly. Yet, they
are not always framed as an explicit critique of the dominant—
thereby refusing the terms of liberal multicultural recognition, which
require either the evocation of animalized depictions of blackness in
order to point out the suffering these images cause or the reversal of
stereotype in a bid for “inclusion.” Instead, they often just get on with
upending and inventing at the edge of legibility. The chapters in this
book explore the critique and innovative thought that emerge from
within the contradictions of competing conceptions of modernity’s
crucible—the human. I argue that the cultural production examined
in the following pages reveals a contrapuntal potential in black
thought and expressive cultures with regard to the human–animal
distinction.
In order to facilitate a fuller appreciation of the conceptions of
ontology identified in Becoming Human, I pose three arguments that
fundamentally reframe the animalization of blackness. First, I argue
that philosophers’ and historians’ emphasis on antiblack formulations
of African reason and history have overlooked the centrality of
gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness.4
Namely, I argue that black female flesh persistently functions as the
limit case of “the human” and is its matrix-figure. This is largely
explained by the fact that, historically, the delineation between
species has fundamentally hinged on the question of reproduction; in
other words, the limit of the human has been determined by how the
means and scene of birth are interpreted. Second, I demonstrate
that Eurocentric humanism needs blackness as a prop in order to
erect whiteness: to define its own limits and to designate humanity
as an achievement as well as to give form to the category of “the
animal.” Third, I look beyond recognition as human as the solution to
the bestialization of blackness, by drawing out the dissident
ontological and materialist thinking in black expressive culture,
lingering on modes of being/knowing/feeling that gesture toward the
overturning of Man.
In debates concerning the specificity of human identity with
respect to “the animal,” science and philosophy foundationally and
recursively construct black femaleness, maternity, and sexuality as
an essential index of abject human animality. Furthermore, gender,
maternity, and sexuality are central to the autopoesis of racialized
animalization that philosophers, theoreticians, and historians of race
hope to displace. While black feminist and queer theories of race
have underlined the intersectional nature of gender, race, and
sexuality, few studies have ventured to identify the autopoetic
operations of these very intersections (Maturana and Varela 78).
Therefore, any study that attempts to provide an account of how
racialization operates must offer an explanation of the intransigent,
recursive, self-referential, and (re)animating power of abject
constructs of black gender and sexuality. Contributing to studies of
the longue durée of antiblackness and “afterlife of slavery,” I offer a
materialist theory of both blackness’s ontologized plasticization and
the temporality of antiblackness whereby I extend and revise Sylvia
Wynter’s theories of sociogeny and the autopoesis of racialization, in
other words, antiblackness’s auto-institution and stable replication as
a system and its consequences for our being both bios and mythos.5
Much has been written about the roles of Reason and History in
the production of “dehumanization.” This discourse is most
commonly represented by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s claim
that “the African,” never attaining immanent differentiation or the
clarity of self-knowledge, is imprisoned by immediacy and is, in other
words, ahistorical. However, in the chapters that follow, I am most
interested in the roles of gender and sexuality in the production of
blackness as “animal man.” Negating discourses on African “history”
and “reason” are not the only—and perhaps not even the most
frequently deployed—concepts through which “the African” is posited
as animal. Gender and sexuality feature prominently in animalizing
discourse, as a measure of both the quality of the mind and an index
of spirit.
Gendered and sexual discourses on “the African” are inextricable
from those pertaining to reason, historicity, and civilization, as
purported observations of gender and sexuality were frequently used
to provide “evidence” of the inherent abject quality of black people’s
human animality from the earliest days of the invention of “the
human.” Christian Europe had already privileged gender and
sexuality as indicators of “civilization,” and visual observation,
namely culturally situated perspective, had not emerged as an
epistemological problem for thought (Haraway, “Situated
Knowledges”). During the so-called “Age of Discovery,” observation
and the visual, imagined as transparent and in opposition to the
opaque, could overcome the practical problem of differences in
worldings. Thus, observation of gender and sex was deployed in the
interest of producing race as a visualizable fact. The body was
believed to provide presence—a supplement to the immateriality of
reason and historicity.
The black body’s fleshiness was aligned with that of animals and
set in opposition to European spirit and mind. As Winthrop Jordan
documents in White over Black: American Attitudes toward the
Negro, 1550–1812, Africans and apes were linked through
physiognomic comparison and sexuality. Englishmen had only
encountered nonhuman primates vicariously through travel writing
and gossip. They were unfamiliar with anthropoid primates, such as
gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Encounters with sub-
Saharan Africans occurred adjacent to these encounters, leading to
unbridled speculations linking primates and Africans (Jordan 29,
229). These speculations were an outgrowth of an epistemological
foundation that had already been circulating tales of mythical human-
animal hybrids and humanoid animals based on ancient reports and
medieval morality (Jordan 29). Africa was seen as a land of new
monsters. Though Africans were rarely perceived as a kind of ape, it
was more commonly suggested that Africans and apes shared
libidinous sexual characteristics or were sexually linked (Jordan 32,
227, 230–32, 237). For the English, sex was barbaric, as the body
was host to sin; and when they did not perceive Africans as
observing the same Christian worldview, they evaluated them
negatively. According to Jordan, Africans were linked with sins of the
body, and their blackness was believed to testify to their unlawful
and ungodly nature (Jordan 17–20, 36, 41). The purported carnality
of the African female was thought to be exemplary of African
sexuality more generally, as the female sex was the measure of a
race’s civility (Jordan 35).
While the discussion here notes Jordan’s comments on the role of
sexuality in the antiblack production of the discourse of African
animality, one could reasonably suggest that at times this now-
classic text naturalizes racial difference as a visualizable fact of the
body with immediate, unitary aesthetic effects for Europeans. In
Kathleen Brown’s reinterpretation of Jordan’s early modern sources,
she notes that divisions of household labor between the sexes,
manners and customs, and mores were as, if not more, central to
West Africans’ function as foils to the emergent concept of
Europeanness as skin color and hair texture (Brown, “Native
Americans” 82). Despite what one might expect from reading
Jordan’s conclusions, skin color was not the essence of racial
difference in the pre-1650 sources: writers of the period devoted
considerable space to descriptions of indigenous peoples’
adornments of their bodies, “the consequences of which were no
less startling to English observers than differences which allegedly
originated in nature” (K. Brown 90). The common criteria for bestial
otherness were measures of degrees of civility in Iberian and English
sources rather than complexion. One of the most common refrains in
early European accounts of people living near the so-called torrid
zones was “the people goeth all naked” (K. Brown 88). The
appearance of allegedly naked bodies had contradictory evocations:
on the one hand, nakedness conjured images of the garden of Eden
and a prelapsarian state of mind, arrested development, and
innocence; on the other hand, “Nudity also communicated sexual
promiscuity and the absence of civility to Europeans, which they
sometimes described as ‘beastly’ living” (K. Brown 88). Rather than
simply, or decisively, a matter of color, projected sexual mores and
virility were crucial determinants for measuring the being of Africans.
As Jennifer Morgan has shown, the imagined proof of the
enslaved’s incivility and degraded humanity was frequently located in
African females’ purported childbearing and child-rearing practices,
whereby the breast of the enslaved took on mythic proportions. In
this context, the breast took on an emblematic status: “European
writers turned to black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority
that ultimately became encoded as racial difference. Monstrous
bodies became enmeshed with savage behavior as the icon of
women’s breasts became evidence of tangible barbarism” (191).
African female breasts were depicted as exaggeratedly long, even
as bestial additional limbs. As Morgan asserts, what this history
demonstrates is not that “gender operated as a more profound
category of difference than race,” but rather that “racialist discourse
was deeply imbued with ideas about gender and sexual difference
that, indeed, became manifest only in contact with each other” (169).
What observers and commentators did not question was their own
universality, their grid of intelligibility, and how it conditioned not just
what they saw, or even how they observed, but how they knew what
they saw. This is an issue of perception that exceeds the question of
what was actually observed and what was “made up” or “imagined”;
instead of debating the facticity of a story, it is imperative to
interrogate how we would go about evaluating any empirical truth
claim. This calls into question how we “know what we know,” not only
about a world “out there” but also how we “know ourselves.”
Epistemology is a problem not of the past but one that is constituent
with our being.
By the nineteenth century, the Chain of Being’s physical
anthropology, using human and animal physical measurements,
sealed the connection between Africans and apes as scientific fact.
One must only recall the manner in which Sara Baartman, the so-
called Hottentot Venus, was displayed for the British and French
public as both pornographic spectacle and scientific specimen
(Gilman 88). Her physiognomic characteristics—posterior and
genitals—were presumed to signal a difference in sexuality that was
pronounced enough to further divide the categories of “female” and
“woman”: an idealized white femininity became paradigmatic of
“woman” through the abjection of the perceived African “female”
(Gilman 83–85). Female, rather than woman, African femaleness is
paradoxically placed under the sign of absence, lack, and pathology
in order to present an idealized western European bourgeois
femininity as the normative embodiment of womanhood (Gilman 85–
108).
In this context, the potential recognition of womanhood in
blackness, and especially black femininity, is placed in tension with
the discourses on black female sexuality. Hortense Spillers put it this
way: “In the universe of unreality and exaggeration, the black female
is, if anything, a creature of sex, but sexuality touches her
nowhere . . . the female has so much sexual potential that she has
none at all that anybody is ready to recognize at the level of culture”
(Black, White, and in Color 155, emphasis in original). The perpetual
specter of black female lack in the realm of culturally and historically
produced femininity, at the register of both performativity and
morphology, produces “the African female” as paradigmatically
indeterminate in terms of gender and paradigmatically the human’s
limit case.
The spectacularization of the posterior has perhaps blinded our
critical attention to the manner with which ontologizing racial
characterization not only divides and stratifies gender but also calls
into question the very meaning of sexual difference. Shifting critical
attention from the posterior to the breast, I demonstrate that racism
not only posits cleavages in womanhood such that black
womanhood is imagined to be a gender apart (an “other” gender) but
also an “other” sex. Additionally, antiblackness itself is sexuating,
whereby so-called biological sex is modulated by “culture.” In other
words, at the registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness
produces differential biocultural effects of both gender and sex. Such
a frame raises the stakes of recent feminist materialism’s inquiry into
both the inter(intra)actional relations of discursivity and materiality as
well as the gendered politics of hylomorphism, or the form–matter
distinction. Thus, antiblack formulations of gender and sexuality are
actually essential rather than subsidiary to the metaphysical
figuration of matter, objects, and animals that recent critical theory
hopes to dislodge. I argue the plasticization of black(ened) people at
the register of sign and materiality is central to the prevailing logics
and praxis of the human and sex/gender.
Recent scholarship in black queer theory suggests we can no
longer presume that gender is a metonym for “woman” and sexuality
a metonym for “queer.” The wanton manipulation of gendered and
sexual codes is essential to the production of antiblackness
generally, irrespective of self-identification.6 Queer theory scholars
have argued that the masculine–feminine dynamic is on the register
of the symbolic, rather than the biological, even though it
masquerades as if the borders dividing masculine from feminine map
neatly onto the “natural” polarity of sex.7 What feminism has not
sufficiently interrogated is the manner in which the masculine–
feminine dichotomy is racialized. We have neither adequately
identified that racialization is intrinsic to the legibility of its codes and
grammar, namely that antiblackness constitutes and disrupts
sex/gender constructs, nor determined the consequence this has for
the matter of the sexed body.
Such a predicament creates conditions of gendered and sexual
anxiety and instability. As Spillers states, “[I]n the historic outline of
dominance, the respective subject-positions of ‘female’ and ‘male’
adhere to no symbolic integrity,” as their meaning can be stripped or
appropriated arbitrarily by power, as black females’ claim to
“womanhood and femininity still tends to rest too solidly on the subtle
and shifting calibrations of a liberal ideology” (“Mama’s” 204, 223).
Thus, while codes of gender are cultural rather than prediscursive,
one must also attend to the matter of the body, as the body’s
materiality is thought to provide the observable “fact” of animality.
The African’s “failure” to achieve humanity has historically been
thought to be rooted in “the body,” in an insatiable appetite that made
it impossible for the African to rise above “the body,” “the organ,” in
order to come back to itself in self-reflection, never achieving the
distance required in order to contemplate the self (Mbembe 190).
Gender, and especially sexuality, was leveraged against
counterclaims acknowledging black reason and civility. For thinkers
such as Thomas Jefferson, black gender and black kinship stood as
an impediment to black progress. So, while it seems that the human
must be reconsidered, a critical engagement with the discourses of
gender and sexuality must be coincident to our interrogation of both
dominant and emergent praxes of being.
At this time, most feminist scholars can agree that an
“intersectional” approach to the question of subjectivity is required,
but scholars have not clarified how the different elements of
subjectivity braid together historically and culturally. In the chapters
that follow, I hope to provide more precise thinking in this area. Our
task would be to take seriously the particularization of gender and
sexuality in black(ened) people in the context of a humanism that in
its desire to universalize, ritualistically posits black(female)ness as
opacity, inversion, and limit. In such a context, the black body is
characterized by a plasticity, whereby raciality arbitrarily remaps
black(ened) gender and sexuality, nonteleologically and
nonbinaristically, with fleeting adherence to normativized
heteropatriarchal codes. In such a context of paradoxical
(un)gendering, and by gendering I mean humanization, power only
takes direction from its own shifting exigencies—a predicament that
might be described as chaos. This chaos by design is used to
marginalize black(ened) genders and sexualities as the border of the
sociological: a condition I refer to as ontologized plasticity.
Plasticity in Becoming Human describes what Stephanie
Smallwood, in her study of the Middle Passage and slavery,
identifies as “an enduring project of the modern Western world”: the
use of black(ened) flesh for “probing the limits up to which it is
possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within”
(36). “Plasticity” has been, as concept and thematic, taken up by a
range of thinkers including Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, Darwin, and most
notably Catherine Malabou. I distinguish my concept from these
alternatives in chapter 1. Here I would like to distinguish my usage
from Kyla Schuller’s more recent use of a similar term: impressibility.
Recently Schuller, in The Biopolitics of Feeling, (re)interprets
nineteenth-century US biopolitics, arguing that in Lamarckian
sentimental discourse and its theories of evolutionary optimization,
the conception of life’s plasticity was grounded in the notion of
mutable inheritance rather than determinism, and that somatic
potential was qualified by purported degrees of binary sex
differentiation, cast as the crowning achievement of the “civilized.”
By comparison, black(ened) people appeared to be inert and
undifferentiated—in other words, excessive to the domain of sexual
difference.8
In contrast, the concept of plasticity in Becoming Human indexes a
mode of domination that conditions the discourse and practices of
optimization at the center of nineteenth-century sentimentality and
accompanying theories of evolution, by suggesting that racial slavery
fleshed out its imagination and provided the experimental means for
exploring the possibilities and boundaries of the kind of optimization
Schuller elucidates.9 Plasticity’s telos, I argue, is not the optimization
of life per se but the fluidification of “life” and fleshly existence.
Plasticity is certainly an antiblack mode of the human concerned with
apportioning vitality and pathologization, but it is more than that.
Plasticity is a praxis that seeks to define the essence of a
black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable, in antiblack, often
paradoxical, sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating
sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally.
My suggestion is that slavery, as an experimental mode, sought to
define and explore the possibilities and limits of sex, gender, and
reproduction on the plantation and beyond in a manner distinct from
but relational to the assumed proper subject of “civilization,” and, in
fact, enabled hegemonic notions of sex/gender and reproduction
such as “woman,” “mother,” and “female body.”10 I demonstrate that
racial slavery as well as early modern proto-racializing conceptions
of “monstrous” races and births are integral to ideas of sex/gender,
reproduction, and indeed what it means to possess a body such that
receding and emergent idea(l)s of mutability and optimization
provide cover for historical and ongoing discursive-material modes of
domination that precede and surround its idealized and retroactively
constructed white(ened) subject and from which historical and
current biomedical and philosophical discourses of plasticity seek to
distance and obscure. Because antiblack modes of sex/gender and
reproduction are generated by means and in terms different from the
dominant, it is commonly assumed that such “excess” lay beyond the
boundaries of the productions of sex/gender; Becoming Human
suggests, instead, that the long arc of modern raciality reveals that
the production of the “civilized” subject of sex/gender and
reproduction is a retroactive construction and dependent on modes
of generating sex/gender and reproduction imagined as excessive to
its proper domain or otherwise invisibilized.
Liberal humanism’s basic unit of analysis, “Man,” produces an
untenable dichotomy—“the human” versus “the animal,” whereby the
black(ened) female is posited as the abyss dividing organic life into
“human” or “animal” based on wholly unsound metaphysical
premises. Thus, as a result of being abjectly animalized, those
marginalized have had to bear the burden of a failed metaphysics.
Becoming Human furthers black studies’ interrogation of humanism
by identifying our shared being with the nonhuman without
suggesting that some members of humanity bear the burden of “the
animal.”
 My second intervention is to demonstrate that exigencies of
racialization, have, commonly, prefigured discourses on animals and
the nonhuman, more generally and that the categories of “race” and
“species” have coevolved and are actually mutually reinforcing
terms. Current scholarship in posthumanism, animal studies, new
materialism, and theories of biopolitics has begun a broad inquiry
into the repercussions of defining “the human” in opposition to “the
animal.” Much of the recent scholarship suggests that race is a by-
product of prior negation of nonhuman animals. These fields,
particularly animal studies, are slowly advancing the thesis that
human–animal binarism is the original and foundational paradigm
upon which discourses of human difference, including, or even
especially, racialization was erected. The chapters that follow will
take an alternative approach.
Far from being an inevitable feature of our thought, this dualism
has been traced to none other than René Descartes. In “The Eight
Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human,” Laurie Shannon
argues that historical attention to lexicons reveals that the “human–
animal divide” descends from “Enlightenment modes of science and
philosophy that have been largely qualified in contexts like
subjectivity, rationality, and liberalism . . . To put it in the broadest
terms: before the cogito, there was no such thing as ‘the animal’”
(474). To illustrate the recentness of “the animal” as an impounding
preoccupation, Shannon makes a striking observation: “While
references to the creatures now gathered as animals defy inventory,
the collective English word animal appears a mere eight times
across the entire verbal expanse of Shakespeare’s work. His
practice on this point of nomenclature tilts overwhelmingly against
the word” (Shannon 474). Two of the eight uses of the word,
Shannon notes, “involve persons failing a (gender-vexed and class-
inflected) human standard”: “lack of self-government,” “unchastity,”
quoting Much Ado “savage sensuality,” and in Love’s Labor’s Lost
animality is evoked as intellectual inferiority.
Philosophers of race and Caribbeanist literary scholars have also
detected the incipience of modern racialization in the work of
Shakespeare.11 This scholarship notes that in The Tempest, Caliban,
too, is placed under the sign of “the animal,” namely irrational and
sexual intemperance. My argument is not simply that Caliban is
animalized but rather that figures like Caliban are constitutive to “the
animal” as a general term. Arguably more a personified idea than a
traditional character, Caliban emerged in the context of publicity
surrounding European voyages to the coast of Africa and the
Caribbean.12 The black body, held captive as a “resource for
metaphor,” has been discussed in the work of Frantz Fanon, in which
he contends that black men’s bodies, like Caliban, are projection
screens for white anxiety about sexuality (Spillers, “Mama’s” 205).
But, instead of recognizing their projections as just that, projection,
white anxiety imposes an image of black(ened) men as a bestial
sexual threat: a powerful sexual menace, initiator of sexual activity
unrestricted by morality or prohibition, or one who monopolizes
gendered sexual pleasure. The result is envy, punishment, or
masochistic pleasure; for the black is not the symbol of sexual threat
but is sexual threat—the penis becomes the synecdoche of black
manhood (Fanon 170, 177). My suggestion is that these subjects
—“animal” as a generic term and the racialized masculine figure of
Caliban—are intertwined and that their interrelation is ordered in
relation to the absent presence of the material metaphor of the black
female as matrix-figure.13 By uncovering the centrality of racialized
gender and sexuality in the very human–animal binarism that
scholars are looking to problematize or displace, I demonstrate the
necessity of the abjection and bestialization of black gender and
sexuality for both the normative construction of “the human” as
rational, self-directed, and autonomous and as the reproduction of
the scientific matrix of classification.
In addition to providing a crucial reexamination of African diasporic
literature and visual culture’s philosophical defiance of Western
scientific and philosophic definitions of “the human,” Becoming
Human clarifies the terms of the relationship between what Cary
Wolfe calls the “discourse of species” and racial discourse by
demonstrating that racialized gender and sexuality serve as an
essential horizon of possibility for the production of “the animal” as a
preoccupation of Modern discourse (Animal Rites 2). Reading the
existential predicament of modern racial blackness through and
against the human–animal distinction in Western philosophy and
science not only reveals the mutual imbrication of “race” and
“species” in Western thought but also invites a reconsideration of the
extent to which exigencies of racialization have preconditioned and
prefigured modern discourses governing the nonhuman. As I
demonstrate, at times antiblackness prefigures and colors
nonhuman animal abjection. I argue that anxieties about conquest,
slavery, and colonial expansionism provided the historical context for
both the emergence of a developmental model of “universal
humanity” and a newly consolidated generic “animal” that would be
defined in nonhuman and human terms. In this context, discourses
on “the animal” and “the black” were conjoined and are now mutually
reinforcing narratives in the traveling racializations of the globalizing
West. I demonstrate that both science’s and philosophy’s
foundational authority articulate black female abjection as a
prerequisite of “the human,” and this abjection helps give credence
to the linear taxonomical (ontological) thinking present scholarship is
trying to displace. Thus, racialized formations of gender and
sexuality are actually central rather than subsidiary to the very
human–animal binarism recent scholarship hopes to dislodge.
Becoming Human emphasizes cultural production that
philosophically challenges the abjection of animality and highlights
alternative modes of being. The cultural production examined here
does not figure the challenge of transforming ways of relating to
animality as separate from the urgent need to reimagine
(human)being because the semio-material burden of living as black
virtually forecloses the “on behalf of” structure that characterizes so
much of animal studies and, especially, its antecedents—animal
ethics and animal rights philosophy. As I have established thus far,
Western humanism has not produced African diasporic subjectivity in
a manner that would permit black people to decisively remove
themselves from being subjected to violence against “the animal.”
For the Enlightenment humanists mentioned above, “the African”
does not symbolize “the animal”; “the African” is “the animal.” The
black philosophical dissidence highlighted in this book speaks to the
biopolitical entanglement of discourses on animals, environment,
and African diasporic peoples. Thus, critical black studies must
challenge animalization on at least two fronts: animalizing discourse
that is directed primarily at people of African descent, and
animalizing discourse that reproduces the abject abstraction of “the
animal” more generally because such an abstraction is not an
empirical reality but a metaphysical technology of bio/necropolitics
applied to life arbitrarily.
Additionally, this project is not limited to a critique of
anthropocentricism. As I have suggested here and will elaborate in
the pages that follow, antiblackness’s arbitrary uses of power do not
comply with the hierarchies presumed by critics of
anthropocentricism. Furthermore, viruses, bacteria, parasites, and
insects all commonly exercise dominance over human populations.
Thus, critics such as Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe have
foregrounded a need for a critical and accountable humanism rather
than seeking ever-vigilant forms of anti-anthropocentricisms.14
However, it is crucial to critically engage with what it means to be in
a biopolitical context that is characterized by entanglements of
humans both historically recent and distant, nonhumans both big and
small, and environments both near and far. This criticality would
interrogate the epistemology of “the human,” as an idea, and that
would guide its ethico-political practices rather than reify the
presumptuous conceit of a received notion of the humane.
A critique of anthropocentricism is not necessarily a critique of
liberal humanism. Critics have advocated “on behalf of” animals
without questioning the epistemic and material project of liberal
humanism. Many critics of anthropocentricism have mistakenly
perceived that the problem of our time is anthropocentricism rather
than a failed praxis of being. Such critics of anthropocentricism often
proceed by humanizing animals in the form of rights, welfare, and
protections without questioning how advocates are constructing
themselves in the process. In other words, they do not subject the
very humanity they want to decenter and/or expand to sufficient
interrogation.15 As a result, they authorize the violence of the state,
one that protects, criminalizes, enforces, and prosecutes
differentially based on race, class, gender, sexuality, national origin,
religion, ability, and immigration status. For example, advocacy
projects that seek greater legal protection for the Great Apes and
more strenuous criminal prosecution for those who transgress
protective laws find themselves at odds with impoverished people in
African nations that have been burdened by IMF and World Bank
policies. Such nations may not be able to provide even limited
protections for their human citizens and even fewer economic
opportunities for the people who would be prosecuted under
international animal protection legislation. An impoverished person
may participate in capturing animals for pay, given that the illegal
wildlife trade is the world’s second largest transnational trading
industry, estimated to be worth $20 billion annually, second only to
drugs. Yet, impoverished people do not gain the majority of the
monetary value derived from the trade; the captured animals and the
wealth generated from their labor spiral upward to the West—but not
the criminal prosecution.16 In this context, it is not difficult to glean
how such international (read: universalist) legislation drafted by
exponents from more powerful and stable nations (because they
continue to be imperialist) places strain on already fragile
postcolonial state resources (because they continue to be
colonized). One really does have to wonder what we mean by justice
and rights when states and their citizens are put in such untenable
positions.
At present, animal studies scholarship tends to presume a
humanity that is secure within the logic of liberal humanism rather
than engage with a humanity that is often cast as debatable or
contingent.17 To render one’s humanity provisional, where the
specter of nullification looms large, is precisely the work that racism
does. Yet when the authors of this field speak of a human, they most
commonly speak of one whose ontological integrity is assumed and
idealized rather than plasticized, even when the goal of
posthumanism and animal studies is ultimately to interrogate or
undermine that certainty. For these fields to do accurate, fully
theorized, and principled work, they must show how the question of
the animal bears on the question of hierarchies of humanity. In the
pages that follow, I investigate blackness’s relation to animality
rather than presuppose black(ened) people’s relative power and
privilege as human, vis-à-vis nonhuman animals. Thus, my work
focuses on humans whose humanity is a subject of controversy,
debate, and dissension in order to reveal the broader political stakes
of “the animal” as a problem for contemplation.
In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that the African diaspora
does indeed have a stake in overturning the production of “the
animal.” However, the economies of value presumed in
posthumanism and animal studies need to be historicized and
transformed, namely, the presumption that all humans are privileged
over all animals by virtue of being included in humanity, or that
racism is a matter of suggesting that black people are like animals
based on a prior and therefore precedential form of violence rooted
in speciesism. The chapters that follow are an attempt to clarify,
historicize, and more precisely situate black(ened) humanity vis-à-vis
animality. I engage contemporary critical theory in the fields of
biopolitics, posthumanism, new materialism, and animal studies.
However, my intent is to critically build on these fields’ insights, not to
replicate them.
What you will find in the subsequent chapters is less a systematic
critical engagement with preexisting arguments in posthumanism,
the new materialisms, and animal studies and more an
establishment of a different conversation on ontology with different
entry points because Becoming Human is more interested in
redefining terms than entering into preestablished ones. Becoming
Human contends that the aforementioned fields, in the main, position
blackness in the space of the unthought, and therefore are not
sufficient grounds for theorizing blackness. This is not to suggest,
however, that their insights hold no purchase for black studies.
Departing from such a reactionary position, Becoming Human is
instead learned and deliberative—borrowing freely from and
extending these fields’ insights when and where it is useful to do so.
To the extent to which Becoming Human does engage the
fundaments of these fields, its primary aim is to clarify how
blackness conditions a given discourse. Becoming Human observes
some crucial distinctions: there is a difference between identifying
how (anti)blackness is a condition of possibility for hegemonic
thought and assuming the hegemonic terms of a given discourse.
Moreover, not all engagements with a given discourse are a ceding
of ground but might very well be the generative unsettling of it. By
placing scholarly and creative work on blackness in dialogue with
posthumanism and related fields, I am able to more fully theorize the
binaristic and hierarchical logics that structure relations among
humans and between animals and humans. I not only show that
antiblackness is actually central to the very construction of “the
animal” that recent scholarship wants to interrogate and move
beyond but also that (anti)blackness upends these fields’
frameworks of analysis and evaluative judgments.
Becoming Human’s third argument is a decisive break with a
commonly held position in the study of race. I do not propose the
extension of human recognition as a solution to the bestialization of
blackness. Recognition of personhood and humanity does not annul
the animalization of blackness. Rather, it reconfigures discourses
that have historically bestialized blackness. In the chapters that
follow, forms of human recognition—inclusion in biological
conceptions of the human species and the transition from native to
universal human subject in law and society—are not at odds with
animalization. Thus, animalization is not incompatible with
humanization: what is commonly deemed dehumanization is, in the
main, more accurately interpreted as the violence of humanization or
the burden of inclusion into a racially hierarchized universal
humanity.
The inquiry into being and matter here does not justify itself by
reproducing the specter of the flesh, of the bestial, of the passions,
of nature in need of human domination. The black cultural producers
in this study have chosen representational strategies that redirect
modern technologies (the magazine, ink-and-paper drawing,
photography, painting, the short story, and the novel) by disrupting
the foundational racialized epistemological presuppositions and
material histories embedded in the archive of these forms. These are
technologies that have not only reflected abject animalized
depictions of blackness but invented them as well. Rather than solely
rehearse debates about the ideological potential or pitfalls of genres
and technology, the cultural production in my study mobilizes these
technologies differently, producing not only disruptive conceptions of
blackness but also of ontology and epistemology more generally.
African diasporic cultural production intervenes productively in
reconsidering the role of “the animal” or the “animalistic” in the
construction of “the human” by producing nonbinaristic models of
human–animal relations, advancing theories of trans-species
interdependency, observing trans-species precarity, and
hypothesizing cross-species relationality in a manner that preserves
alterity while undermining the nonhuman and animality’s abjection,
an abjection that constantly rebounds on marginalized humans. I
suggest that only by questioning rather than presupposing the
virtuousness of human recognition will we be able to develop a
praxis of being that is not only an alternative to the necropolitical but
opposes it (Derrida, The Animal xi).
Ultimately, I suggest that the normative subject of liberal
humanism is predicated on the abjection of blackness, which is not
based on figurations of blackness as “animal-like” but rather casts
black people as ontologically plastic. Therefore, the task before us is
realizing being in a manner that does not privilege the very
normativity cohered by notions of abject animality and the discursive-
material plasticity of black(ened) flesh. This requires that scholars of
race extend the radical questioning of “the human” established by
African diasporic critics of Western humanism in a direction
potentially unanticipated by prior scholarship, by interrogating the
very construction of the animal beyond a condemnation of its
racialized application and scope. Both critics who seek more
equitable inclusion in liberal humanism and those who pursue a
radical transformation of the normative category of “the human” have
commonly overlooked the centrality of the animal question for black
existential matters. Becoming Human extends the insights of African
diasporic critics of “the human” by demonstrating that key texts in
black cultural production move beyond a demand for recognition and
inclusion in the very normative humanity that theorists such as
Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers,
Fred Moten, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson III,
Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Denise Ferreira da Silva,
Achille Mbembe, and Alex Weheliye have shown is fundamentally
antiblack, while also calling into question the presumptive logic
undergirding the specter of animalization.18
The cultural production examined here spans three continents and
three centuries because antiblackness has been central to
establishing national borders and readily crosses them.
Antiblackness has also been diasporically challenged and refused,
making it central to what comprises the very notion of the African
diaspora and of blackness. It is precisely through rather than against
historically demarcated regional, national, linguistic, and state
preoccupations that this discourse cyclically reorganizes itself.
Antiblackness’s pliability is essential to the intransigent,
complementary, and universalizing impetus of antiblack paradigms.
Irrespective of the innumerable and ever-transient definitions of
black identity across the diaspora, which by definition are
ephemerally produced, all black(ened) people must contend with the
burden of the antiblack animalization of the global paradigm of
blackness, which will infringe on all articulations and political
maneuverings that seek redress for present and historical violence.
Within the structure of much thought on race there is an implicit
assumption that the recognition of one as a human being will protect
one from (or acts as an insurance policy against) ontologizing
violence. Departing from a melancholic attachment to such an ideal,
I argue that the violence and terror scholars describe is endemic to
the recognition of humanity itself—when that humanity is cast as
black. A recognition of black humanity, demonstrated across these
pages, is not denied or excluded but weaponized by a conception of
“the human” foundationally organized by the idea of a racial telos.
For Wynter, the Negro is not so much excluded from the category
Man and its overrepresentation of humanity but foundational to it as
its antipodal figure, as the nadir of Man.19 I argue that the recognition
of humanity and its suspension act as alibis for each other’s terror,
such that the pursuit of human recognition or a compact with “the
human” would only plunge one headlong into further terror and
domination. Is the black a human being? The answer is
hegemonically yes. However, this, in actuality, may be the wrong
question as an affirmative offers no assurances. A better question
may be: If being recognized as human offers no reprieve from
ontologizing dominance and violence, then what might we gain from
the rupture of “the human”?
Animalization is a privileged method of biopolitical expression of
antiblackness; however, historians’ and theoreticians’ response to
the centrality of animalization has been inadequate, as scholars
have misrecognized the complexity of its operations. Binaristic
frameworks such as “humanization versus dehumanization” and
“human versus animal” are insufficient to understand a biopolitical
regime that develops technologies of humanization in order to
refigure blackness as abject human animality and extends human
recognition in an effort to demean blackness as “the animal within
the human” form. This is not to say that expressions and practices of
antiblackness never radically exclude black people from the category
of “the human”; rather, the point is that inclusion does not provide a
reliable solution because, in the main, black people have been
included in (one might even say dominated by) “universal
humanity”—but as the incarnation of abject dimensions of humanity
for which “the human” is foundationally and seemingly eternally at
war. Thus, black people are without shelter, whether invited into or
locked out of “the human.”
 I seek to investigate black revisionist and counter-discursive
practices in the context of liberal humanism’s selective and
circumscribed recognition of humanity in black people. While black
people cannot simply opt out of humanism, as liberal humanism is
the primary mode of recognition in the global historical present,
nevertheless, I argue that the severe limitations of liberal humanism
and notions of “the human,” the conscripting humanity imputed to
black people, has led to a radical questioning of “the human,” and in
particular the status assigned to animality, in key works of black
cultural expression. This questioning is suggestive of a desire for,
perhaps, a different “genre of the human” or may even signal, as I
propose, an urgent demand for the dissolution of “human” but, in
either case, is not simply a desire for fuller recognition within liberal
humanism’s terms (Wynter and Scott 196–197).20
 Making Humans: Animalization as Humanization
Everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet,
precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided.
—Giorgio Agamben, The Open

No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this
suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled
and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with
this wild and passionate uproar.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The uncompromising nature of the Western self and its active negation of
anything not itself had the counter-effect of reducing African discourse to a
simple polemical reaffirmation of black humanity. However, both the asserted
denial and the reaffirmation of that humanity now look like two sterile sides of
the same coin.
—Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (emphasis in original)

As Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony observes, discourse on

Africa “is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the
fringes) of a meta-text about the animal—to be exact, about the
beast: its experience, its world, and its spectacle” (2). During the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Western philosophy’s architects,
figures such as Hume, Hegel, Jefferson, and Kant, constructed a
theory of blackness’s inherent animality based on either “the
African’s” purported physical or mental likeness to nonhuman
animals, or as a result of the underdeveloped condition of African
humanity. The former relied on the establishment of “laws of nature”
whereby Africans and animals found on the African continent
developed similar deficiencies based largely on geographical
determinants. In such a model, privileging human–animal
comparison, the environment itself is black(ened), and its inferiority
in turn stymies African humanity. Thus, African peoples qualify as
human but only tentatively so, given their purported physical or
mental similarity to nonhuman animals and vice versa. In the latter
case, a developmental model, humanity is marked as an
achievement and teleology. Here “the African,” while also human, is
nevertheless defined by their animality. Rather than being animal-
like, black people are animals occupying the human form. The two
positions have different routes but the same destination: in short,
black(ened) people are the living border dividing forms of life such
that “the animal” is a category that may apply to animals and some
humans. Thus, the category of “the animal” develops in a manner
that crosses lines of species. Furthermore, in either case, in the
process of animalizing “the African,” blackness would be defined as
the emblematic state of animal man, as the nadir of the human. By
virtue of racialization, the category of “the animal” could even
potentially racialize animals in addition to animalizing blackness. The
debate over whether blackness is a subspecies of the human or
another type of being altogether haunted scientific debates
concerning “monogenesis versus polygenesis.” However, the line
between these two approaches is only partially maintained in the
thinkers discussed across this book’s pages. It is not always clear,
not only on what side of the border “the African” is placed, but also
the total number of borders posited at any given point in this debate.
What is certain, though, is that monogenesis or racially inclusive
constructions of “the human” complemented rather than detracted
from animalized depictions of blackness. Such debates were
instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both popular and
scientific perceptions of race. There are too many examples to
enumerate them all—but in the following, I have chosen what I
believe are the most cited cases.
Much of this history is known; it is commonly referred to in
critiques of humanism that advance a conception of
“dehumanization,” in which dehumanization is treated as sufficient
shorthand for humanist thought (especially Enlightenment thought)
concerning blackness. Enlightenment is a multivocality with
contradiction and moving parts, and thus not reducible to its more
infamous ideas. However, this section reinterprets a powerful and
ever-present strand of racist Enlightenment thought.21 After careful
investigation, I have come to some new conclusions that inform the
chapters that follow: First, I replace the notion of “denied humanity”
and “exclusion” with bestialized humanization, because the African’s
humanity is not denied but appropriated, inverted, and ultimately
plasticized in the methodology of abjecting animality. Universal
humanity, a specific “genre of the human,” is produced by the
constitutive abjection of black humanity; nevertheless, the very
constitutive function of this inverted recognition reveals that this
black abjection is transposing recognition, and an inclusion that
masks itself as an exclusion. Second, blackness is not so much
derived from a discourse on nonhuman animals—rather the
discourse on “the animal” is formed through enslavement and the
colonial encounter encompassing both human and nonhuman forms
of life. Discourses on nonhuman animals and animalized humans
are forged through each other; they reflect and refract each other for
the purposes of producing an idealized and teleological conception
of “the human.” Furthermore, antiblack animalization is not merely a
symptom of speciesism; it is a relatively distinctive modality of
semio-material violence that can be leveraged against humans or
animals (Singer 6, 18, 83). Similarly, speciesism can be mobilized to
produce racial difference. Thus, the animalizations of humans and
animals have contiguous and intersecting histories rather than
encompassing a single narrative on “animality.” This is a crucial
point, as it allows us to appreciate the irreducibility of both
antiblackness and species as well as investigate the respective
semio-material trajectories of black(ened) bodies and nonhuman
animal bodies take in their historical and cultural specificity.
Hume extrapolated from his understanding of the natural
environment that “inferior” climates produce “inferior nations.” He
believed that if plants and “irrational” animals were influenced by
degree of heat and cold, then the character of humans must also be
influenced by air and climate. These environmental factors rendered
minds “incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind,”
which prompted him to “suspect negroes and in general all other
species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites . . . No ingenious
manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences” (Hume 125n). He
went as far as to infamously declare, “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk
of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is
admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a
few words plainly” (Hume 213). Hume, like most Enlightenment
thinkers mentioned here, accepted the Aristotelian conception of the
human as an animal, but what marked human’s uniqueness,
according to Aristotle, was rationality.22 The human was a “rational
animal.” Thus, humanity was not defined in strict opposition to “the
animal,” but one’s humanity was determined by the nature of one’s
rationality. For Hume, in the case of African rationality, it was either
deficient or negligible. Therefore, the humanity of the Negro “species
of men” was acknowledged, but in a hierarchical and taxonomical
frame.
Kant, like Hume, looked to “the animal kingdom” as an analogue
for humanity, but what is astonishing is the manner in which his
articulations of “species” and “race” are interdependent and
concentric epistemological constructions. Whether in the work of
Carl Von Linne, Georges-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon,23 or in the
following statement by Kant, animal and human “race” are co-
articulations:

Among the deviations—i.e., the hereditary differences

of animals belonging to a single stock—those which,
when transplanted (displaced to other areas), maintain
themselves over protracted generation, and which also
generate hybrid young whenever they interbreed with
other deviations of the same stock, are called
races. . . . In this way Negroes and Whites are not
different species of humans (for they belong
presumably to one stock), but they are different races,
for each perpetuates itself in every area, and they
generate between them children that are necessarily
hybrid, or blendlings (mulattoes). (17)
 In such formulations, there is much anxiety about maternity and
sexual difference. It is difficult to maintain that either the logic of
raciality or the animalization of blackness is merely symptomatic of
attempts to domesticate “nature” or “animals” under an ordering
system. Rather, the demand for taxonomical and hierarchical races
is foundational to the project of assimilating newly “discovered”
plants and nonhuman animals into a system, as the vastness of
nature would overwhelm and exceed the limits of the time and
location’s reigning epistemological frame (but not its appetite for
mastery).24 Race can only be subsidiary to the desire to animalize
nonhuman animals or make “nature” knowable if one abstracts this
desire from its historical context: “The Age of Discovery,” which is to
say the age of slavery and conquest.25
If, as Foucault maintains in The Order of Things, our current
hegemonic, “universalist” conception of “man” is a mutation of prior
metaphysical conceptions of being, then I would qualify this insight
by insisting that this mutation was and remains an effect of slavery,
conquest, and colonialism. The metaphysical question of “the
human,” as one of species in particular, arose through the
organizational logics of racialized sexuation and the secularizing
imperatives (largely economic, but not exclusively so) of an imperial
paradigm that sought dominion over life, writ large. At the meeting
point of natural philosophy and the so-called Age of Discovery,
natural science instituted its representational logics of somatic
difference in ever-increasingly secularized ontological terms.
Hegel represents perhaps the most extreme articulation of “the
African’s” animality, one in which animality is thought not only to be a
feature, but the essence of African life. At times, from reading
Hegel’s (and arguably Kant’s) geographical theories, one could
conclude that his theory of nature and animals is animated by a
desire to fix race as teleological hierarchy: to make race knowable
and predictable. For Hegel declares:

Even the animals show the same inferiority as the

human beings. The fauna of America includes lions,
 tigers, and crocodiles. But although they are otherwise
similar to their equivalents in the Old World, they are in
every respect smaller, weaker, and less powerful. (163)

In this case, it is not the native’s likeness to animals that defines

human animality; instead animals’ likeness to American Indians
defines animals in their animality. The quality of American Indian
being becomes the term through which “nature” is defined. This is
not to say that his thoughts on nonhuman animals are merely a
justification for his theories of race, but rather it does demonstrate
that we cannot assume that racism does not animate conceptions of
some of our most foundational theories of nature and nonhuman
animality. Most of the humanist thought discussed here was
developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the
slave trade was increasingly under scrutiny by abolitionists.
Contestation had risen to unprecedented levels, and as a result,
slavery increasingly required justification (Jordan 27, 231–232).
These justifications relied heavily on the African’s purported
animality. Even Georges Leopold Cuvier’s classification of humanity
into three distinct varieties—Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian—
emphasized the superiority of the Caucasian and is elaborated in his
book titled Animal Kingdom (Cuvier 50).
In Notes on a State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson attempts to
qualify the essence of black people’s humanity. What is crucial is that
Jefferson defines black people as “animal” not based on a direct
correlation to nonhuman animals but on the specificity of black
people’s humanity, particularly with regard to black embodiment,
sexuality, intelligence, and emotions: aesthetically displeasing form,
bestial sexuality, and minor intelligence and feeling. Regarding the
heart and mind, he states:

They are more ardent after their female; but love

seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a
tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.
Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions,
 which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life
to us in mercy or in wrath are less felt, and sooner
forgotten with them. (Jefferson 46)

Jefferson’s arguments recognize black humanity, but the question is

what kind of humanity is imputed to black(ened) people? As he
states, “It is not against experience to suppose, that different species
of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess
different qualifications” (Jefferson 151).
Following Aristotle, humanity and animality are not mutually
exclusive terms in much Eurocentric humanistic thought—however,
there is an important qualification: the logic of conquest, slavery, and
colonialism produced a linear and relational conception of human
animality. Whereas Europeans are moral/rational/political animals,
the recognition of black people’s humanity did not unambiguously
and unidirectionally elevate black people’s ontologized status vis-à-
vis nonhuman animals. “Being human” instead provided a vehicle for
reinforcing a striated conception of human species. Thus, the
extension and recognition of shared humanity across racial lines is
neither “denied” nor mutual, reciprocal human recognition; rather, it
is more accurately deemed bestializing humanization and inverted
recognition. Instead of denying humanity, black people are
humanized, but this humanity is burdened with the specter of abject
animality. In fact, all of the thinkers above identify black people as
human (however attenuated and qualified); thus, assimilation into the
category of “universal humanity” should not be equated with black
freedom. Assimilation into “universal humanity” is precisely this
tradition’s modus operandi. But what are the methods? And what are
the costs?
Too often, our conception of antiblackness is defined by the
specter of “denied humanity” or “exclusion.” Yet as Saidiya Hartman
has identified in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-
Making in Nineteenth-Century America, the process of making the
slave relied on the abjection and criminalization of slave humanity,
rather than the denial of it. Hartman asks:
 suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the
promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s
suffering but rather of intensifying it? Or what if this
acknowledgment was little more than a pretext for
punishment, dissimulation of the violence of chattel
slavery and the sanction given it by the law and the
state, and an instantiation of racial hierarchy? What if
the endowments of man—conscience, sentiment, and
reason—rather than assuring liberty or negating
slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom? Or what if
the heart, the soul, and the mind were simply the
inroads of discipline rather than that which confirmed
the crime of slavery. (5)

Hartman contends that the recognition of the enslaved’s humanity

did not redress slavery’s abuses nor the arbitrariness of the master’s
power since in most instances the acknowledgment of the humanity
of the enslaved was a “complement” to the arrangement of chattel
property rather than its “remedy”(6). She demonstrates that
recognition of the enslaved’s humanity served as a pretext for
punishment, dissimulation of chattel slavery’s violence, and the
sanction given it by the law and the state (Hartman 5). What’s more,
rather than fostering “equality,” this acknowledgment often served as
an instantiation of racial hierarchy, as the slave is “recognized” but
only as a lesser human in (pre)evolutionist discourse or criminalized
by state discourses. In other words, objecthood and humanization
were two sides of the same coin, as ties of affection could be
manipulated and will was criminalized.
The enslaved bifurcated existence as both an object of property
and legal person endowed with limited rights, protections, and
criminal culpability produced a context where consent, reform, and
protection extended the slave’s animalized status rather than
ameliorated objectification. From this perspective, emancipation is
less of a decisive event than a reorganization of a structure of
violence, an ambivalent legacy, with gains and losses, where
inclusion could arguably function as an intensification of racial
subjection. Echoing Hartman, I would argue for reframing black
subjection not as a matter of imperfect policy nor as evidence for a
spurious commitment to black rights (which is undeniably the case)
but rather as necessitating a questioning of the universal liberal
human project. “The human” and “the universal” subject of rights and
entitlements assumed a highly particularized subject that is held as
paradigmatic, subjugating all other conceptions of being and justice.
Furthermore, if the following assertion by Achille Mbembe is correct,
“the obsession with hierarchy . . . provides the constant impetus to
count, judge, classify, and eliminate, both persons and things” in the
name of “humanizing” the colonized, I ask, how can we confidently
distinguish humanization from animalization (Mbembe 192)? What
we have at hand is more complicated than a simple opposition such
as “exclusion versus inclusion,” “the human” versus “the animal,” and
“humanization versus dehumanization.” Consequently, a new
epistemology and transformative approach to being is needed rather
than the extension of human recognition under the state’s normative
conception.
As long as “the animal” remains an intrinsic but abject feature of
“the human,” black freedom will remain elusive and black lives in
peril, as “the animal” and “the black” are not only interdependent
representations but also entangled concepts. While there are
particular Euroanthropocentric discourses about specific animals,
just as there are particular forms of antiblack racialization based on
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national origin, for instance, these
particularizing discourses are in relation to the organizing abstraction
of “the animal” as “the black.” To disaggregate “humanity” from the
production of “black humanity,” the one imposed on black(ened)
people, assumes one could neutralize blackness and maintain the
human’s coherence. But the neutralization of blackness requires the
dissolution of discourses on “the animal” and vice versa, but that is,
to say the least, unlikely because “the animal” is a mode of being for
which Man is at war. What is more plausible is that attempts to
neutralize blackness and “the animal” will continue to be in practice,
if not word, a means of discipline and eradication.
When humanization is thought to be synonymous with black
freedom, or even a means to freedom, one risks inadvertently
minimizing or extending the violence of “universal humanity.” The
“universal” is a site of imperial imposition and constant contestation
rather than simply an ideal. The ongoing process of universalization
is purchased precisely through the abjection and ontologizing
plasticization of “the African.” As Hegel argued, Africans are barred
from universal humanity or spirit because they are not aware of
themselves as conscious historical beings, a consequence of two
intrinsic qualities. First, Africans worship themselves or nature rather
than God. Second, Africans kill their king, which is a failure to
recognize the superiority of a higher authority than themselves,
whether that of God or law.
The African character, according to Hegel, springs from a
geographical climate hostile to the achievement of spirit. Hegel
builds on earlier theories that suggest that climate is not simply fertile
ground for the cultivation of nature but is also the root of a
teleological human character. He believed the “torrid” and “frigid”
zones, “where nature is too powerful,” do not provide the sufficient
conditions for the dialectic of becoming, or the attainment of
“freedom by means of internal reflection,” whereby humanity is
achieved in opposition to nature (Hegel 154). One achieves spirit by
rising above nature, distinguishing oneself from one’s natural
surroundings. Only by passing through this stage is one able to
recognize the presence of God as separate from the self and above
Nature. Thus, God “exists in and for itself as a completely objective
and absolute being of higher power” determining the course of
everything in nature and humanity (Hegel 178). Hegel declares, “The
Negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and
lawlessness” and the African’s “primitive state of nature is in fact a
state of animality” (177, 178).
The practice whereby Africans “worship the moon, the sun, and
the rivers,” animating these natural forms “in their imagination, at the
same time treating them as completely independent agents,” Hegel
believes, ultimately makes the mistake of identifying nature’s power
without identifying that nature has an eternal law or providence
behind it, providing universal and permanent natural order (Hegel
178). The African’s “arbitrariness” triumphs over permanent natural
order. Thus, the African is not capable of the rational universality
embedded in the concepts of law, ethics, and morality. As free
rational laws are, for Hegel, the bases of freedom, Hegel formulates
most systematically a conception of “the African” that is both of
humanity but not in humanity. Thus, humanity is not strictly a
biological imperative but a cultural achievement in Hegelian thought.
Hegel pronounces “the African” an animal precisely through the
rejection of African political and spiritual rationality, even while
denying the existence of African rational capability all together. One
must ask, how can one deny the presence of African rationality
through a method that acknowledges its existence? And, to what
extent is black humanity “excluded” when it is central to the
construction of European humanity as an achievement? Infamous
pronouncements aside, Hegel’s conclusion is circular: his logic
collapses against the weight of his precepts and method. This
circuitous logic is one we inherit when a difference in Reason is
interpreted as absence or chaos.26
As Mbembe notes in On the Postcolony, the problem of universal
humanity shapes current conditions of ethics and justice:

Each time it came to peoples different in race,

language, and culture, the idea that we have,
concretely and typically, the same flesh, or that in
Husserl’s word, “My flesh already has the meaning of
being a flesh typical in general for us all,” became
problematic. The theoretical and practical recognition
of the body of “the stranger” as flesh and body just like
mine, the idea of a common human nature, a humanity
shared with others, long posed, and still poses, a
problem for Western consciousness. (2)
Hegel’s theory of “universal humanity” has influenced the culture of
rights and law, including human rights law, but at the cost of erasing
competing conceptions of being and justice that are not rooted in the
opposition between Man and Nature.
A conception of humanity that Hegel dismissed as “nature-
worship” animates the work of famed South African artist Ezrom
Legae, in particular his Chicken Series (Hegel 133). Legae created
artworks in ink and pencil as well as totemic bronze sculptures
(Figure P.1). In 1977, Legae expressed his feelings about the
gunned-down child protesters during the Soweto uprising and the
murder of Bantu antiapartheid leader Steve Biko at the hands of the
police through chiaroscuro, a set of pencil and ink drawings. In
Biko’s Ghost, Shannen Hill asserts that the Chicken Series remains
among two of the best known of all works that explore Steve Biko’s
death (116). A medium that mobilizes the polarity of black:white, by
mixing light and substance, according to Richard Dyer, chiaroscuro
can become a key feature of the representation of white humanity as
translucence: privileging the “radiant white face” and obscuring “the
opaque black one,” “which is at the very least consonant with the
perceptual/moral/racial slippages of western dualism” (115–116).
Channeling Anne Hollander, Dyer argues that chiaroscuro is a
technique used to “discipline, organize and fix the image, suggesting
the exercise of spirit over subject matter” (Dyer 115). If, as Dyer
suggests, chiaroscuro “allows the spiritual to be manifest in the
material” because it selectively lets light through, Legae’s
subversion, his chiaroscuro’s representation of spirit, bends the
semiotics of the Christian West and black South Africa in a direction
that calls for the overthrow of (state) hierarchies of race and “the
human” rooted in polarities of the enlightened and benighted.27 In
the drawings, there are fragile domestic fowls and human–bird
hybrids: broken bones, battered, impaled, crucified, fragmented, and
swollen. Tortured bodies are alongside eggs, figures of renewal. The
drawings collectively speak to the torture, sacrifice, and regeneration
of South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement.
 As John Peffer notes, in terms of its manifest content, the image is
that of Christian martyrdom: a crucified chicken. However, the animal
aspect is not simply a metaphor for the pained existence of human
life under the rule of apartheid; it also illustrates the animal potential
of the human. This felt conception of humanity’s animal potential is
rooted in a cosmological system, a philosophy where the potency of
animals may be shared with humans. Humans, especially those who
are spiritually powerful, such as community leaders or healers,
harness the spiritual and even physical characteristics of animals.
For South Africans such as Legae, those depicted in his work are no
longer simply human, as they are transformed by the taking on of the
physical and psychical potential of animals. Thus, they are not
merely metaphorically animals, but are altered in a physical and
psychical sense. His work is a challenge to Manichean distinctions
between the physical and the spiritual as well as “human versus the
animal” (Peffer 58–59).
When the prevailing notion of (human) being becomes
synonymous with “universal humanity” or “the human” in discourses
of law and popular consciousness, this is an outcome of power,
whereby one worldview is able to supplant another onto-
epistemological system with a different set of ethical possibilities.
The more “the human” declares itself “universal,” the more it
imposes itself and attempts to crowd out correspondence across the
fabric of being and competing conceptions of being. The insistence
on the universality of “the human” allows for the multiplication and
proliferation of this abstraction’s aggression. To overcome a
competing model, Western humanism has historically harnessed the
force of the state; not only does this take the form of direct state
violence, but it is also accomplished by epistemic erasure. Attacks
on indigenous forms of knowledge are essential to the process of
normalizing a colonial episteme. In bids for recognition and legibility
of suffering, within national and global judicial bodies, one’s legal
identity and injury must speak the language of a particular
philosophy of the human. This is so despite the fact that universal
humanity, as defined by Hegel and taken up in liberal humanist
judicial bodies, is rooted in an anti-African epistemology.
However, under the circumstances, Legae’s protest did benefit, to
an extent, from its opacity and incommensurability with respect to
the state’s conception of the human, as its critique was obscured
from the state. Its cosmological codes, its animating conception of
humanity, were rendered illegible by the same force of law that
sparked his outrage and grief. However, what was opaque to the
state was immediately identifiable to South Africans like himself. The
current conception of universal humanity does not move beyond a
Western, secularized cultural mode and thus misrecognizes and
occludes African subjectivity. Thus, we cannot take universal
humanity at its word that it is indeed “universal.” Hegel’s conception
of universal humanity aggressively negates Legae’s conception of
being and world. Namely, Hegel’s humanism disregards the
rationality, reflexivity, and abstract reasoning and idiom of
representation that constitute Legae’s vitalizing mode of
insubordination. According to Hegel, such a considered act could
never spring from “nature-worship” cosmological worldviews (133).
Ironically, the manner in which “the human” announces its
universality provides the occasion for Legae’s protest to slip under
the radar of the apartheid South African government and elude
censorship. Evoking the latent animal potential of those brutalized by
the state’s violence, an alternative mode of being (human) and
attendant to spirit, the Chicken Series bypasses the problem of the
representationalism and its historical reification of the traumatized
black body. Thus, Legae could provide powerful witness to events
barred from public discourse by an apartheid government,
challenging apartheid state terror overtly (opaque). His conception of
being, or ontology, defends indigenous African life from the
encroachment of a humanism that universalizes itself through torture
and intimidation, yes, but also via imperial epistemology, ontology,
and ethics.28 Considering that much of the world does not adhere to
a worldview guided by human–animal binarism nor is legible within
these terms, I wonder what other modes of relating, epistemologies
of being, and ethical possibilities exist beyond the horizon of “the
human” and “the animal”?
Some believe, like Lewis Gordon, that black people must be
humanists for the “obvious” reason, that the dominant group can
“give up” humanism for the simple fact that their humanity is
presumed, while other communities have struggled too long for the
“humanistic prize” (Gordon 39–46). But what if the enslaved and
colonized “no longer accept concepts as gift, nor merely purify and
polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make
them convincing?” (Nietzsche 409). The elusive “humanist prize”—
the formal, symmetrical extension of European humanism—makes
achieving its conception of “the human” a prerequisite of equitable
recognition, yet its conception of humanity already includes the
African, but as abject, as plastic. Thus, in order to become human
without qualification, you must already be Man in its idealized form,
yet Man, understood simultaneously as an achievement and bio-
ontology, implies whiteness and specifically nonblackness.
We misdiagnose the problems of Western globalizing humanism
when we take universalism at its word, seeing its failures as simply a
problem of implementation or procedure. This results in a further
misdiagnosis of the causes and outcomes of freedom and
unfreedom. Freedom itself is an evolving practice rather than a
normative ideal (D. Roberts, Killing 183). As an ideal, freedom is
shielded from critique by alternative conceptions rooted in another
order of being/knowing/feeling. That said, I also believe that we have
misrecognized the refractory desires of black culture, which are
commonly not to assimilate but to transform.
 After Man
In the Enlightenment thought mentioned above, “the African” is a
discourse that develops out of the specific historical context of
slavery and expansionism beyond the so-called temperate zones, an
expansion into what came to be called Africa and the Caribbean.
The discourses that developed to narrate Africa as a land of abject
bestial humanity spiraled out and sought to take possession of all
African diasporic peoples beyond the geo/ethno/linguistic
specificities of “the African” and “the Hottentot.” As Mbembe puts it,
“What we have said about the slave also holds for the native. From
the point of view of African history, the notion of the native belongs to
the grammar of animality” (236). Thus, while the black thinkers in
Becoming Human were born in different nations—South Africa,
Cuba, Kenya, the United States, among others—all must define
themselves in a globalizing antiblack order that raises “the animal
question” as ultimately an existential one.
In this project, I am interested in how African diasporic writers and
artists not only critique animalization but also exceed critique by
overturning received ontology and epistemic regimes of species that
seek to define blackness through the prism of abject animality. By
doing so, they present possibilities that point our attention to the
potential of modes of worlding that are more advantageous to life
writ large. I home in on the epistemic locations of science and
philosophy not only because these are the sites that have continued
to be privileged in a contest over meaning and truth but also
because the questions pursued in Becoming Human are biocultural,
or more precisely sociogenic: they concern the ways that we are
Homo Narrans, both bios and mythos.29 Instead of aiming for a
comprehensive approach to African diasporic perspectives on the
so-called animal question, this study does not claim to be all-
inclusive, but it does claim that the strategies examined here offer a
set of cases that enlarge the field of being’s possibility beyond
antiblack ontological plasticity. They initiate what appears impossible
and create that which is to come.
In Habeas Viscus, Alexander Weheliye maintains, “The greatest
contribution to critical thinking of black studies—and critical ethnic
studies more generally—is the transformation of the human into a
heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli” (8). Becoming
Human’s contribution to this effort is its concept of plasticity, which
maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized
as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people
framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra,
and human simultaneously and in a manner that puts being in peril
because the operations of simultaneously being everything and
nothing for an order—human, animal, machine, for instance—
constructs black(ened) humanity as the privation and exorbitance of
form. Thus the demand placed on black(ened) being is not that of
serialized states nor that of the in-between nor partial states but a
statelessness that collapses a distinction between the virtual and the
actual, abstract potential and situated possibility, whereby the
abstraction of blackness is enfleshed via an ongoing process of
wresting form from matter such that raciality’s materialization is that
of a dematerializing virtuality.
What sets Becoming Human apart is the manner in which it takes
seriously that black literary and visual culture theorizes and
philosophizes. While certainly highlighting historical and
contemporary individual black philosophical thinkers, this project is
equally interested in the philosophical thought that occurs in/as
expressive culture. Given that, historically, black people have, in the
main, been excluded from the more recognized domains of politics,
religion, and philosophy, I maintain that black arts and letters has
often been a key site for philosophy, theology, and political theory.
Becoming Human acknowledges the historical and ongoing
exclusions of black people from the domain of the “properly”
theoretical and philosophical, but in what follows, you will not find an
effort justifying or trying to convince anyone that black thought has
something to say about European Continental thought and it is
valuable to do so; it just gets on with the work of reading black arts
and letters philosophically. Such a reading is not content with
reading a novel or poem or work of visual art as mere example of the
ideas of an individual “great” thinker; rather, in reading literature and
visual art for theory, the approach is that of placing the theories of/as
literary and visual art in conversation with more recognizable means
and forms of philosophy. It is not an attempt to be exhaustive or
comprehensive rather it takes aim at assumptive logics by disrupting
and reconstellating the frame through which we have come to
question blackness’s relation to Man, particularly as it pertains to
“the animal” and “species.” Thus, the aim is to establish new entry
points into the conversation about the nature of the problem and
point to other horizons rather than purport to exhaust the
monumental question of race and “the human.” Subscribing to the
view all is present, when it comes to modern blackness, Becoming
Human—while historically situating and contextualizing “theory”—
has the principal intention of depth in its critical aims rather than
producing the effects of the historian.
The modes of being examined in Becoming Human do not
advocate a politics based on rights and entitlements under the law,
precisely because their forms are undergirded by demands that are
either criminalized, pathologized, or simply rendered illegible by law
and the normative mode of “the human”; these demands emerge
from a different way of being/knowing/feeling existence than the
ones legible and codified in law and the dialectics of Man. Their
contestation invests in speculation and expressive culture as a site
of critique and creativity. They put forth transient and fleeting
expressions of potentiality in the context of the incongruity between
substantial freedom and legal emancipation as well as that of
colonialism and decolonization. These gestures of potentiality are
often incomplete but point to a desire and world-upending claim that
is not currently recognized in the social orders that gave rise to them.
Each chapter of Becoming Human engages a different aspect of
what it is to problematize the category of Man from that space that
has been foreclosed in order for the category to exist.30
 The arc of Becoming Human starts with the grounding reference of
slavery. It puts forward the theory of ontologized plasticity based on
reading across Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and 1873
speech on “Kindness to Animals” and Toni Morrison’s Beloved for
their respective elaboration and philosophical interventions into the
idea of the Chain of Being and its racialization of the human–animal
distinction. Next, it examines the concept of “the world,” by reading
Nalo Hopkinson’s genre-defying and literary philosophical Brown Girl
in the Ring for its upending of Heideggerian metaphysics, in
particular Heidegger’s highly influential tripartite system of human,
animal, and stone, through the text’s allegorical examination of the
matter of black women’s being in the world. Becoming Human then
turns to a reading of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” a text that
deconstructs the racialized gendered and sexual imaginary of body
and self, accompanying scientific debates about the origin of life
itself and symbiosis, a theory of cross-species evolutionary
association. Finally, Becoming Human concludes with Wangechi
Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals; Mutu’s visual art and Lorde’s
journals bring to the forefront the problem of antiblackness, in the
mode of a discourse of species, and its role in reproductive health
disparity. Becoming Human closes with a coda that initiates a black
feminist theory of the necropolitical. The last two chapters and coda
concern the pertinence of the biopolitics of antiblackness to
historically recent and contemporary theories of biological discourse
and species. However, all of the texts in my study underscore the
recursive trajectory of discourses on black animality.
Chapter 1, “Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in
the (Neo)Slave Narrative,” is introduced by Frederick Douglass’s
provocation from his 1845 Narrative, “You have seen how a man
was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man”
(389). Slavery, in particular the slave narrative, established the terms
through which we commonly understand the bestialization of
blackness. Douglass’s 1845 Narrative has been central to
interpretations that read African American literature through the
framework of a petition for human recognition. Douglass, himself,
arguably the nineteenth century’s most iconic slave, grounds his
critique of slavery in natural law. However, Douglass’s later
speeches problematize his commitment to the natural rights tradition
found in his 1845 Narrative, by disrupting its racially hierarchical
conception of being and challenging the animal abjection that is
foundational to its ontology.
Beloved recalls rhetorical strategies, such as appeals to
sentimentality and the sovereign “I” employed by Frederick
Douglass, that diagnose racialization and animalization as mutually
constitutive modalities of domination under slavery. Chapter 1
examines how we might read Morrison as productively
problematizing sentimentality as well as gendered appeals to
discourses of the Self rooted in religio-scientific hierarchy,
specifically the scala naturae or Chain of Being, as both discourses
have historically recognized black humanity and included black
people in their conceptualization of “the human,” but in the
dissimulating terms of an imperial racial hierarchy. Beloved extends
Douglass’s intervention by subjecting animality’s abjection to further
interrogation by foregrounding nonhuman animal perspective,
destabilizing the epistemological authority of enslaving modernity,
including its gendered and sexual logics. By doing so, Beloved
destabilizes the very binaristic and teleological epistemic
presumptions that authorize the black body as border concept. Re-
constellating the slave narrative genre, Morrison opens up a new
way to interpret the genre, not as one that exposes slavery’s
dehumanization but rather as one that meditates on the violence of
liberal humanism’s attempts at humanization. Unsettling calcified
interpretations of history and literary slave narratives, Beloved
identifies the violation of slavery not in an unnatural ordering of man
and beast but in its transmogrification of human form and personality
as an experiment in plasticity and its limits therein, while also
exploring what potential opacity holds for a generative disordering of
being.
 Chapter 2, “Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo
Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring,” is a reading of Nalo
Hopkinson’s 1999 Locus Award–winning near-future novel Brown
Girl in the Ring. Becoming Human avers that gendered antiblack
metaphysics continues to subtend scales of world among humans,
animals, and objects in Heidegger’s still highly influential thought
despite being imagined as a corrective to previous scales, such as
the scala naturae or the Chain of Being examined in chapter 1. It
explores what other sense of world becomes available in spaces of
abjection and the unthought. Martin Heidegger once wrote regarding
the relation between thought and being: “[1.] the stone (material
object) is worldless [weltlos]; [2.] the animal is poor in world
[weltarm]; [3.] man is world-forming [weltbildend]” (Fundamental
177). Chapter 2 argues that the absent presence of the black female
figure functions as an interposition that subtends and therefore
paradoxically holds the potential to topple the logic of this schema
and investigates how, as a consequence of this system’s imperialist
worldmaking and monopolization of sense, the matter of the black
female body is vertiginously affected. An inquiry into onto-
epistemology, this chapter explores the reciprocal production of
aesthesis and empiricism, both the seemingly scientific and the
perceptual knowledge that signify otherwise under conditions of
imperial Western humanism.
I argue that as an enabling condition of an imperial Western
humanist conception of the world as such, the black mater(nal)
marks the discursive-material trace effects and foreclosures of the
dialectics of hegemonic common sense and that the anxieties
stimulated by related signifiers, such as the black(ened) maternal
image, voice, and lifeworld, allude to the latent symbolic-material
capacities of black mater, as mater, as matter, to destabilize or even
rupture the reigning order of representation that grounds the
thought–world relation. In other words, the specter of black mater—
that is, nonrepresentability—haunts the terms and operations tasked
with adjudicating the thought–world correlate or the proper
perception of the world as such, including hierarchical distinctions
between reality and illusion, Reason and its absence, subject and
object, science and fiction, speculation and realism, which turn on
attendant aporias pertaining to immanence and transcendence.
Exploring the mind-body-social nexus in Hopkinson’s fiction, I
contend that in Brown Girl in the Ring, vertigo is evoked as both a
symptom and a metaphor of inhabiting a reality discredited (a
blackened reality) that is at once the experience of the carceral and
the apprehension of a radically redistributed sensorium. I argue that
black mater holds the potential to transform the terms of reality and
feeling, therefore rewriting the conditions of possibility of the
empirical.
While remaining attentive to the role of the scientific in the
philosophical and the philosophical in scientific throughout, the
second half of Becoming Human turns, more centrally, to the
question of “species” in scientific discourse. Having established the
plastic function of blackness in the still active metaphysics of The
Great Chain and the conditioning absent presence of black mater for
Heideggerian scales of being, Becoming Human moves from an
investigation of the philosophical production of “the animal” to the
scientific production of “species.” I demonstrate that in scientific
discourse, antiblackness functions there, too, as an essential means
of arranging human–animal and human–nonhuman distinctions.
Chapter 3, the penultimate chapter, “‘Not Our Own’: Sex, Genre, and
the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild,’” begins an inquiry
into the constitutive role of antiblackness for the logics of scientific
taxonomical species hierarchies. The chapter identifies the agentic
capaciousness of embodied somatic processes and investigates
how matter’s efficacies register social inscription. Chapter 3 provides
a reading of risk, sex, and embodiment in Butler’s “Bloodchild,” a text
that affirms the continued importance of risk for establishing new
modes of life and worlding, despite historical violence and embodied
vulnerability. “Bloodchild” is instructive for situating the racial,
gendered-sexual politics of the idea of evolutionary association, or
symbiogenesis, in the historical discourses of evolutionary and cell
biology, as well as deposing a cross-racially hegemonic conception
of the autonomous, bounded body that underwrites phantasies of
possessive individualism, self-ownership, and self-determination.
Perhaps surprisingly, one organism in particular—lichen—has played
no minor role in the idea of evolutionary association. As a material
actor, lichen has been a source of imagination for troubling the idea
of the human individual.
In 1868, when Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener put forth his
theory that lichen were actually an association of a fungus or algae—
modified fungi, rather than one or the other—he employed vexed
social imagery (Schwendener). He argued that lichens represented a
master–slave relation: the master was a fungus of the order
Ascomycetes, “a parasite which is accustomed to live upon the work
of others; its slaves are green algals, which it has sought out or
indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service” (Schwendener 4).
As Jan Sapp describes, his theory was met with “bitter opposition,”
considered a threat to taxonomical classification and disciplinary
boundaries (4). One commentator described the theory as “the
unnatural union between a captive Algal damsel and tyrant Fungal
master” (4). This theory would eventually be known as symbiosis.
Similarly, the term “colonialism,” Eric C. Brown explains in Insect
Poetics, “replays one of the most visible ways in which humans and
insects have been compared: insect colonies take their name from
the Latin verb colere, meaning ‘to cultivate,’ especially agriculturally”
(xiv). This poetic Latinization of the zoological world extends the
bygone Roman Empire into the realms of contemporary biological
science and political theory.
If, as Donna Haraway states in How Like a Leaf, “science fiction is
political theory,” the penultimate chapter demonstrates that in
Butler’s narratives, interspecies relations between humans and
insects, parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi, and bacteria open up
the question of what it means to be (human) rather than neatly map
onto intrahuman relations and histories (120). This chapter aims to
critically examine the stakes, possibilities, and problems of trans-
species metaphors at the interface of Butler’s fiction and its criticism
by examining how racial slavery and colonial ideas about gender,
sexuality, and “nature,” more generally, have informed evolutionary
discourses on the origin of life itself and our ideas of cellular biology
by looking at the racialized history of the theory of symbiosis in
relation to “Bloodchild,” Butler’s 1984 Hugo and Nebula Award–
winning short story that creatively and philosophically reimagines
symbiosis as well as what it means to be (human) and to have a
body. Departing from the substitutional logic Sapp and Brown
identify, chapter 3 explores how Butler’s fiction overturns commonly
held conceptions of “the human’s” relation to the nonhuman not by
analogy but by dislodging established presumptions regarding the
fundaments of human subjectivity and the materiality of the body.
With “Bloodchild,” Butler offers a reorientation to the subject and its
related associated notions of subjectivity and subjectivation. Butler
challenges conventions of literary genre and those genres of the
human predicated on racial slavery and colonial narratives of
possessive individualism, sovereignty, and self-determination
through a literary meditation on sexuality beyond heteronormativity,
sexuation beyond dimorphism, and reproduction beyond the man–
woman dyad.
The fourth and final chapter, in an alternate reading of Audre
Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Wangechi Mutu’s cyborg figures in
Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, identifies the
manner in which the nullification of black mater as mater, as matter,
continues to underwrite contemporary species hierarchies, including
that of race, as race is a “discourse of species.” This chapter,
“Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in
the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde,” identifies the
contemporary reorganization of racially sexuating bio-economies by
examining biotechnology, tissue economies, and epigenetic
discourse as well as furthers an investigation into the stakes of the
manner in which the agencies of the organismic body shape and are
shaped by an antiblack world. “Racism,” Sylvia Wynter argues, “is an
effect of the biocentric conception of the human” (“Biocentric” 364,
emphasis added). Biocentrism, as defined by Wynter, is a peculiar
yet hegemonic logic of species; it espouses the belief that we are
“biological beings who then create culture” (361). In other words,
according to a biocentric logic, human cultural practices are linearly
determined by groups’ respective bio-ontological composition, which
are vertically arranged by nature itself. Wynter contrasts this belief
system’s reductive investment in DNA as substratum and
mechanistic causation with an alternative she terms sociogeny: “My
proposal is that we are bioevolutionarily prepared by means of
language to inscript and autoinstitute ourselves in this or that
modality of the human, always in adaptive response to the ecological
as well as to the geopolitical circumstances in which we find
ourselves” (“Biocentric” 361). With sociogeny, Wynter joins other
critics of nature–culture binarism, perhaps most notably Haraway’s
natureculture, which has been recently extended by ecofeminist and
feminist materialist conceptions such as Samantha Frost’s
“bioculture,” Staci Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality,” and Karen Barad’s
“entanglement” and “intra-action.”31 But Wynter raises the stakes of
these critiques by arguing that affect and desire are determinant of
both nature and culture as their coproduction (matter and meaning)
is given dynamic expression by biocentrism’s raciality, which is to
say our studied critiques of nature–culture oppositions and the
phenomenon itself are inside of the economies of affect and desire
generated by raciality.
Departing from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that
of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that
black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a
framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-
active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental,
and cultural. Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine
Tumors crucially reveals the stakes of this intra-activity as it pertains
to the semio-material history of “the black female body,” reproductive
function, and sex(uality) as linchpin and opposable limit of “the
human” in scientific taxonomies and medical science, particularly
that of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Ernst Haeckel’s highly
aesthetic approach to evolutionary theory.32 Mutu’s art is notable for
its constructive reorientation of the theorization of race via a reflexive
methodological practice of collage, one that reframes the spectatorial
encounter from that of a determinate Kantian linear teleological
drama of subjects and objects to that of intra-active processes and
indeterminate feedback loops. Thus, this is not a study of a reified
object but of an intra-actional field that includes material objects but
is not limited to them.
While chapter 4 is principally concerned with the work of Mutu, I
maintain that Lorde offers insights that are generative for a fuller
appreciation of Mutu’s critical artistic engagement with the
racialization of biological reproductive systems and its somatic
effects. Lorde’s The Cancer Journals was one of the first critical
analyses of female reproductive cancers to put forth an
understanding of the body as an emergent and co-productive intra-
actional system and to emphasize that semio-affective-psychic
relations are crucial determinants of physiological processes. Lorde
contends in The Cancer Journals that carcinogenesis is a feedback
loop encompassing biological, psychological, environmental, and
cultural agencies and, therefore, neither a matter of individualized
disease nor inferior biology but rather a somaticization of politics,
and, by politics, I mean war.
The coda closes Becoming Human with a consideration of recent
developments in the biological sciences and biotechnology that have
turned their attention to narrating the problem of “racial health
disparity” in reproductive health. I suggest that work on the
epigenome, mostly housed in the regulatory sciences—epidemiology
and public health—possesses contradictory potential and thus
uncertain possibilities with respect to (dis)articulating the antiblack
logics that have conditioned the symbiosis of teleological
determinism and evolutionary thought (whereby a developmental
conception of “the human” is only one of its most obvious
instantiations). Bringing the epigenome in conversation with my
theory of ontologized plasticity, I argue that Mutu’s aesthetic
strategies, along with those of Legae, Douglass, Morrison,
Hopkinson, and Lorde, featured in Becoming Human reveal a
potential (with neither guarantee nor a manifest horizon of possibility
—but a potential, nonetheless) for mutation beyond a mode of
thought and representation that continually adheres to predefined
rules and narratives that legitimate antiblack ordering and premature
death.
I do not suggest consensus across the texts in this study, rather I
am highlighting evidence of a disturbance within “the human’s”
epistemologies and horizon of meaning. This disturbance is
suggestive of how we might theorize anew the paradoxes of regimes
of knowledge and being that gave rise to the ongoing exigencies of
enslavement and colonial modernity. Furthermore, they are highly
innovative, creatively offering contrary and often counterintuitive
approaches for how we might see humans and animals differently. I
am less interested in finding a universal posture toward humanism in
the form of a prescription on how we should be (human) or treat
animals. That would run the risk of simply inverting the paradigmatic
universal subject, obscuring the particular situatedness of my
subject(s) by reproducing the normative logic of imperial humanism,
one that equates an idealized Western subjectivity with universal law
and universal law with justice. And, as we have seen, law may
obscure ethics and justice because laws always point to a specific
lived, historical, and embodied subjectivity—one that is not
universally shared. I approach what follows without investing in any
foundational authority, whether in philosophy, law, or science,
because I do not believe it is necessary for ethical action; instead,
this study takes as its central task the unsettling of foundational
authority. It is precisely the condition of the absence of foundational
authority that has commonly grounded black ethics.
Historically, foundational authority has either been hostile to or
denied the possibility of black intellectualism and disqualified black
people from ethical consideration. The seeds planted in the pages
that follow spring from the embattled epistemology of peoples living
at the vanishing point between direct domination and hegemony but
who nevertheless generate a centrifugal and dissident way of being,
feeling, and knowing existence.
 1

Losing Manhood

Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave

Narrative

The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star
general, is to strut.
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man.
—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Slavery and colonialism not only catalyzed the conscription of black

people into hegemonically imperialist and racialized conceptions of
“modernity” and “universal humanity” but also inaugurated Western
modernity’s condition of possibility, initiating a chain of events that
have given rise to a transnational, capitalist order.1 In light of this
history, it stands to reason that we should critically remember New
World slavery as epochal rupture.2 Slavery’s archival footprint is a
ledger system that placed black humans, horses, cattle, and
household items all on the same bill of purchase. This ledger’s
biopolitical arithmetic—its calculation of humanity—dislocated,
depersonalized, and collapsed difference, except in the area of
market value. In “Mathematics Black Life,” Katherine McKittrick
states that “this is where historic blackness comes from: the list, the
breathless numbers, the absolutely economic, the mathematics of
the unliving” (17). The ledger’s life promised the social death of
those enslaved.3
“Slave humanity” is an aporia with which we have yet to reckon. It
may well mark the limit of the reckonable. Rather than view the
paradoxical predicament of enslaved humanity through the lens of
dehumanization, I contend that the concept of humanity itself is
fractured and relational. In place of assuming the virtuousness of
human recognition or humanization, I interrogate the methods upon
which an imperialist and racialized conception of “universal
humanity” attempted to “humanize” blackness. In the case of slavery,
humanization and captivity go hand in hand. Too often, our
conception of antiblackness is defined by the specter of “denied
humanity,” “dehumanization,” or “exclusion,” yet, as Saidiya Hartman
has identified in her path-breaking study Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, the
process of making the slave relied on the abjection and
criminalization of the enslaved’s humanity rather than merely on the
denial of it.4 Thus, humanization is not an antidote to slavery’s
violence; rather, slavery is a technology for producing a kind of
human.
Following Hartman, my interest is in drawing attention not only to
the manner in which black people have been excluded from the “life
and liberty” of universal rights and entitlements but also to the
conditions under which black people have been selectively
incorporated into the liberal humanist project. Blackness has been
central to, rather than excluded from, liberal humanism: the black
body is an essential index for the calculation of degree of humanity
and the measure of human progress. From the aporetic space of this
inclusion that nevertheless masks itself as exclusion, I query how
Toni Morrison’s Beloved might disarticulate Eurocentric humanism
while negotiating blackness’s status as interposition in the ever-
shifting biopolitical terms and stakes of “the human versus the
animal.” Beloved’s questioning of liberal humanism’s selective
recognition of black humanity is suggestive of a desire for a different
mode of being/knowing/feeling and not simply a desire for fuller
recognition within liberal humanism’s terms.5
Toni Morrison’s 1988 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Beloved
(1987), is a neo-slave narrative that departs from and transforms the
slave narrative convention of juxtaposing the degradation of slaves
with that of animals in order to draw our attention not to the violence
of dehumanization but rather to the violence of humanization.6 More
specifically, Beloved suggests that animalization and humanization
of the slave’s personhood are not mutually exclusive but mutually
constitutive. In other words, the slave’s humanity (the heart, the
mind, the soul, and the body) is not denied or excluded but
manipulated and prefigured as animal whereby black(ened)
humanity is understood, paradigmatically, as a state of abject human
animality.
Morrison’s text recalls rhetorical strategies employed by Frederick
Douglass that diagnose racialization and animalization as mutually
constitutive modalities of domination under slavery. Douglass has
become an icon of nineteenth-century slavery, perhaps due to his
dexterous navigation of competing liberal humanist rhetorical modes
and affective registers, in particular sentimentality and religio-
scientific hierarchy. Douglass calls into question the biopolitical
logics and practices of slavery with respect to both humans and
animals. However, he does so in a manner that reveals the
seemingly near-inescapable paradoxes of liberal humanist
recognition to the extent that one is conscripted by its terms—
appeals to discourses of sentiment and Self.
Both sentiment and the sovereign “I” return us to racialized,
gendered master narratives of identity and feeling, which the
rooster’s gaze in Beloved productively destabilizes.7 Mister’s gaze,
or the exchange of glances between Mister and Paul D, offers a
much-needed critical alternative to sentimental ethics—sympathy,
compassion, protection, stewardship, care, and the humane—which
has historically been conceived within the terms of a racialized,
heteropatriarchal economy of sensibility. In what follows, I examine
how we might read Morrison as productively problematizing
sentimentality as well as gendered appeals to discourses of the Self
rooted in religio-scientific hierarchy considering both discourses have
historically recognized black humanity and included black people in
their conceptualization of “the human” but in the dissimulating terms
of an imperial racial hierarchy.
 Re-constellating the slave narrative genre, Morrison opens up a
new way to interpret the genre, not as one that exposes slavery’s
dehumanization but rather as one that meditates on the terror of
liberal humanism’s attempts at humanization. Unsettling calcified
interpretations of history and literary slave narratives, Beloved
identifies the violation of slavery not in an unnatural ordering of man
and beast but in its transmogrification of human form and
personality, as an experiment in plasticity and its limits therein. To
put it differently, 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. What appear as
alternating, or serialized, discrete modes of (mis)recognition—
sub/super/humanization, animalization/humanization,
privation/superfluity—are in fact varying dimensions of a racializing
demand that the slave be all dimensions at once, a simultaneous
actualization of the discontinuous and incompatible: everything and
nothing at the register of ontology such that form shall not hold.
Blackness, in this case, functions not simply as negative relation but
as a plastic fleshly being that stabilizes and gives form to human and
animal as categories.
 “How a Slave Was Made a Man”: Racialized Animality
and the Paradoxes of Recognition
Canonized among literary studies of blackness, Douglass’s 1845
Narrative has served as many critics and readers’ introduction to the
routine bestialization experienced by those enslaved in the southern
United States. The text relies heavily on bestializing images and
juxtapositions of slave and animal degradation, a strategy that
sought to provoke moral persuasion and/or Christian outrage over a
system of “unnatural” ordering that was discordant with God’s law.
For instance, Douglass describes how, upon the death of a master,
the enslaved were divided and appraised:

We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and

women, old and young, married and single, were
ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were
horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children,
all holding the same rank in the scale of being. . . .
After the valuation, then came the division. . . . We had
no more voice in that decision than the brutes among
whom we were ranked. (Narrative 271, 282)

As Jennifer Mason has observed, the “scale of being” to which

Douglass refers is the scala naturae, or the Chain of Being,
predicated on the commonplace view that all living beings could be
placed on the rungs of a linear, hierarchical, and continuous ladder
that extended from Earth to Heaven. Each step of the ladder
corresponded to a different measure of perfection: God was at the
top, humans were suspended between angels and animals, and
inanimate things occupied the lowest rung (Mason 124).8
Douglass published the 1845 Narrative while acting as an orator
for William Lloyd Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. As
Douglass knew well, the philosophy of natural rights and its
hierarchies of being—human superiority and uniqueness—were
cornerstones of the rhetorical arsenal for abolitionists like Garrison.
Yet, the adoption of the Chain of Being framework neither provides
the slave standing nor authorizes the slave’s testimony.
While the Chain of Being may have suggested that placing
humans and animals on the same rank was discordant with God’s
law, it did not provide a stable place for black people to argue for
symmetrical, liberal humanist recognition, much less redress, since
the enslaved were merely a rung away from animals or possibly
even conjoined with their animal neighbors as “animal humans” on
what was a continuous scale. Once (human) being became
coincident with animality, recognition of one’s humanity as such
would not guarantee a respite from violence based on race because
humans were measured by their purported capacity to be more or
less “animal.”9 As Winthrop Jordan has noted, the strategic use of
the Great Chain was exceedingly tricky for abolitionists because

[o]n the one hand the existence of the Chain of Being

was difficult to deny categorically without implying that
Nature was not so highly ordered as it might be.
Contrarily, to admit the possibility that Nature was
hierarchically ordered was to open the door to inherent
inferiority, no matter how strenuously the unity of the
human species was objected. (496)10

As in this case, if black people were human but represented the

lowest human rung of the ladder and, thus, embodied the specter of
“the animal” within the human, then the extension of human
recognition dissimulated rather than simply abated race’s animalizing
discourse.
As exemplified by the Chain of Being, modern racialized
animalization stratified humanity, preemptively barring or excluding
black participation in the symbolic order while also establishing or
including black humanity as an object in the discursive-material
institution of proto-scientific Western humanism. Here, human
recognition is extended, but only to serve further objectification. The
recognition of the slave’s humanity was cast in the terms of a
globally expansive debate over what kind of human black(ened)
people represented. To put it plainly, the discourse of race is a
discourse of speciation and thus indissociable from the historical
development of what Cary Wolfe has called the “discourse of
species” and “the animal” as a fundamental site of onto-epistemo-
ethical reflection.11
The Chain of Being and related frameworks provided a sense of
order and stability at the dawn of an expanding imperial order, which
was newly conceived in global terms. As noted by Jordan, the Great
Chain and related systems developed in a manner that was
responsive to global political and epistemological shifts that emerged
in the wake of slavery including the French Revolution and the
ascendancy of comparative anatomy in natural philosophy (485).
The slave’s disputed humanity would ground claims about what was
proper to man by functioning as its plastic limit case. Therefore, I
suggest that slave labor be principally understood not as forced,
unwaged labor exploitation in the master’s enclave but as an
essential enabling condition of the modern grammar of the Subject, a
peculiar grammar of kind or logic of species, one that approaches
and articulates the planetary scale.12 Yet as Jordan reminds us,
while blackness might have functioned as a stabilizer, the logic of the
Great Chain was always inherently tautological; the Great Chain
lapsed into incoherence once specific cases came into view:

To obtain criteria for ranking all creatures on a single

scale was virtually impossible. . . . When natural
philosophers tried to decide whether the ape, the
parrot, or the elephant was next below man, for
instance, the grand Chain began to look like an
unprepossessing pile of ill-assorted links. . . . Any
sharp increase in detailed knowledge of the multitude
of species was bound to make hierarchical construction
 impossible even for the most masterful craftsman. How
was one going to rank thousands of species of plants
in exact order? (222)

It was for these precise reasons, I would argue, that the compulsive
repositioning of blackness as limit case, in its abstraction, as type
was not only necessary but also an essential stabilizer.
The Chain of Being framework was a compromise between the
increasing authority of science and the powerful sway of Christianity.
Christian abolitionists deployed the Chain of Being as a rhetorical
strategy in the hope of rousing a largely white, northern, Christian
readership to ethical action. Most white Christian denominations at
the time sanctioned slavery based on a reactionary interpretation of
scripture. Abolitionists countered by producing interpretations that
repurposed biblical authority. But both pro- and antislavery factions,
by appropriating an established discourse, necessarily obscured the
singular nature of New World slavery’s cataclysmic violence.13
Rather than registering the seismic stakes of the enslaved’s claim to
being or attending to the contradiction inherent in racializing
humanity, the twin strategies of moral suasion and Christian outrage
joined the fray of contemporaneous debates concerning the potential
consequences of slavery for the fate of the white soul and/or the
future of the republic.14
Many scholars have underscored the exceptional originality of
Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Deborah McDowell has even suggested
that it might be best understood as “sui generis.”15 However, it is
worth asking: how might the Narrative’s subversion of genre or
innovation of both slave and abolitionist literature as noted by
scholars necessarily exist alongside and even be enabled by the
fraught rhetorical inheritance that occasioned Douglass’s textual
performance? In particular, I want to consider the ways in which
abolitionist discourse and its conventions are constitutive of
Douglass’s textual performance of the “truth” of slavery and the
veracity of experience. Those formerly enslaved, like Douglass, were
pressured from within white-led abolitionist circles to trope one’s
personally nuanced experience of slavery to produce recognizable
characters, plot devices, and rhetorical strategies because the slave
narrative had become a genre, and like all genres, it had narrative
strictures.
In a study that investigates “the discursive terrain” awaiting slave
testimony, Dwight McBride observes the following:

If the situation of the discursive terrain is that there is a

language about slavery that preexists the slave’s telling
of his or her own experience of slavery, or an entire
dialogue or series of debates that preexist the telling of
the slave narrator’s particular experience, how does
one negotiate the terms of slavery in order to be able to
tell one’s own story? The importance of this idea is that
the discursive terrain does not simply function to create
a kind of overdetermined way of telling an experience;
it creates the very codes through which those who
would be readers of the slave narrative understand the
experience of slavery.

. . . Even more radically, the discourse of slavery is

what allowed the slave to speak in the first place. But
to speak what? It allowed for speech on one’s very
experience as a slave. That is, it produced the
occasion for bearing witness, but to an experience that
had already been theorized and prophesied. . . . Before
the slave ever speaks, we know the slave; we know
what his or her experience is, and we know how to
read that experience. Although we do not ourselves
have that experience, we nevertheless know it and
recognize it by its language.16

“To be heard at all,” McBride argues, the witness writes to, if not for,
an imagined reader, who is, in turn, discursively constructed out of a
cacophonous debate concerning the controversy surrounding the
being of the witness (2). This scenario arguably positions the witness
as an object of discourse and/or noise—an actant rather than an
interlocutor.17 It is likely that the slave’s actual perspective (rather
than unmediated experience, which is ineligible for strict narration by
the very nature of representation) was often only obliquely present in
the text’s inconsistencies, ellipses, and constrained speech. The
writing of subsequent versions of Douglass’s narrative reveals the
text’s and the self’s opacity and instability as “origin.”
Following McDowell, I want to inquire into rhetorical inheritance: In
what ways does Douglass’s corpus exist inside and outside of
slavery’s and abolitionism’s textuality? Or more precisely, how does
this polarity undermine our ability to identify and assess the enabling
conditions of textuality? Moreover, as a number of scholars have
observed, reading slave narratives as unmediated truth would not
only reinforce the problematic conflation between black authors and
their texts but also potentially undermine our ability to critically
examine both their content and the historical context of their
production, considering that they arose within a literary cultural
industry and often under the duress of fugitivity’s criminalization.18
The point here is not to criticize Douglass’s strategic use of the
Chain of Being framework or his adroit facility with sentimentality but
to take stock of its constraints. Those untimely voices negated by the
prevailing episteme of their age may never find the words to
satisfactorily describe their experience, or their speech may be
rendered illegible or inaudible by power. This is so even when their
voices are, like Douglass’s, bold and eloquent. That said, the
insistence that slavery’s violation be articulated as a mistake of
categorization (rendering humans as beasts) or application
undercuts our ability to subject racialization’s justifications to fuller
critique. This approach undermines our capacity for a more thorough
assessment of the life-and-death stakes of slavery’s equation of
black humanity with a state of animality. A fuller critique would risk
calling into question not only its application but also its epistemic
foundations. Antiracism has too often limited our critique of
“animalization” to a critique of the term’s scope instead of disrupting
its authority in the management of life. Power has legitimated itself
by taking refuge in the presumed necessity of managing, disciplining,
criminalizing, and extinguishing “the animal.” The debate or
controversy over black humanity is itself a form of necropolitics. I am
interested in how we can undermine the assumptive logic of the
debate rather than reinforce its starting places. What I am
suggesting is that “freedom” is a practice of onto-epistemology as
well as of affect or feeling. “The animal” as symbol, as trope, as
locus of possibility, must be rethought and transformed; otherwise, it
will continue to animate antiblack discourse and institute itself
biopolitically.
Here I want to suggest that although it is often taken to be the
case, Douglass’s 1845 Narrative may not in fact be representative of
how the enslaved saw their place in relation to animals. Liberal
humanist frameworks of “inclusion” and “recognition” have obscured
and/or insufficiently examined other possible modes, some authored
by Douglass himself, of relating to animals—forms of relating that
problematize biopolitical arrangements engendered by slavery. While
ultimately I will argue that Douglass problematizes rather than
resolves the biopolitical arrangements he scrutinizes, shifts in his
rhetorical strategy confound his earlier position in the 1845 Narrative
—revealing that testimony, social structural position, and political
diagnosis must be understood as an improvised rather than reified
interrelation in the corpus of Douglass’s thought.
In the years immediately following the formal end of slavery,
Douglass produced speeches that have a noticeably more vexed
and irresolute relation to the 1845 Narrative’s philosophies of natural
rights and the Chain of Being, philosophies that are premised on
concepts of human superiority and uniqueness. For instance, on
Friday, September 19, 1873, the Tennessean published a speech
that Douglass had delivered the day before at Nashville’s “Colored
Fair Grounds.” When discussing the topic of “Kindness to Animals,”
Douglass states the following:
 There is no denying that slavery had a direct and
positive tendency to produce coarseness and brutality
in the treatment and management of domestic animals,
especially those most useful to the agricultural industry.
Not only the slave, but the horse, the ox, and the mule
shared the general feeling of indifference to the right
naturally engendered by a state of slavery. . . . It should
be the study of every farmer to make his horse his
companion and friend, and to do this, there is but one
rule, and that is, uniform sympathy and kindness. . . .
All loud and boisterous commands, a brutal flogging
should be banished from the field, and only words of
cheer and encouragement should be tolerated. A horse
is in many respects like a man. He has the five senses,
and has memory, affection, and reason to a limited
degree.19

Here, Douglass suggests that slavery introduces brutality into the

lives of humans and animals such that brutality is understood as
synonymous with the institution, and he advocates for human–
animal cooperation in farming in place of rivalry or brutalization.
More than that, while stopping short of foreclosing difference, his
understanding of (human) being, presumably including his being,
does not arise in binaristic opposition to, or in negation of, “the
animal” as a “horse is in many respects like a man.”20 More
importantly, for this discussion, Douglass’s “many respects like” and
the use to which these words are put confound the terms of his
earlier testimony.
Nevertheless, what if the rhetoric of sentimentality and empathetic
identification itself reintroduces hierarchies of feeling and capacity
engendered by slavery rather than remedies them as his “to a limited
degree” might suggest? The Tennessean reports that Douglass ends
the section of his speech devoted to “Kindness to Animals” with the
following:
 When young, untrained and untamed, he (a horse) has
unbounded faith in his strength and fleetness. He runs,
jumps, and plays in the pride of his perfections. But
convince him that he is a creature of law as well as of
freedom, by a judicious and kindly application of your
superior power, and he will conform his conduct to that
law, far better than your most law-abiding citizen. (4)

While a horse is “perfect” rather than in a state of privation as the

Chain of Being might suggest, according to Douglass the horse, like
a citizen, must still defer to the “kindly application” of “superior
power” and “law.” Rather than read Douglass’s sentimental animal
ethics and deference to state power as either an unqualified reversal
of the 1845 Narrative or prescriptively, I read both statements as
critically wrestling with (but still very much conscripted by) slavery’s
hierarchies of being and feeling—even extending the institution’s
palliative logic of “humane” reform.21
The “humane” is an ideal that suggests humanity is gained by
performing acts of kindness and attuning oneself to the suffering of
those of inferior status and lesser capacity; as such, it does not posit
humanity as simply an inherent or a priori aspect of being (human).
As in John Locke’s highly influential Thoughts on Education (1693),
rather than forestall domination, “humane” discourse, in effect, made
human identity contingent on hierarchical relationality—encounters
between those with refined sensibilities and those presumably
without, in particular children, animals, and slaves—as “humane”
education in the United States concerned itself with the proper
cultivation of sympathy and behavior conducive to the successful
reproduction of the established order.22 Saidiya Hartman has argued
that “the humane in slave law was totally consonant with the
domination of the enslaved” and, more specifically, that sentiment
routinely regulated and preserved the institution rather than effected
a reversal of its relations (Scenes of Subjection 93):
 On one hand, there was an increased liability for white
violence committed against slaves; and on the other,
the law continued to decriminalize the violence thought
necessary to the preservation of the institution and the
submission and obedience of the slave. If anything, the
dual invocation of law [property and person] generated
the prohibitions and interdictions designed to regulate
the violent excesses of slavery and at the same time
extended this violence in the garb of sentiment. . . . To
be subject in this manner was no less brutalizing than
being an object of property.

In the arena of affect, the body was no less vulnerable

to the demands and the excesses of power. The
bestowal that granted the slave a circumscribed and
fragmented identity as a person in turn shrouded the
violence of such a beneficent and humane gesture.
(94)

While scholars of the US nineteenth century have put forth varying

accounts of how racial slavery shaped white racial anxiety and the
increasing prominence of sentimentality as a mode of civic
engagement and pedagogy, a shared scholarly conviction that
extends far beyond Hartman holds that sentimentality, perhaps the
century’s most privileged rhetorical mode, acted to safeguard
existing power relations, even in its abolitionist deployment, by
masking the reorganization of domination and violence in the
emerging secularizing terms of empathetic identification on the one
hand and hierarchical bonds of kindness, domesticity, and laws of
nature on the other.23 Regarding Douglass, Robert Fanuzzi notes,
“Above all, Douglass knew what it meant to produce the position of
the outsider as a kind of performance, through a political rhetoric that
was also an art. His infamous mimicry of venerable orators, his
reiteration of civic pedagogy, and his inversion of political symbolism
all betrayed a formal mastery” of genres of masculine, republican
elocution (206).
But what if this lesson in civic pedagogy addressed to the “colored
citizens” of Tennessee in 1873—exemplary pedagogy of civic
manhood—actually reinscribes (even as it appears to renounce) the
terms of their continued subjugation, even in slavery’s putative
absence? I invoke Douglass’s equivocations here to suggest we
read the inchoate and incomplete nature of his intervention, its
fugitivity, as a provocation and an effort to refuse modes of relating
that were established under slavery. However, Douglass’s
hierarchized conception of feeling and capacity, even in its
deployment as empathetic identification with animals, actually
rehearses the assumptive logics of racial subjection. After all, the
racialization of capacity and feeling preconditions and prefigures the
occasion of Douglass’s speech on at least two counts: the city’s
spatiotemporal arrangement—the “Colored Fair Grounds”—and the
honorifics bestowed on Douglass—“the most distinguished of their
race,” “The Colored American’s Chosen Moses,” “distinguished
gentleman, statesman, and lover of his race.”24 In addition to
hypostatizing racial difference, the regularity of such plaudits
throughout Douglass’s career implies that while Douglass represents
black people, he is not representative of blackness but exceptional
not simply as an orator but as a black person. In fact, in Douglass’s
case, assessments of his skill as an orator is inseparable from his
racialization: it is precisely his reported exceptional capacity as an
orator that simultaneously marks his racial difference and
purportedly sets him apart from other black people.
Douglass’s acclaim as an orator began with his career as a
lecturer in Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and grew
precipitously with the publication of his 1845 Narrative. At the time,
some skeptics questioned whether a slave, a black, could have
produced such an eloquent and moving piece of literature. The
credibility of black authorship—in other words, the facticity of black
capacity for reason and feeling—was so routinely questioned that
slave narratives were commonly underwritten by white abolitionists.
For instance, the 1845 Narrative was published under Garrison’s
imprimatur presumably because he was axiomatically credible by
virtue of his whiteness.
However, Jacques Derrida has productively called into question
how securely “the human,” understood in its white Western imperial
form, possesses the characteristics it claims for itself and denies to
others (The Animal 135). In The Animal That Therefore I Am, the late
French philosopher Jacques Derrida contends “the question” of “the
animal” in philosophy refers “not to the animal but to the naive
assurance of man.” In critically approaching the “bestiary at the
origin of philosophy,” Derrida clarifies that it is less a matter of asking
“whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a
power . . . [than of] asking whether what calls itself human has the
right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to
attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can
ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that
attribution” (The Animal 135). Moreover, what of the capacities that
exceed human identification? What of those things and creatures
with which it is not (yet) possible to confer identification or with which
identification is denied? Sentimental ethics is an arbitrary order of
perception and sense making that disqualifies from ethical
consideration all those incalculable opacities and yet-to-be-
recuperated differences with which it does not and, by design,
cannot identify. Moreover, sentimentality is a relation, not a
sensibility; conceived as a sensibility, sentimental feeling has
historically functioned as a pretext for racial hierarchy in the forms of
a pedagogy in white ideality and the pathologization and
criminalization of blackness.25 If, as I suggest, sentimental ethics
typically proceeds without sufficiently interrogating the vexed terms
of identification or even pausing to consider whether or not
identification should organize ethics, is such an order of
consideration ethical? And if so, by what measure?
These vexed terms of identification are precisely what are under
investigation in Beloved, and in the process of investigation, a hasty,
prescriptive, sentimental ethics is exchanged for an exploration of
affectivity and its relational effects.26 Eschewing both sentimentalism
and naturalized hierarchy with Beloved, Morrison pulls apart and
reconstellates the slave narrative form. In doing so, Morrison invites
the reader to relinquish a reified understanding of “the truth of
slavery” so that we might investigate New World slavery as an ever-
present mode of violent ontologizing that includes but exceeds the
animalization of the slave, as blackness was always subject to
something more.
 Ontological Plasticity in Beloved
I have always been struck by the speed with which “handsome young Negro”
turns into “young colt” or “stallion.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

At the close of Derrida’s highly influential essay, a number of

interrelated questions at the center of what he calls the
“philosophical bestiary” nevertheless remain. In particular, if sexual
difference and its attendant Oedipal anxieties and oppositions
structure the foundational violence of the Western philosophical
tradition, a violence that is constitutive with and recalled by human–
animal oppositions, how might a consideration of the mode by which
the symbolic logics of both dualisms are cut and qualitatively
intensified by antiblack racialization clarify the terms and stakes of
his inquiry? I suggest that Beloved (1987) sheds light on a
constitutive lacuna in Derrida’s thought by thinking a being for whom
normative symbolics of gender and personhood do not take hold due
to a concerted attempt to apportion and delimit characteristics
presumed to be proper to Man in a manner that accords with the
paradoxical dictates of a racializing Law. Morrison’s Beloved is
suggestive for identifying how blackness constitutes and disrupts the
historical and philosophical terms and assumptive logic of Derrida’s
meditation. However, the primary investment here is not a systematic
critique of Derrida’s essay but drawing out Morrison’s philosophical
meditation on antiblack slavery as a mode of ontologizing and
identifying its implications for resetting our thinking on ontology.
Namely, I argue that blackness is the missing term in Derrida’s
analysis of the antinomy of man and animal and that it is blackness
in the mode of ontological plasticity that stabilizes and gives form to
“human” and “animal” as terms.
The bestialization of blackness has been central, even essential,
to reanimations of antiblack discourse from the early days of the
American republic until today. Often when this occurs, the evocation
of black animality is either unquestioningly reified or criticized for
reinforcing antiblack racism and quickly dismissed. Toni Morrison
avoids both approaches; instead, she problematizes these strategies
by critically engaging the assumptive logic of racialized animality and
redirecting antiblack animal imagery such as the bestializing
compositions found in Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Morrison critically
observes the fundaments of animalized representation up close
rather than negating them at a distance. Instead of performing a
straightforward rejection of racially oppressive imagery, her text
exposes the complexity and contradictions that produce blackness
and animality as proxies, not through the refutation of bestial
imagery but rather through its magnification and deconstruction. It is
Morrison’s deconstructive approach that reveals the convolutedness
of racialized animalization as an essential feature of the historical
institution of liberal humanism, including its lexical and ethical
possibilities.27
Beloved does not resolve the ethical blindness of liberal humanism
through empathy between the reader and the narrative’s characters,
or between human and animal as general categories, but instead
reopens the field of ethics by reminding readers of alterity’s
intractable insistence.28 Instead of offering a dialectical solution or
providing an answer or prescription on ethical action, the text
uncompromisingly insists on the problem of ethics that accompanies
asymmetrical relations, in this case between Paul D, a slave, and
Mister, a rooster.29
Beloved identifies the site of a potential breach in the
epistemological project of humanistic perspective: What is behind
Mister’s gaze? More accurately, Beloved intensifies “animal
perspective,” a disruption that is already there—latent and repressed
—in liberal humanism’s textuality. As a result, the novel facilitates
reconsideration of perspective’s consequence for ethics, given liberal
humanism’s stubborn refusal to authorize (or even avow) the
perspective of the animalized (human and nonhuman) while also
failing to attend to its own pernicious limitations.
 This refusal is the result of at least three contiguous
presuppositions: first, “the animal” lacks perspective; second, “the
African” is animal in the form of a human and, thus, is devoid of the
achievement of Reason or the full realization of perspective; and
third, because “the animal”—human and nonhuman—is lacking,
animality disqualifies one from ethical consideration. Mister’s gaze
calls into question the ethical authority of this formulation by
countering the epistemological certainty upon which principled
judgment is made and questioning, rather than presuming, the
ontological distinctions upon which ethical judgments rest. Beloved
rearticulates, rather than resolves, the problem of ethics in light of
differential embodiment by questioning and destabilizing slavery’s
economy of sense and perceptual logic, that is to say, its religio-
scientific taxonomies and foreclosures that rely on a white patriarchal
authority alternately supported by naturalistic, divine, or positivistic
pretense. Beloved invites a critical reopening of the orders of ethical
authority and ontological distinction, thus rendering them not as the
context of investigation but rather as the object to be critically
reexamined. As the foreclosing of animal perspective reinforces the
logic of enslavement, the novel prompts us to reconsider how animal
perspective potentially undermines one of race’s most formative
epistemic presumptions.
With Beloved, Morrison provides a rich exploration of the
seemingly contradictory construction that is black(ened) humanity,
namely the entanglement of racialized, gendered, and sexual
discourses with those concerning animality. Largely focusing on the
animalization of black male gender, sexuality, and subjectivity under
conditions of enslavement, I investigate how the captive’s gender
and sexuality were constructed in relationship to humanity and
animality in the text.
Critics of Beloved have largely ignored the presence of Mister the
rooster despite the text’s insistent return to Mister’s gaze in scenes
that make and undo the significance of both humanity and manhood
—where gendered, sexual, and ontological violence produce and
mark the limits of manhood for Paul D. If one considers the rooster
as both figurative actor and material entity in the novel rather than
mere projection of Paul D’s trauma, the gaze of Mister—the
exchange of glances between Mister and Paul D—takes on the
quality of a caesura, a disruption of the prevailing grammar of
gender, knowledge, and being.
Taking up the narrative’s insistence on Mister’s gaze, in particular,
I investigate the distinctive quality of Paul D and Mister’s relationality
and explore its implications for contemporary theorization of
biopolitics and the onto-epistemo-ethical stakes of non/in/humanity
designations. Problematizing literary conventions of form and
interpretive method, Beloved performs narrative at the register of a
structural analysis of the modern grammar of the Subject. Reaching
to meet the fullness of Morrison’s intervention into theory, mine is a
literary criticism that explores how narrative texture performs and
excites philosophical engagement. I will read Paul D’s encounter
with Mister the rooster as bringing into stark relief Paul D’s gendered
sexual alienation and existentially debilitating circumstances.
The practice of gender at Sweet Home, the fictional plantation that
provides the setting for much of Beloved, would appear to depart
from the generalized principles that characterized slavery as
depicted in the text. At Sweet Home, male slaves are considered
“men,” breaking with the commonplace slaveholder logic, which
typically withheld acknowledgment of manhood or even adulthood
among those enslaved. It was believed that reciprocal recognition
between white and black men would disrupt the natural order of
plantation life. Normative modes of gender such as patriarchal
authority and filial recognition are the entitlements of manhood in the
Oedipal symbolic economies of the US South, but manhood and
enslavement were commonly viewed as incommensurate by
proponents of slavery. As one slaveholder put it, “Ain’t no nigger
men” (Beloved 13).30 Yet, Mr. Garner would appear to break with this
tradition by being “tough enough and smart enough to make and call
his own niggers men” (Beloved 13). However, with Garner, Morrison
explores dimensions of sovereign power that often go undetected
and unremarked. Garner is emblematic not of sovereignty’s power to
expropriate and withhold recognition but of that aspect of sovereignty
(self-)authorized to give and bestow, to create and legitimate.
So that he might “demonstrate . . . what a real Kentuckian was,”
Garner consolidated his manhood in the bestowal of abject manhood
on the enslaved in the figure of the “Sweet Home man.” The concept
of “Sweet Home men” was initially introduced by Morrison’s
omniscient narrator in the following way: “There had been six of
them who belonged to the farm” (Beloved 11, emphasis added). That
they belonged to the farm, rather than the other way around, alerts
readers to their nonnormative relation to property. Owning property is
an emblem of white patriarchal masculinity; in contrast, Paul D
belonged to property. The enslaved men’s fungibility, or replaceability
and interchangeability, was built into their names.31 There are three
Pauls at Sweet Home, with Garner’s surname qualifying their proper
name. His surname does not announce their entitlement to patrilineal
wealth, as it would seem to suggest, but marks them, brands them,
as belonging to the arrangements of the property relation. Another is
named after a number, Sixo—the wild man. His name possibly
references the “60 million or more” lost to the Middle Passage. And
then there is Halle Suggs, Sethe’s husband and the father of her
children—only he disappears, going “wild eyed” after witnessing
Sethe’s mammary rape by Schoolteacher.
Paul D’s encounter with Mister initiates wonder: When Garner
refers to them as men, “was he naming what he saw or creating
what he did not?” (Beloved 260). He is “allowed” or “encouraged” to
correct Garner; defiance is even tolerated. He can invent ways of
doing things and can “attack” problems without permission. He can
buy a mother, choose a horse or a wife, handle guns, and “even
learn reading” (Beloved 147). But even these forms of masculine
prerogatives still leave him with the feeling that Sweet Home men
are “trespassers among the human race” (Beloved 148). They are
“watchdogs without teeth, steer bulls without horns; gelded
workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated into a
language responsible humans spoke” (Beloved 148). “He did manly
things,” yet Paul D cannot come to a clear conclusion about whether
that was Garner’s gift, or his own will (Beloved 260). He wonders if
his manhood rests entirely on the word of a white man, stirring within
him a nascent question: Is his sense of manhood the product of a
“wonderful lie” (Beloved 260)?
After his encounter with Mister, Paul D continues to wrestle with
creeping unease concerning his own manhood. What becomes
increasingly apparent is that Garner recognized Paul D’s mutual
humanity but then proceeded to manipulate and exploit it. What was
commonly believed to distinguish human from animal, for Garner,
are merely opportunities for manipulation; human capability—
sentiment, sexuality, rationality, intention, and intelligence—were
instrumentalized in order to plasticize Paul D’s humanity rather than
guarantee a just intersubjectivity. Again, Garner recognized Paul D’s
humanity but inverted it, in the interest of property and ego, rather
than affirmatively recognizing their shared humanity as the grounds
of a principled intersubjectivity. Garner transgresses behavioral
polarities that normatively characterized the master–slave relation,
not as recognition of the injustice of denied intersubjectivity but as a
performance of his dominance. In other words, he invited the
disruption of hierarchical coded behavior without sacrificing his
dominance over the enslaved, precisely because he solicited the
transgression. Thus, by inviting the slave to transgress slavery’s
limitations, he displays the arbitrariness of his power, and Garner’s
“superior” manhood rests on the arbitrariness of his power.
Paul D had no substantive authority over himself or the definition
of manhood at Sweet Home, in Alfred, Georgia; Ohio; or Delaware.
He could respond to Garner’s definition, but he had no power to
generate a definition to his liking: at least, not in a “language
responsible people spoke” (Beloved 148). That Garner’s
slaveholding estate is named “Sweet Home” points to the manner in
which language is used ironically in the text. Language, the deadly
play of signification over terms like “manhood,” is exactly what the
narrative alerts us to, as Paul D qualifies of Sweet Home: “It wasn’t
sweet, and it sure wasn’t home” (Beloved 16). Garner, as patriarch,
was so powerful that the enslaved could hardly believe he could die.
He is elevated even beyond death. The extent to which his life
defined theirs is revealed in his death—when Schoolteacher arrives.
It is Schoolteacher and his necropolitical pedagogy—but
especially Mister’s gaze—which destabilizes the illusion Garner had
worked so hard to create. Paul D desperately tries to cling to his
genre of manhood by recalling his past demonstrations of corporeal
masculinity:

He, he. He who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who
under plum trees bursting with blossoms had crushed
through a dove’s breast before its heart stopped
beating. Because he was a man and a man could do
what he would: be still for six hours in a dry well while
night dropped; fight raccoon with his hands and win;
watch another man, whom he loved better than his
brothers, roast without a tear just so the roasters would
know what a man was like. And it was he, that man,
who had walked from Georgia to Delaware, who could
not go or stay put where he wanted in 124—shame.
(Beloved 148)

The stuttering “he” initiating the passage above testifies to both a

stubborn pursuit and an uncertain arrival. Paul D wants to believe
that he is a fully autonomous man, coherent, and whole. Ironically,
the more Paul D clings to rugged expressions of masculinity—
curtailed emotion, mastery over bodily sensation, and killing if need
be—the more he is boxed into not simply animality but plasticity: he
can be manipulated and poured into a mold designed by Garner, and
later by Beloved—acting as an avatar for slavery. For Paul D,
masculinity is a symbol of his presence as a human. However, his
manhood is decidedly qualified at Sweet Home because he is not an
architect of a language under the aegis of power, but rather, he is
subjected to its mocking grammar.
The expressions of masculinity that he offers as evidence of his
manhood are easily appropriated as evidence of his savagery and
animality; yet these paradoxical symbols of manhood are the only
aspects of masculinity available to him. Autonomy and a rugged
code of masculinity have failed Paul D. Whereas they might provide
white masculinity solace, for him, they only mock. Instead of a
steadiness in the conviction of his manhood, he is flushed with
shame and disquietude, the kind of shame that produces nausea
and repulsion. Before his encounter with a rooster named Mister,
Paul D affirmatively identified as a “Sweet Home man” as defined
within the terms of Garner’s racially qualified and hierarchical
definition of manhood.
Yet, with the arrival of Schoolteacher and the subsequent
encounter with Mister, Paul D begins to question the meaning of his
manhood (Beloved 11). Schoolteacher “arrived to put things in order”
(Beloved 11). A man who “always wore a collar, even in the fields,”
Schoolteacher was an emblem of both the epistemic powers and
abuses of scientific and biblical authority under relations of
domination (Beloved 44).32 Through the use of free indirect
discourse, Paul D’s telegraphed subterranean thoughts oscillate
between (self)assurance and worry: “He grew up thinking that, of all
the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men. . . . Was that
it? Is that where the manhood lay? In the naming done by a
whiteman who was supposed to know?” (Beloved 147). He tries to
reassure himself that, in fact, he has nothing to worry about, his
identity secure, yet the stark and near total domination introduced
under Schoolteacher’s rule, culminating in his encounter with Mister,
ushers in creeping doubt. He recounts:

[Mister] sat right there . . . looking at me. I swear he

smiled. My head was full of what I’d seen of Halle a
while back. I wasn’t even thinking about the bit. Just
Halle and before him Sixo, but when I saw Mister I
knew it was me too. Not just them, me too. One crazy,
one sold, one missing, one burnt and me licking iron
with my hands crossed behind me. The last of the
Sweet Home men. (Beloved 85–86)
 As I will demonstrate, in this scene, the recurring phrase “the last
of the Sweet Home men” (emphasis added), and Paul D’s self-
identification with it, takes on an ironic quality. It suggests incipient
possibilities and the unsettling of identity rather than mere reification.
Paul D might in fact be able to experience something the other Pauls
had not—a life beyond the farm—that introduces discontinuity into
the fetters of ownership and gendered identification. In its way, his
growing envy of Mister in this scene is an acknowledgment of doubt,
but Paul D initially refuses that knowledge due to his attachment to
heteropatriarchy and its sovereign “I.”
It is not until Paul D has an encounter with a rooster that
destabilizes his sense of his own manhood that he begins to
recognize that tyrannical power not only denies but also permits.
This is a realization that ultimately leads him to question Sweet
Home’s fetters of obligation. When Paul D comes face-to-face, eye
to eye, male to male with Mister the rooster, he is compelled to
confront what is in plain view: the state of his manhood is not one of
coherence, unification, and integrity but is, rather, riven,
circumscribed, and indefinite. In the eyes of Garner, Paul D is not
decisively and symmetrically “man” but is, instead, an occasion for
the theater of sovereign power and manipulated matter—a plastic.
The encounter with Mister sets in motion the interrelated processes
of relinquishing his identification as a “Sweet Home man” and
redefining his gender and being in improvisational terms rather than
in fidelity to those inherited from slavery. Crucially, Morrison
desentimentalizes this loss of identity by framing loss as an invitation
to invention, such that the loss of manhood, the relinquishment of
what never properly belonged to him and compelled renegotiations
of identity, becomes the arc of Paul D’s development as a character.
The scene with Mister sets Paul D in a direction away from liberal
humanism’s hierarchical ordering in an improvisational manner and,
thus, initiates movement without predetermined terminus but
nevertheless in an insistent direction. Similarly, Fred Moten
describes improvisation as not “without foresight” but rather a
“deviance of form” that always “operates as a kind of foreshadowing,
if not prophetic, description” as well as a “trace of another
organization” and “extemporaneous formation and reformation of
rules, rather than the following of them” (46, 63).
Elliptically returning in the novel, Mister’s gaze pushes Paul D to
confront that doubt, turn toward it rather than away from it, and go
deeper into it by stripping him of an identity that never belonged to
him and revealing the depth of the violence that upholds it. Merging
Paul D’s voice with the narrator’s, a tremble would register that he
was not free of Mister even when Mister appeared far from Paul D’s
consciousness: “OUT OF SIGHT of Mister’s sight, away, praise His
name, from the smiling boss of roosters, Paul D began to tremble”
(Beloved 125, small caps in original).
Morrison’s insistence on Mister’s gaze, via free indirect discourse,
invites a reconsideration of ontological and gendered meaning: If an
essential feature of your existence is that the norm is not able to take
hold, what mode of being becomes available, and what mode might
you invent? How might an injunction against an avowed commonality
in being by an ontologized conception of racialized gender
paradoxically provide access to an alternative mode of
being/knowing/feeling—a realm of invention whereby an alternative
operates or becomes manifest in the recesses of powers of
interdiction?33 How might the singular burden and (im)possibilities of
blackness be reconceived in a manner other than as a melancholic
attachment to the norm? What modes of correspondence between
humanity and animality open up? Again, Morrison desentimentalizes
this loss of identity by framing loss as invitation to invention such that
the loss of manhood—the relinquishment of what never properly
belonged to him—compels renegotiations of identity and becomes a
caesura, or a space for something other than what Paul D has
previously known and desired to occur.
Due to Sethe’s resentment of her husband Halle’s unexplained
disappearance, Paul D feels compelled to recount not only the
events that led to Halle’s disappearance but also the events that
indelibly shaped his own history. In conversation with Sethe, Paul D,
despite himself, attempts to recount unspeakable events. He recalls
how he found himself with a horse bit between his jaws: the bit
immobilizing his tongue, tearing the corners of his mouth, forcing it
open, plasticizing by pulling and ripping. Paul D’s retelling prompts
Sethe, in turn, to remember witnessing similar episodes, “Men, boys,
little girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the
moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out,
goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to
soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.” She said,
“People I saw as a child . . . who’d had the bit always looked wild
after that . . . it put a wildness where before there wasn’t any”
(Beloved 84). Beloved suggests that the forcing of a bit into a human
mouth, the plasticization of the body, puts wildness into the eyes
rather than reveals the wildness that is presumed to already
characterize black people.
For Paul D, however, the bestializing bit is not the worst part—the
em dash giving emphasis to this point. He recounts, “[I]t wasn’t the
bit—that wasn’t it. . . . The roosters. . . . Walking past the roosters
looking at them look at me. . . . Must have been five of them perched
up there, and at least fifty hens” (Beloved 85). It is seeing himself
being seen in the gaze of a rooster named Mister. Reflected in
Mister’s eyes, he sees for the first time the extent to which his being
has been distorted by slavery. He is ashamed that Mister is witness
to all of it.
More specifically, rather than an inability to hide his shame, it is
Unheimlich identification that is “the worst part”: what unmoors Paul
D is that somehow Mister knows, that Mister has seen what Paul D
cannot. Shame would give shape to recognition of his abjection and
subjection to another. Paul D watches Mister walk from the fence
post before ultimately choosing his favorite spot: “I hadn’t took
twenty steps before I seen him. He come down off the fence post
there and sat on the tub . . . [l]ike a throne” (Beloved 85). Now
perched on a tub, Mister is one of the five roosters and at least fifty
hens Paul D believes are observing him. However, Paul D fixates on
Mister, perhaps because Mister appears to possess aspects of
masculinity that Paul D believes are his by entitlement or ought to be
the rightful property of his manhood, but at the same time, as Freud
might characterize it, Paul D is “dimly aware, in a remote corner of
his own being,” that they are not.34 Despite Mister’s “bad feet,” “he
whup(ed) everything in the yard” (Beloved 85). Unlike Mister, who
can overcome his “bad feet” and triumph over every opponent in the
yard to become a “Mister,” Paul D cannot untie his hands. In
contrast, Mister is described:

Comb as big as my hand and some kind of red. He sat

right there on the tub looking at me. I swear he smiled.
My head was full of what I’d seen of Halle a while back.
I wasn’t even thinking about the bit. Just Halle and
before him Sixo, but when I saw Mister I knew it was
me too. Not just them, me too. One crazy, one sold,
one missing, one burnt and me licking iron with my
hands crossed behind me. The last of the Sweet Home
men. (Beloved 85–86, emphasis added)

Staring at Paul D, evil-eyed, Mister, his uncanny double, his large

red comb, Mister’s phallus, smiles in the face of his torture, flaunting
his sovereignty, or so Paul D believes.
Paul D, with his hands tied behind his back and hobbled, begins to
envy Mister, who “looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger,
tougher. Son of a bitch couldn’t even get out of his shell by hisself
but he was still king and I was . . .” (Beloved 86, emphasis added).
Paul D sees Mister as “better” because he symbolizes masculinist
aspects of a normative conception of “freedom” felt increasingly
contingent at Sweet Home: autonomy over the body, over
movement, over one’s sexuality.35 It would appear to Paul D that
plantation slavery has somehow accorded Mister aspects of “life and
liberty” as well as manhood withheld from him. Paul D can no longer
be appeased by the relative freedoms afforded Sweet Home men,
freedoms that are diminishing quickly under Schoolteacher’s rule. To
Paul D, Mister is “king” (Beloved 86). Paul D laments, “Mister was
allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and
stay what I was” (Beloved 86). Here Paul D not only describes a
scene of interspecies male rivalry characterized by a melancholic
longing for the purported whole of the mythical phallus, but he also
identifies an ontological aporia, one that is so foundational that it
reverberates across the entire horizon of discourses governing the
Subject. “I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was,” says Paul D
(Beloved 86, emphasis added).
So, what is the being of blackness? Ultimately, (anti)blackness
appears to be a matrix: a mold, a womb, a binding substance, a
network of intersections, functioning as an encoder or decoder. It is
an essential enabling condition for something of, but distinguishable
from, its source—and therefore, it performs a kind of natality,
performing a generative function rather than serving as an identity.
If (anti)blackness is a matrix, then the normative conception of “the
human” and the entire set of arrangements Sweet Home allegorizes
have their source in abject blackness. In the process of
distinguishing itself from blackness, normative humanity
nevertheless bears the shadowy traces of blackness’s abject
generativity. As “the defined” rather than the “definers,” the
enslaved’s abjection places blackness under the sign of the
feminine, the object, matter, and the animal regardless of sex. Paul
D hints at the slave’s abject generative function when recounting the
fact that he was the one who enabled Mister’s birth:

Was me took him [Mister] out the shell, you know. He’d
a died if it hadn’t been for me. The hen had walked on
off with all the hatched peeps trailing behind her. There
was this one egg left. Looked like a blank, but then I
saw it move so I tapped it open and here come Mister,
bad feet and all. (Beloved 85)

In describing his presumably indispensable role in Mister’s birth,

Paul D both identifies with and abjects the hen. Realizing that he has
thus far been blind to crucial aspects of slavery’s gendered violence,
his initial response is to displace those feelings onto Mister, as
representative of a loss of the illusion of a proper gendered role. And
it is this natality, this irreducible femininity, that Paul D resents as
Mister reminds him of the plasticity of his manhood or, more
precisely, that such plasticity represents the impossibility for
unqualified manhood to take hold. Mister momentarily appears
before Paul D as “a blank,” yet with respect to Garner and the
gendered, symbolic arrangements of slavery more generally, Paul D
begins to fear that it is actually he who signifies as “a blank” or even
that he fails to signify at all (Beloved 85). This unsettling encounter
marks the beginning, not the completion, of Paul D’s meditation on
the violent nature of Sweet Home’s ordered hierarchy in the
renegotiated terms of an identity’s un/becoming.
So, if blackness here is a natal function rather than an identity or
experience, then what/who are black people? The slash conjoining
who and what is not there to offend but to open up the question as
widely as needed, which Morrison invites us to do, in order to identify
whatever answer arises in the narrative. Paul D states, “Even if you
cooked him [Mister] you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But
wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead” (Beloved 86).
Paul D is irrevocably changed by the violent terms of his
enslavement, but into what? The statement about the cooking of
Mister recalls the cooking of Sixo—a Sweet Home man burned to
death by Schoolteacher. However, Paul D is establishing something
more specific, a condition or quality that differentiates these two
modes of roasting an other, of meat production, to evoke Abdul
JanMohamed.36
The enslaved are not only conscripted by hierarchical economies
of commodification, property, and killing (which would position Paul
D and Mister as proxies), but Paul D’s heart, mind, soul, and flesh
are also conscripted by and must contend with whatever the master
effects. The blackened embodied mind is, therefore, rendered plastic
by a demand that includes and exceeds the authorized killing,
consumption, and disposability of fleshly existence. Paul D’s body,
hobbled with a bit in his mouth, is subject to be transmogrified
according to purported registers of “animality” and “humanity.” In this
act of transmogrification—the changing of something into a different
form or appearance (especially a fantastic or grotesque one)—the
coordinates of the human body are forcefully altered into a different
shape or form—bizarre and fantastic: human personality is made
“wild” under the weight of blackness’s production as seemingly pure
potentiality. “But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or
dead,” he says (Beloved 86). Here, Paul D is pointing to the way that
the black(ened) body and mind are twisted and contorted in a
manner indifferent to structures of form, their integrity, and their
limits. So, it is not only a body that is stolen but also the becoming of
the slave: the slave’s future perfect state of being. The black(ened)
are, therefore, defined as plastic: impressionable, stretchable, and
misshapen to the point that the mind may not survive—it potentially
goes wild. We are well beyond alienation, exploitation, subjection,
domestication, and even animalization; we can only describe such
transmogrification as a form of engineering. Slavery’s technologies
were not the denial of humanity but the plasticization of humanity.
After all, as Paul D learns, slavery is not “like paid labor” (Beloved
165). Economic labor might actually be incidental to enslavement.37
“Beast of burden” is one of the many forms that Paul D is forced to
take but not the sole form; as Beloved depicts it, the slave’s body is
always subjected to something else, to forms of domination that are
in excess of forced labor. “The slave” is paradigmatically that which
shall be appropriated by emerging demands of the reigning order, as
needed, with no regard for the potential irreparable effects of
ontological slippage. Arguably, plasticization is the fundamental
violation of enslavement: not any one particular form of violence—
animalization or objectification, for instance—but rather coerced
formlessness as a mode of domination and the Unheimlich existence
that is its result.38
“Plasticity,” as concept and thematic, has been differentially
articulated and inflected by thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Lévi-
Strauss, Darwin, and most recently the French philosopher
Catherine Malabou. While my use of the term “plasticity” arose
independently of Malabou’s unique philosophical elaboration and
development of “plasticity” as concept and reading practice in its
distinction from and productive tension with Malabou’s materialist-
realist hermeneutics, my approach is, nevertheless, arguably
responsive to what has become Malabou’s signature concept.39
Transformed by but also transformative of Hegelian, Derridean,
Heideggerian, and contemporary neuroscientific thought, “plasticity,”
as taken up by Malabou, refers to a fundamentally immanent
mutable, transformable, and indeed plastic understanding of thought,
matter, and being whereby the plastic is defined as that which is able
to receive and give form and assumes the destruction of form in this
giving and receiving. In the words of Malabou:

Existence reveals itself as plasticity, as the very

material of presence, as marble is the material of
sculpture. It is capable of receiving any kind of form,
but it also has the power to give form to itself. Being
the stuff of things, it has the power both to shape and
to dissolve a particular facet of individuality. A lifetime
always proceeds within the boundaries of a double
excess: an excess of reification and an excess of
fluidification. When identity tends toward reification, the
congealing of form, one can become the victim of rigid
frameworks whose temporal solidification produces the
appearance of unmalleable substance. Plasticity
situates itself in the middle of these two excesses.
(Plasticity 81)

Malabou’s philosophy is an attempt to think the dialectical process

anew as a plasticity that governs the continuous or even explosive
process of (de)formation of the real.
While an engagement with the fullness of Malabou’s
conceptualization of plasticity is beyond the scope of this project, for
the purposes of this discussion I contend that with respect to
Malabou’s proposed structuring dualism—dialectics of reification and
fluidification—“the slave” is that discursive-material instance where
the givenness of structural form is denied or fluidified. What is in flux,
in the first instance here, is not immanent metamorphosis or matter’s
self-regulation but antiblack bonds of ontological effacement or
irresolution that produce blackness as a plastic way of being—a
relational field whereby what Malabou describes as “the fragile and
finite mutability” of being is effaced or fluidified (Plasticity 81). In
other words, the slave is the discursive-material site that must
contend with the demand for seemingly infinite malleability, a
demand whose limits are set merely by the tyrannies of will and
imagination. What is at stake is the definitive character of form, its
determinacy or resistance, which is potentially fluidified by a willed
excess of polymorphism and the violent wresting of form from matter.
In contrast to Malabou’s approach, the plastic ontology described
here is neither the thing-in-itself nor an immanent ontology of the real
but representational or paradigmatic: an a posteriori virtual model of
a dynamic, motile mode of antiblack arrangement. As ontologizing
plasticization has been constituent to a mode of unfreedom and the
history of antiblackness, plasticity is, therefore, inflected differently
than in Malabou’s work. My conceptualization of plasticity neither
posits that human form can become “any kind of form” nor affirms
such a potential; rather, it concerns the way potential can be turned
against itself by bonds of power.40 As Jayna Brown in “Being
Cellular: Race, the Inhuman, and the Plasticity of Life” rightfully
cautions:

Remembering how a plasticity of life was imagined and

scientifically practiced through race and ability is key as
scholars go forward in the project of decentering the
human. A trust in scientific knowledge must be
interrogated, and the ‘we’ of new materialist thinking
situated historically. Scholars must remember not to
assume a universally shared positioning in relation to
the material world. (327)41
Similarly, I suggest that the desirability and ruse of the “any kind” or
optimization is embedded in and conditioned by an antiblack
imaginary, in other words by the afterlife of slavery.42
Moreover, I am resistant to Malabou’s theory of plasticity because
of its commitment to Hegelian dialecticism. I remain skeptical of
attempts to read both the “interior” of bodies or the organismic field
in Hegelian terms and to elevate such thought to the level of an
originary anterior principle, or even “systemic law,” underpinning the
organization of life, sense, and meaning (Plasticity 57). Even in its
plastic presentation as the principle of fundamental mutability rather
than totalizing movement toward identity, the constitutive operations
of plasticity remain contradiction and synthesis, or negativity and
reconciliation (New French Philosophy 87).
Beloved’s refiguration of trans-species correspondence, rather
than oppositional difference, disrupts the ontologizing plasticization I
describe and Man’s ability to cast “animal”—human or nonhuman—
as the abjected referent in the production of the human Self. Beloved
makes possible an intervention into an episteme, and not simply its
application, by inviting an investigation of the potentially disruptive
effects of trans-species correspondence—or more specifically,
correspondence between actants—on the reigning order of being,
knowing, naming, and its attribution of value. I use the term
“correspondence,” denoting connection, interplay, and
communication, in place of and against the normativity that legislates
intersubjectivity in the Hegelian terms of the Self–Other relation. In
the Hegelian tradition, Paul D and Mister are neither Self nor Other
but reciprocally and constitutively sub-Other. The animal as negative
referent rests largely on the presumption that “the animal” lacks
perspective or exists in a state of privation.43 In this tradition, black
people are situated as “animal man” (Hegel 177). In other words, the
African is animal in the form of a human and is, thus, devoid of the
achievement of feeling and Reasoned perspective. Attributes of body
and character are presumed to provide evidence of black people’s
bestial nature. Here, I aim to think the relationship between Paul D
and Mister in vocabularies and terms other than those of post- or
neo-Hegelian thought, which tends to inform the theorization of
“Self/Other” as the plasticization of the black(ened) forestalls
definitive position as either Self or Other.
Paul D begins the telling not sure he “can say it. Say it right”
(Beloved 85). “Definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined,”
and Paul D’s ontology was denoted by an em dash, an emphatic gap
between definition and the act of defining (Beloved 225). Aphasia
rather than dissemblance more precisely characterizes Paul D’s
speech; rather than trying to spare the reader, Sethe, or the teller
embarrassment or shield his interiority, Paul D’s speech is paralytic,
not unlike his tightly bound hands on that fateful day.44 Signifying
aphasia rather than dissemblance, the ellipses in Paul D’s narration
of his encounter with Mister—“I was . . .”—and the pregnant pauses
in his speech emblematize lexical gaps in language; as Jennifer
DeVere Brody describes, “visceral and elusive, enveloping and
intangible, material and conceptual” (63). De-composing speech and
the page by signifying an excess, the ellipses “labors to contra-
dictory ends” (Brody 71). The ellipses testify to the impossibility of a
grammar—predicated equally on domination as a particular mode of
violence and foreclosure, rather than forgetting, as a particular
imposition of erasure—to give voice to the severing of person from
personality that Paul D attempts to describe as well as expressively
infer elusive contra-dictory possibilities.
Whereas Paul D “was . . .” in his phantasy, Mister was definitively
masculine, and he envied him for it. Yet, Mister is in many respects a
phantasm: an emblem of the desired but denied pleasures of racial
patriarchy. His comb is described by Paul D as “as big as my hand
and some kind of red” (Beloved 85). Its size and red color makes him
simultaneously a demonic apparition and a potent symbol of
eroticism, as Mister has access to “at least fifty hens” (Beloved 85).
Yet, Paul D’s envy combines his incipient existential awakening with
a myopic, patriarchal, Humanist entitlement (Beloved 85).
However, because Paul D’s envy does not merely reflect
misplaced resentments and patriarchal desires, we should resist
moralizing and dismissing his envy outright. As Sianne Ngai points
out, “envy” is not “a term describing a subject that lacks, but rather
the subject’s affective response to perceived inequality.”45 Moreover,
Ngai observes, “[E]nvy lacks cultural recognition as a valid mode of
publicly recognizing or responding to social disparities, even though
it remains the only agnostic emotion defined as having a perceived
inequality as its object” (128). Because it has been so thoroughly
pathologized as an error of individualized passions, envy, whether
pointing to phantasmatic or actual disparities, is undervalued as a
political diagnosis.46 Helmut Schoeck asks, “Why is a subject’s
enviousness automatically assumed to be unwarranted or petty? Or
dismissed as an overreaction, as delusional or even hysterical—a
reflection of the ego’s inner workings rather than a polemical mode
of engagement with the world?” (172). Even the imaginary sources
of envy can be a form of oppositional consciousness to what are
indeed actual asymmetries. That one so often feels shame as a
result of one’s envy points to how successfully envy has been
pathologized and stripped of its critical value. Envy has been
overdetermined as a passion that belongs to the individual
psychological failures of the poor and especially the feminine; it is no
coincidence that envy is so frequently rendered a symptom of
hysteria. Once cast as feminine, representative of a disreputable
economic class and the hysterical, envy is devalued for its critical
implications (Ngai 126–173).47
Mister’s freedom to move across the expanse of the plantation,
juxtaposed to Paul D’s tightly bound hands and forcibly mute tongue,
makes Mister an object of Paul D’s envy. However, this envy is not
simply a passive condition or psychological flaw; it is the means by
which he recognizes and responds to an actual relation of power,
where antagonism may be an appropriate response. However,
instead of directing his antagonistic feelings toward enslavement, he
turns them in on the self before misdirecting them at Mister based on
a rivalry engendered by white patriarchal slavery. That slavery could
inspire such debilitating envy and traumatic desire is astounding
given Mister’s position as animal in the order of things. Mister’s low
rank in the Chain of Being makes him a surprising symbol of
phallocentric power, but at Sweet Home, Mister would appear to
enjoy a measure of freedom withheld from Paul D.
Paul D has been acutely dispossessed of his sexuality by sexual
trauma and Garner’s control. The slave’s captive embodiment often
placed his pleasure and his will at odds with one another; throughout
the novel Paul D’s pleasure does not temporally or spatially coincide
with his desire, not only because desire’s satiation is ultimately
impossible but also because his will is “locked up and chained
down,” dramatically undercutting his ability to participate in the
metonymic chain of desire (Beloved 21). The physical and psychical
limitations constitutive of his enslavement expropriate and alienate
him from his pleasure and desire. Paul D’s seemingly intractable
investment in a symmetrical, heteromasculine recognition that never
arrives suggests normative manhood’s racial exclusion.
Nevertheless, Paul D’s investments in that manhood blind him to the
manner in which said manhood establishes itself based on his
vulnerability to gendered and sexual violence whether in the context
of Garner’s control over his sexuality or the routinization of rape on
the chain gang.48 Tragically, he fails to see how such an investment
places him in an ironic relation to freedom, obscuring the fullness of
being. Not only is patriarchy itself inimical to freedom, but his
investment in normative masculinity is also especially pernicious for
at least two reasons. First, he does not yet understand that
patriarchal desire is counterproductive to a politics of black freedom,
in particular, as the pursuit of patriarchy binds black people to a
model that can only reinforce black gender as failed or fraudulent.
Not only are the discursive-material conditions absent for
heteronormative genders and domestic arrangements, but
attempting to embody such genders will entrench internecine
violence among black people and be seen as reinforcing whiteness
as their natural home and point of origin. Second, this purported
fraudulence is predicated on the projection of animal lack—human
and nonhuman—such that the slave will never experience
ontologically level relationality without displacing this epistemic
premise.
 In short, while Paul D’s traumatized envy suggests the highly
problematic and ultimately self-defeating consequences of his
identification with Garner and the master’s conception of manhood, it
also underscores a historical and existential truth: “the human” and
“the animal” are not mutually exclusive ontological zones but rather
positions in a highly unstable and indeterminate relational hierarchy,
one that requires blackness as exception, as plasticity, in the
establishment and reproduction of its code or representational
grammar.49 Blackness’s ontological plasticity and the near
formlessness of the violence that secures it do not and cannot rigidly
observe strictures of human exceptionalism where blackness is
concerned as blackness’s plasticity acts as a safeguard against
emergent conditions that threaten to disestablish its code. Thus,
arbitrary inversions of anthropocentric hierarchy as well as absurd
and paradoxical modes of human recognition are essential to the
renewal and adaptability of liberal humanism’s biopolitical logics.
Beloved facilitates a reconsideration of animal perspective’s
significance, and from this questioning, we can alter how we define
our (human) being, black or otherwise. The scene underlines not
only the questionable nature of Euro-patriarchal, anthropocentric
constructions of the Self but also “the animal,” and by doing so, it
undermines “the human” ideal, one that claims that black people are
representative of failed humanity, of being animals. In Beloved,
Morrison narrates Mister and Paul D’s traumatized correspondence
neither as a sentimental romanticization of nature nor as a phantasy
of dominion over nature, which would characterize so much of the
Western humanist (literary) tradition, but as a rupture of the
governing terms of social life and grammar of representation. Eye to
eye with Mister, Paul D is traumatized by his identification with the
rooster. The encounter fractures his sense of identity and radically
destabilizes his sense of himself. Paul D, bit in mouth and in a
traumatized state, cannot lay claim to a position of mastery that is
supported by hegemonic orders of knowledge, culture, and being.
Paul D has no epistemological, economic, or symbolic capital to do
that. All he can do is try to hold on to his mind while carefully formed
illusions of the self shatter. Embedded in that encounter is the
incontrovertible specification of his existential predicament: he has
not determined the meaning of (his) being; the manhood he claims is
the property of an other, a Self-effecting phantasy.
The pain of the bit was certainly incalculably horrible, yet it was
Paul D’s traumatizing introduction into trans-species correspondence
and the non-self-identical revelation that emerged in its wake that
threatened a total loss of self. If Mister has a perspective authorized
by something other than sovereign power, that supersedes
sovereign recognition and disrupts its terms via an inexorable
affectivity, how would Paul D define his manhood and (human)
being? What Beloved establishes in this scene is that antiblack
racialization exists within a biopolitical sphere that exceeds the
master–slave relation and comprises also trans-species relations.
However, human–animal binarism is, in turn, shaped by the historical
development of slavery. The slave’s plasticity neither conforms to a
predetermined human exceptionalism nor maintains fidelity to the
general principle of human privilege with respect to the animal. The
arbitrary powers of the master (order) confound formulations that
presume the coherence of humans’ symbolic and material power
over animals. The slave’s status is uncertain and provisional with
respect to animals even when slaves such as Paul D desire
anthropocentric privilege and prerogatives. The interval effectuated
by animal perspective is an interruption of the slaveholder’s
conception of humanity and manhood, a conception Paul D has
inherited. However, what if this painful and traumatizing interruption
is more than a personal crisis for Paul D? What if this crisis is the
precipice of a conception of being that would rechart the fate of black
masculinity, one where humanity would be defined in a manner other
than as teleology or hierarchy? What would it mean for black(ened)
humanity if (human) being was no longer binaristically or
teleologically positioned with respect to “the animal”? On what basis
would we then define black humanity as liminal, lacking, or absent?
Mister’s gaze arguably haunts Paul D. However, if we limit our
analysis to the figure of Mister, whereby his gaze is merely a
symptom of Paul D’s trauma, then we potentially miss that Mister’s
presence in the novel is also an invitation, an opening to question
some of our most basic assumptions about who we are and what
defines (human) being, revealing the fuller stakes of the ideal of “the
human.” Reading Mister deconstructively as a character in the novel
calls into question the terms that have defined the antagonistic
binarism subtending the human/animal distinction. Mister’s gaze is a
provocation inviting us to reconsider how we define ourselves
especially with regard to the racialized, gendered, and sexual
dimensions of our fleshly being. In place of reading Mister’s
presence as only a symbol of slavery’s animalization of black(ened)
humanity or as an emblem of the travestied manhood afforded to
black men under conditions of a racially hierarchized “universal
humanity,” we can read Mister’s presence as the onto-epistemo-
ethical disruption that it is. Paul D sees Mister as a castrating figure,
one that mocks him, showing him how low and unmanly he is. But
not even Paul D, who is so thoroughly invested in normative codes
of manliness, can resist wondering what is behind Mister’s eyes:
What phenomenological experience and meaning-making exist for
the rooster—for this particular rooster?
Paul D’s tortured speculation about Mister’s smile and his constant
return to it raise important questions about epistemology and being.
Paul D is shaken by his own conviction that Mister has an authorized
perspective and is not simply there mechanically recording but rather
“sees.” Mister is a spectator of his humiliation neither as human nor
as Descartes’s automaton but as one whose force and weight is
registered as an affectivity that effects, and redirects, Paul D’s
experience of his gendered sexual being.
Moreover, Morrison’s narration avoids the vexed problematics of
anthropomorphism. Instead of purporting to transcribe or narrating
Mister’s mode of address and interiority, she alerts us to it, through
Paul D’s response to it, but does not represent it nor cast Mister as a
transparency. Thus, Mister’s mode of address and interiority are able
to exist as a disruption of the onto-epistemo-ethical while honoring
its opacity.50 Morrison, therefore, could help us revise conventional
interpretations of slave narratives in which the genre simply
reinforces what Derrida describes as a presumed hierarchy of
humanity over an already-known and unitary “animal” (“The Animal”
402). Morrison’s text questions the terms on which we represent and
define beasts, human or otherwise.
Paul D’s near nullification in signification is what ails him.
According to the ideology of slavery, the slave is
human/animal/machine and more much more. Conceived as “animal
man,” reason, sentiment, morality, will, desire, or any of the exalted
characteristics that putatively define humanity as not only species
membership but also a cultivated achievement are either absent,
pathological, criminal, wholly deficient, or wholly excessive. How
might Paul D’s pained correspondence with Mister the rooster, as
fellow actants rather than subjects, problematize the very episteme
and grammar of evaluation that animalize both? In that moment,
Mister is no longer simply an animal, and if he is not simply an
animal, then what does “animal” mean? Could slave–animal
correspondence provide an entry point to another horizon of
possibility or make way for another code or another mode of
relating? Surely a different mode of relating and a different grammar
of value is behind (and reflected in) Mister’s eyes—one that might
even disorder the ocularcentrism that underwrites the hierarchical
arrangements of taxonomy and typology.
Instead of offering an elaboration of an alternative epistemological
claim regarding the animal that would return us to foundational forms
of authority rooted in scientific positivism or Scripture, Beloved
queries without hastily concocting answers. In Beloved, because
opacity is not to be overcome or domesticated, alterity remains open;
it must be free to remain that which is present but is not fully
apprehended. The text does not seek to definitively answer ethical
questions; instead, it raises their profile as questions, problematizing
regimes of knowledge rather than competing with them.
The text opens up a space for us to ask questions that may not
have solutions, or else whose solutions may not be legitimated by
hegemonic regimes of knowledge and liberal humanist ethics. The
trauma of having a bit forced in his mouth may have been so great
that it inhibited Paul D’s ability to accept an address from another on
any terms other than his traumatized own. Seeing Mister seeing him,
Paul D is suspended somewhere between what used to be “the
animal,” what used to be “the human,” and an entirely different
arrangement of possibility. Paul D’s traumatized identification with
Mister is a caesura. No longer “the animal” or “the human,” Paul D’s
plasticity potentially gives way to forms that would not turn “wild.”
The remainder of Paul D’s story concerns his attempt to reconfigure
his being, gender, and sexuality, not in pursuit of completion or
wholeness but inside of conditions of irreparability and freedom’s
deferral.
In the text, Mister is not incapacity but instead is capacitated to
situate and decenter Paul D’s understanding of the Self. Crucially,
the effects of correspondence are not predicated on granting
permission or prior authorization; rather, to be affected is to expose
the prerogatives of the Self as a beguiling fiction. If we consider that
Paul D’s perspective, his conception of himself, has already been
intruded upon by Garner and Schoolteacher’s Eurocentric,
patriarchal, and teleological understanding of the Self, where
“animal” is the negative referent that defines Euro-humanity as an
achievement and signifier of sovereign capacity, then the text’s
insistence on the situating power of animal perspective undermines
one of slavery’s most formative epistemic presumptions. But in order
to problematize the sovereign “I,” Morrison had to put the liberal
humanist Self at risk.
Mister’s capacity is occluded in the Chain of Being framework
found in Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. But what eludes anthropocentric
humanism is not only that Mister has a perspective that does not
await recognition but rather precedes and exceeds the limited terms
of recognition; what also eludes it is that Mister’s perspective
requires that we rethink the limitations of our inherited views on “the
animal” and examine how our presuppositions undermine thought on
human identity. It is not that Morrison’s text is suggesting that Mister,
a male chicken, and Paul D, a male slave, are existentially the same;
contesting the Chain of Being’s (and related frameworks’) ethico-
onto-epistemological grounding does not require a disavowal of
phenomenological differences of embodiment or existence. Instead,
the text suggests the liberating potential, for Paul D and Mister as
well as their avatars, both alive and dead, of a thoroughgoing
questioning of the legacy of Enlightenment humanism.
Morrison’s text suggests that slavery’s violence is not the reduction
of humans to the rank of animals but rather the transmogrification of
the black(ened)’s being. More accurately, the black(ened)’s fleshly
being, in its humanity, is turned into a form of infinitely malleable
lexical and biological matter, a plastic upon which projects of
humanization and animalization rest. This work is accomplished by
the ontological position of blackness not as a sociological subjectivity
or identity but as a matrix for forms of modern subjecthood and
subjectivity.
Animal perspective, as an affectivity that effectively dislocated and
redirected Paul D’s conception of his gendered and sexual being by
reminding him of what he knows but represses, may destabilize the
prevailing grammar of “the human.” Nevertheless, said disruption
does not in and of itself topple hierarchical order: to do so would
require a transformation of the terms and logics of correspondence
and the institution of another mode of being/knowing/feeling. A shift
in the valuation of animals, if it is to be transformative and not merely
a reallocation of attribution within a racially hierarchical system of
value, must be accompanied by a different mode of political social
life and grammar of representation. In other words, a revaluation of
“animality,” or any other singular term (“objecthood,” for instance)
does not guarantee the revaluation of blackness; as in the example
of Douglass, the elevation of the status of animals, especially their
humanization, may reciprocally intensify the abjection or
diminishment of black(ened) humans/animals due to some purported
irrecuperable difference effected by rigged scales and retroactive
justification. In short, Beloved not only questions the authority of the
trope of “the animal” as applied to humans and animals but also
offers an approach to the question “What is man?” that ultimately
invites the dissolution of its terms.
 2

Sense of Things

Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in

the Ring

The Door of No Return—real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to

those of us scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in
a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To
live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction—a creation of empires,
and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is
to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant
moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most
resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.
—Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

The persistence of the question of blackness’s resemblance to

nothingness reveals an anxiety about declension into a void.1
Attempts to nullify blackness has a sexuating logic, I argue, one that
figures black(ened) femaleness and/or femininity as baleful,
phobogenic fleshly metaphors of the void. This predicament is
signaled in Brown Girl in the Ring by Ti-Jeanne’s vertigo, where the
novel’s main character’s vertigo functions as a metaphor for the
“onto-epistemological” predicament of black mater, as mater, as
matter under conditions of imperial Western modernity or the
conception of Man within the terms of a taxonomical telos.2
To the extent that this ill-fated nothingness would appear to befall
black(ened) manhood and/or masculinity, it is via “the ‘female’ within”
that as Spillers reminds they will have to “learn.” Say “yes” to this
power within instead of attempting to displace or disavow it if there is
to be movement in and against history. Learning is in attending to the
ways they are situated to and by its matrixial weight and force
instead of ignoring, rivaling, or under-attending to the sexuating
logics of “race” or “blackness” or “the black” or “the slave.” In
“Interstices,” Spillers draws our attention to a singularity in slavery by
telling us the black female is “the principal point of passage between
the human and the nonhuman world. Her issue became the focus of
cunning difference—visually, psychologically, ontologically—as the
route by which the dominant modes decided the distinction between
humanity and ‘other.’” (Black 155, emphasis in original) The
predicament of black(end) female flesh’s being that appears in the
form of a question is what links Paul D to Sethe and Paul D to Ti-
Jeanne and Sethe and Ti-Jeanne to each other.
In Beloved, Paul D’s predicament occurs inside of the paradoxical
and absurd racial logics of “manhood.” In other words, patriarchal
gender hierarchy is not so much precluded by antiblackness as it
produces gender differentially along the ontologized lines of race.
Thus, masculine entitlements are tentative and conditional and being
sexed “male” or gendered “man” indexes a structural vulnerability to
a racialized mode of domination whose gendered contours are
productive of a manhood not disestablished by blackness but
qualified by racial hierarchy among men. Thereby subjection and
violation does not “unman” so much as constitute key sites of its
differential production. That it is often suggested that violent
prostration unmans suggests the casualness of our assumption that
vulnerability to violation properly belongs to the female (slave), a
mode of defining that, however, callously acknowledges “the ‘female’
within” yet fails to attend to the relational nature of violation (Spillers,
“Mama’s” 228). In other words, it is preoccupied by the homosocial
relation while disavowing black men’s relation to black women and
the abjection of black womanhood and their contiguity to the
existential predicaments of this problem space.
In the worldmaking Schoolteacher produced by letter and lash, it is
Sethe who makes the ink. Schoolteacher liked the way Sethe mixed
it although it was Mrs. Garner’s recipe—Morrison further undercuts a
temptation to read the Garners as benevolent characters. Sethe
discloses to Paul D, “I made the ink, Paul D. He couldn’t have done it
if I didn’t make the ink” (Morrison, Beloved 320). I take this
admission to suggest she is a figure constitutive to Schoolteacher’s
transubstantiating pedagogy. The ink was made of “cherry gum and
oak bark” recalling the chokecherry tree on her back (Morrison,
Beloved 44). The ink and the notebook need Sethe and her avatars
for its alchemy of being and world. The image of Mister stalks Paul
D, and the smell of the ink stalks Sethe. Sethe overhears her name
in one of his many lectures. Schoolteacher instructs his nephew, who
was writing in one of his books, to “put her human characteristics on
the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them
up.” In doing so, Schoolteacher establishes the measure and metrics
of being and world, indeed of being-in-the-world. This is an allegory
of world history.
If the approach is to argue that blackness is nothingness and to
demystify the machinations that falsely make blackness appear as
something, my aim is the opposite: I maintain that blackness, and
the abject fleshly figures that bear the weight of the world, is a being
(something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything), and I aim
to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest blackness is
nothingness. Attentiveness both to the paradoxical gendering of
blackness and the fundamental antiblackness of Western imperial
gender as identity, presentation, and performative, or more
accurately sexuation’s antiblack production, reveals the fuller stakes
of the debate on blackness and being that can be traced to key
figures such as Du Bois, Fanon, and Césaire, among others.
Blackness is not imperviousness to a politics of sex-gender but a site
of its profound intensification. Black female flesh un/gendered
arranges sex-gender and organizes the terms through which
transgression and dis/order are perceived and defined. A blackness,
in general, that is male and/or masculine by default can only serve to
further obscure and obliterate. A comprehensive interrogation of
racialized sexuation and gender takes us to the matrix-figure of “the
human,” black female flesh un/gendered.
As a commodified object and scientific specimen, black female
flesh un/gendered is an indispensable precept of the linear
taxonomical (ontological) thinking that scholars in animal studies,
feminist new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and
posthumanism are presently trying to displace. This study
demonstrates that the icon of “black female body” has been an
essential figure in the unfurling of the object, the thing, matter, and
the animal in ontological discourses of Western philosophy and
science and that there is a fundamental indefiniteness and opacity in
projections and productions of blackness that troubles the
ontological and its arrangements of world. In this chapter I examine
the Heideggerian metaphysical ordering of human, animal, and
stone as world relation. In approaching the world-shattering claim of
black female flesh un/gendered’s claim to being, I argue this is not
an order to reify. This is an order to destroy.
Subjects of all human orders once knew their physical
environment only in terms prescribed by their modes of subjective
understanding and cultural representational schemas. The revolution
of imperial Western humanism made possible the ongoing
displacement of local knowledge (or culture-specific orders) by a
hegemonically (re)produced but no less epistemically violent
Western scientific conception of the cosmos.3 A transculturally
verifiable image of the earth, or positivist knowledge as aspirational
horizon, has been pursued via a combination of material-discursive
force and a coercive (dis)possession of processes of sense
perception and cognition on a global scale.
According to Sylvia Wynter, the novel form has played no small
part in this process. In “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,”
Wynter states, “The novel form and our societies are twin children of
the same parents” (95). That is to say, our contemporary racial,
capitalist societies and the novel form itself are both cause and effect
of the market economy, “an emergence which marked a change of
such world-historical magnitude, that we are all, without exception
still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its
bewitched reality” (95).4 Drawing on and augmenting György Lukács
and Lucien Goldmann’s theories of the novel with Eric Williams’s
history of Caribbean slavery, Wynter asserts that the emergence of
the novel form is inextricably linked with the historical developments
of the conquest of the Americas and the plantation societies of the
Caribbean as the latter provided the “raw material” for the extension
and dominance of the market economy and initiated a globally
expansive reordering of aesthesis and imaginative capacities. It is in
this context that Robinson Crusoe, Oroonoko, and The Blazing
World in English and Don Quixote and Sinapia in Spanish, with their
imperial thematics and speculative elements, inaugurate a new
literary form—the novel.5
In “The Ceremony Must Be Found,” Wynter deepens the argument
of “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” with the claim that not
only are “Literature” and racial capitalism mutually constitutive but
also that by the nineteenth century, literature was increasingly
regarded as the “highest manifestation of language” and therefore
considered to be an essential measure of the capacity for
technological progress and scientific reason (46). Wynter argues that
with the secularization of knowledge and the constitution of “man” in
the post-Cartesian terms of Foucault’s “empirico-transcendental
doublet,” “literature” came to function as the transcendentalized
index of degree of “Culture” which a group, understood in the
biologized terms of race and national identity, had achieved or could
achieve based on their immanent “nature”:

Culture, in the new episteme, now took the place that

Reason had played in the Classical episteme, as the
index for determining the degree to which a particular
group knew ‘Self/World’ in the metaphysical terms of
the current order’s ‘rational’ world view which by
extension determined bio-ontological value and vice-
versa. (“Ceremony” 46)

The reported presence (or absence) of the novel form coupled with
textual and philological assessments of literature’s aesthetic value
along lines of race and/or national origin were embedded in the
techno-scientific conception of progress that organized Man in the
Hegelian terms of a teleology.
 While this is not to say, as Wynter maintains (citing Valentin
Mudimbe), that:

African world views and African traditional systems of

thought are “unthinkable and cannot be made explicit
within the framework of their own rationality,” the fact
remains that “the ways in which they have been
evaluated and the means used to explain them relate
to theories and methods whose constraints, rules, and
systems of operation suppose a non-African
epistemological locus,” and, in effect, suppose “a silent
dependence on a Western episteme.”6

However, the West itself is an iteratively dependent construction; its

renewal depends on the ritual purification of knowledge produced by
and expropriated from those indigenous onto-epistemic architects
the West casts as benighted and, therefore, bereft of knowledge
such that “the Western tradition” emerges as an imperious effect of
adaptive processes and multiscalar mutations of matter and
meaning.7 Moreover, the upheavals of political and cultural thought
most commonly attributed to the respective events of 1492 and the
Copernican Revolution made possible that mutation at the level of
sensorium, which led, in turn, to the rise of natural science and its
racialized taxonomies and teleological mode of Reason and
Universality. In this context, the idea of (national) literature and the
novel, in particular, emerge as an imperialist technology, one that is
the cause and effect of the (re)ordering of aesthesis and imaginative
capacities. Hopkinson’s 1996 Locus Award–winning novel Brown
Girl in the Ring’s subversion and redirection of this order’s inaugural
literary form ruptures this sense of world.
Editor and speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson draws from
Greek myth and diverse Caribbean linguistic conventions, folklore,
and spiritual practices in order to create fictive narratives and
lifeworlds that often explore, allegorically, the vexed figure of “the
black female body” in Western scientific discourse and metaphysics,
rewriting the conventions of Western literary genres, in particular
science fiction, realism, and fantasy, along the way. As Jessica
Langer observes of postcolonial science fiction more generally,
“There are levels upon levels of hybridity here: hybridity of form, of
genre, of criticism, of concept” (109).8 The observation that
“postcolonial SF” introduces new complexity into literary theory may
also require, as Luke Gibbons suggests, new methods of
interpretation: “Theory itself needs to be recast from the periphery
and acquire hybrid forms, bringing the plurality of voices associated
with the creative energies of colonial cultures to bear on criticism
itself” (27).9 Brown Girl in the Ring provokes a reconsideration of
theory and an experiment in method on at least two counts: (1) it
centralizes the role of antiblackness and slavery in the postcolonial,
inviting a reworking of prevailing postcolonial paradigms that
disaggregate racial slavery from colonialism; and (2) it centrally
stages and performs speculation as an intervention into and as
theory, intensifying speculation’s performance as theory and theory’s
performance by blackness.10
In a reading of Brown Girl in the Ring, I argue that as an enabling
condition of an imperial Western humanist conception of the world as
such, the black mater(nal) marks the discursive-material trace effects
and foreclosures of the dialectics of hegemonic common sense and
that the anxieties stimulated by related signifiers, such as the
black(ened) maternal image, voice, and lifeworld, allude to the latent
symbolic-material capacities of black mater, as mater, as matter, to
destabilize or even rupture the reigning order of representation that
grounds the thought-world relation.11 In other words, the specter of
the black mater—that is, nonrepresentability—haunts the terms and
operations tasked with adjudicating the thought-world correlate or
the proper perception of the world as such including hierarchical
distinctions between reality and illusion, Reason and its absence,
subject and object, science and fiction, speculation and realism,
which turn on attendant aporias pertaining to immanence and
transcendence.12
 While the immanence-transcendence dualism has a long religio-
philosophical inheritance, Hegel is perhaps the emblematic figure for
the racialization of this prevailing dualism, providing raciality with
what would become the essential touchstones of its logic: teleology
and determinism.13 At the incipiency of globality as an idea, Hegel
argued that racial polarity is both the means and the ends of the
universal-historical order, privileging transcendence over immanence
and understanding the two principles in the oppositional terms of
raciality.14 Citing reports on African religion that claimed Africans
worshipped nature or themselves, Hegel concluded that Africans are
governed by the senses and, as a result, are incapable of acquiring
adequate distance from nature, a distance that would allow them to
oppose nature and the bestial dimensions of the self. For Hegel,
opposing both is required for the achievement of Spirit, reason, and
self-governance: “Inward freedom” is first attained through opposing
one’s immediate existence (natural environment) and one’s natural
existence (animal existence); this opposition then provides the
condition of possibility for higher order thinking and self-governance.
According to Hegel, one must rise above one’s natural/sensuous
existence via internal reflection to attain spiritual freedom, and this
transcendence then becomes the basis of one’s entry into the
domain of culture and history. Ultimately, Hegel concluded, “the
African” is eternally an “animal man” because Africans are trapped
within immanence, or immediate experience, and are, therefore,
unable to achieve transcendence or apprehend transcendent
knowledge. In this, Hegel co-constitutes human–animal, nature–
culture, and immanence–transcendence dualisms within the
imaginary of global raciality.15 The re-emergence of these dualisms,
as I argue below, extends into Heidegger’s highly influential
conceptualizations of human, animal, world. The final term “world” is
what Hopkinson’s text will rupture via black mater—the veil between
worlds—and in doing so unmoors onto-epistemological claims that
attempt to stably binarize the human and the animal, whiteness and
blackness and even void the latter terms.
 While it is crucial to demonstrate the perniciousness of Hegel’s
philosophical premises and vocabulary, given that Hegelianism
remains the reigning framework of universalist historicity, it is just as
necessary to engage onto-epistemological frameworks that
challenge antiblack modes of worlding and epistemic authority. With
Brown Girl in the Ring, Hopkinson makes it possible to read what is
invisible (but nonetheless present) or what is constitutive yet absent
at the manifest level of Hegel’s text, namely the foreclosure of black
mater, its latent capacities, and its effects on orbiting discursive-
material formations of knowledge and being.16 The term
“nonrepresentability” as applied to the black mater in these pages
alludes to a central and ever-present unsettling excess that
nevertheless eludes representation.
If Wynter is correct that by the nineteenth century, “Literature” was
understood as the incarnation of “Culture’s” definition—the defining
language of a collective impulse whereby poetry, drama, and fiction
represented the “self-transcendence” of a people—then, in essence,
Brown Girl in the Ring is both an effect and a critique of the very
narrative processes and metonymic that have produced the Hegelian
“myth of history” and (neo)Hegelian “aesthetico-ontology”
(“Ceremony”). By turning on its head the (racial) teleology attributed
to the novelistic form, Hopkinson reveals the function of myth in the
poesis of racial teleology and harnesses the power of myth in a
generative critique of antiblackness and its idea(l) of the world as
such. To put it more pointedly, if a Manichean myth of history,
reason, and “scientific fact” could produce a world-historical order
predicated on the conjunctive abjection of black femaleness and
nullification of black maternity, then Hopkinson’s novel effectively
counters this order by, in turn, performing its intervention at the
register of myth. Writing in an allegorical mode, Hopkinson redirects
Hegelian tropes of blackness, of “the African” in particular, in a
manner that exposes the essential but invisibilized role of black
mater in Hegel’s system as well as the irreducible indistinction of
scientific reason and myth.
 Hopkinson’s text recasts the metonymic of literature and
blackness precisely by exploiting the equation of blackness, and in
particular Africanness, with irrationality and teratology—by troping
the trope of African religion. Though commonly apprehended in the
narratives of Western science and philosophy through the terms of
objective empirical fact, “the black female body” and her world are,
as Hopkinson’s text implies, better understood as enabling myths. In
order to bring out the slippage between scientific empiricism and
myth where black (maternal) female figures are concerned,
Hopkinson turns the realist world of science fiction into one where
myth and empirical reality not only coexist but also wherein myth is
embedded in realism. By doing so, the protagonist Ti-Jeanne and
the reader are provoked by “second sight” to confront the manner in
which myth, in particular myths of history and of scientific fact,
structure and obscure the black female figure—and therefore
foreclose the comprehension of a perspective and comprehension
from a perspective of black mater. In the novel, Ti-Jeanne’s vertigo
functions as a symptom and a metaphor for this predicament, as a
disruption in vision, hearing, and proprioception or the felt corporeal
sense of the body in space and in the making of space.17 In using
myth to counter “myths of history,” the novel reveals that myth often
shrouds “fact” and claims to objective reality, and for this very
reason, myth—or, more precisely, a nonrepresentationalist mode of
reason or onto-epistemology—may hold the potential to unsettle
hegemonic modes of racist reality and their constituent myths. As
such, the novel makes available a transvaluation of myth by
investing representation differently and vice versa.18
The problem under consideration in these pages is not simply that
of the gap between the referent and the sign—the classical problem
of representationalism being the misalignment in spacetime of the
thing and its representation—but rather that of a sublimity attributed
to the signifier “black female” and the dematerialization this
attribution engenders.19 The black mater(nal) serves an enabling
function that although it can be thought of precisely as a condition of
possibility—the racially sexuating movement of trace—in its all at-
once-ness, it nevertheless exceeds what we can rightfully claim to
know; it eludes both measurement and conceptualization, and the
novel provides a way to read that approaches such
nonrepresentability.20
I follow Hortense Spillers in this chapter by investigating two
meanings of “representation” in the discursive practices of imperial
Western humanism: representative and re-presentation. The black
mater(nal) is non-represent-ability because the black mater(nal)
gestures toward the foreclosed enabling condition of the modern
grammar of representation: a space of nonsense or aphasia and
correspondingly without a representative in the “I and thou”
dialectical processes of recognition, value, and decision.21
Regarding re-presentation, in the grammar described, there are
“black (maternal) female” figures (or representations) that appear,
but they function at the register of myth rather than indexicality and,
therefore, reveal that representation performs rather than functions
mimetically as the notion of “re-presentation” suggests.
In the pages that follow, I investigate both meanings of
representation and trace how each works on the other in
Hopkinson’s text.22 The approach here diverges from one that
evaluates representation exclusively based on a representation’s
supposed accuracy or inaccuracy: in other words, its ability to re-
present the real thing. While the text certainly problematizes calcified
representations of black womanhood, the novel does not then
reinvest in authenticity or the proper re-presentation of black women
but rather performs representation in a speculative mode. The text
does not (re)produce black women as an empiricist object or within
the terms of her production as a transparent foundational object of
science. Rather than functioning within the limited discourse of
empirical facts or seeking the authority of scientific method, black
female figures in Brown Girl in the Ring underscore the manner in
which representation performs in worlds and in the (un)making of
worlds rather than indexes the world as such.23 Moving away from
science fiction’s defining investments in scientific fact, the novel
provokes a consideration of the problem of representing a sublime
function that necessarily exceeds any claim to knowledge but that
can only be approached obliquely in a gesture of representation.24
Moreover, one could argue that the long-standing black feminist
preoccupation with representation, in particular the seemingly
inescapable burden of paradoxical modes of visibility/invisibility, does
not primarily gesture toward an assessment of the (in)accuracy of
representations but rather toward a critique of the performative labor
representation does in worlding processes—or the crafting and
obliteration of worlds.
Brown Girl in the Ring contemplates the stakes and possibilities of
a mode of non-self-identical onto-epistemology to emerge, some
other relation of being to knowing to feeling to sensing than what
organizes our antiblack present—not based on re-presenting “the
voice” or “experience of the oppressed black woman” or simply
affirming subaltern knowledge in the form of African religion—but by
investigating the conditions of possibility for representation itself. In a
reading that insists upon aesthesis and empiricism’s inextricability,
whether the epistemological context is the seemingly scientific or
concerns perceptual knowledge that signifies otherwise, I will argue
that the modern grammar of representation takes as its enabling
figure (if “figure” is the appropriate concept here; “portal” is probably
more accurate) that which is not only unrepresented but, more
precisely, nonrepresentable—politicizing both the sense of
commonality implied in the notion of common sense and sense
perception itself. The regulating terms of the dominant grammar of
representation (re)produce black(ened) mater as always and already
trapped within immanence, burdening black (maternal) female
figures in particular, but not exclusively, with functioning as a material
metaphor that points to what Sylvia Wynter terms “demonic ground”
or what is foreclosed from representability: the nonrepresentable
beyond dividing what is sensible from what is nullified and precluded
from representability (“Miranda” 110). This foreclosed space in
discourse and dense material content, black mater, organizes and
stabilizes the hierarchical arrangement of being. The foreclosure of
black mater is what brings Heidegger’s still highly influential thought
concerning human, animal, and stone into legibility. My interest in
this chapter concerns how our received conceptions of being hinges
on our im/perception of black mater. I argue that Hopkinson’s
narrative topples Heidegger’s hierarchical schema and the
perception of world it generates.
 Before the World
Martin Heidegger once wrote, regarding the relation between thought
and being, “[1.] the stone (material object) is worldless [weltlos]; [2.]
the animal is poor in world [weltrarm]; [3.] man is world-forming
[weltbildend]” (Fundametal Concepts 177). Matthew Calarco
comments on the meaning of this passage:

if by “world” is meant accessibility to other beings, we

can say that the animal has world; but if “world” is in
some way related to having access to the being of
beings, to beings as such, then the animal does not
have world. (22)

Heidegger’s initial analysis of the animal’s relation to world is a

“having by not having.” However, as Calarco notes, in the same
volume, Heidegger himself admits that the distinction between man
and animal “is difficult to determine” (Fundametal Concepts 179).25 I
will show that Heidegger’s theses, his attempt to parse this
distinction, evokes and extends a racially sexuating and essentially
antiblack tradition of thought and demonstrate how it becomes
possible to transform the terms that authorize and cohere this
“traditional statement” via the thought of Édouard Glissant and Sylvia
Wynter and by way of Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring in
particular.
Despite admitting the difficulty in the distinction, Heidegger
bypasses the need for a more exacting determination of the essence
of animality and instead seeks to ensure that his guiding theses not
be interpreted as hierarchical value judgment, advocacy of a
continuist scale of being, or a misplaced effort to evaluate the animal
based on a comparison to man or by the measure of man. Rather,
he hoped that his thesis “the animal is poor in world” be understood
as in accordance with the animal’s own terms. The conclusion that
the animal does and does not have world, Heidegger attempts to
clarify by way of empirical examples drawn from the work of biologist
Jakob von Uexküll, in particular, on insects. However, Heidegger
ultimately rejects the conclusions of Uexküll and other ethologists
because, in Heidegger’s view, they grant too much world to those
under the sign of what he termed the animal. Rather than follow their
conclusions, Heidegger instead extrapolates a theory that the
animal’s relation to world is, in essence, captivation or fixation.
Defined by instinct rather than cognition, while the animal enacts
responsivity to external stimuli, there is no gap between an animal’s
activities and itself, only immediacy. The animal’s instinctual behavior
toward itself and the world, its specific capacity for being and
essence thus “becomes and remains proper to itself—and does so
without any so-called self-consciousness or any reflection at all,
without any relating back to itself” (Heidegger, Fundamental
Concepts 233).26
Despite such decisive claims, Heidegger occasionally
equivocates, noting it is “only from the human perspective that the
animal is poor with respect to world, yet animal being in itself is not a
deprivation of world” (Fundamental Concepts 270–271). However,
the animal’s mode of being and relationality is voided at nearly the
moment—within paragraphs—that Heidegger himself acknowledges
a failure to understand the animal’s mode of relationality on the
animal’s own terms. Setting his own uncertainty aside, Heidegger
declares that “in accordance with its essence,” “the animal behaves
within an environment [Umwelt] but never within the world [Welt]”
(Fundamental Concepts 238–239). The possibility (however limited)
of world is withdrawn all together in the following:

[I]n distinction from what we said earlier we must now

say that it is precisely because the animal in its
captivation has a relation to everything encountered
within its disinhibiting ring that it precisely does not
stand alongside man and precisely has no world.
(Fundamental Concepts 269)
Calarco has described Heidegger’s efforts as a “dead end” because
Heidegger is forced to admit that his efforts reveal not the essence of
animality and its relation to world but establish the terms of an
“anthropocentric” comparison, where “the human functions as the
measure of animal life” (Calarco 28).27
In a later work, What Is Called Thinking, Heidegger writes, “Apes,
for example, have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand”
(16).28 What Heidegger is suggesting with this enigmatic claim is that
the hand synecdochically figures a mode of being determined not by
biological or utilitarian function—“does not let itself be determined as
a bodily organ of gripping” (Derrida, “Geschlecht” 172)—but rather
one that can serve as “a figure for thought” (Wolfe, Animal Rites 63).
The particular mode of thought uniquely in possession of the as
such, and the as such, for Heidegger, is the synecdoche for the
capacity for worlding. Derrida will argue in Heidegger’s thought there
is an “abyss,” between the animal and the human, between the
grasping or “prehension” associated with the “prehensile” organs of
the ape (Derrida, Of Spirit 11) and the hand of man, which “is far
from these in an infinite way (unendlich) through the abyss of its
being. This abyss is speech and thought” (Derrida, “Geschlecht”
174). “Only a being who can speak, that is, think,” Heidegger writes,
“can have the hand and be handy (in der Handhabung) in achieving
the works of handicraft” (quoted in “Geschlecht” 174). Like the
animal, Heidegger’s the hand here is metaphysical. The empirical
hand masking and acting as an alibi for metaphysics: “The hand of
the man, of man as such, . . .” (Derrida, “Geschlecht” 183). In the
Heideggerian synecdochic chain I describe “thought of the hand, but
just as well the hand of thought, of a thought of the human” is in
essence a thesis that rests, Derrida argues, on the shaky ground of
an assured opposition of giving and taking (Derrida, “Geschlecht”
168):

[M]an’s hand gives and gives itself, gives and is given,

like thought or like what gives itself to be thought and
what we do not yet think, whereas the organ of the ape
 or of man as a simple animal, indeed as an animal
rationale, can only take hold of, grasp, lay hands on the
thing. The organ can only take hold of and manipulate
the thing insofar as, in any case, it does not have to
deal with the thing as such, does not let the thing be
what it is in essence. The organ has no access to the
essence of being [étant] as such. (Derrida,
“Geschlecht” 175)

Ironically, in thought that certainly aimed to be nonmetaphysical and

withdraw the human from biological determinism, “this traditional
statement” reinstalls “organico-biologic programs” and metaphysics
at the center of its discourse (Derrida, “Geschlecht” 173–174).
Heidegger’s “animal” relies on no zoological knowledge but rather
presupposes its object—a unitary object: the animal, for which the
ape is mere example (Derrida, “Geschlecht” 173). “Nonknowing
raised to a tranquil knowing” inscribed “not some difference but an
absolute oppositional limit” (Derrida, “Geschlecht” 173–174).
As Cary Wolfe has noted, Derrida bridles against the
reductiveness of the genre of the thesis in principle: the form of this
thesis dogmatically presupposes “that there is one thing, one
domain, one homogenous type of entity, which is called animality in
general, for which any example will do the job” (Derrida, Of Spirit
57). Also noted by Wolfe, in Derrida’s “Eating Well” and “The Animal
That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” the philosopher maintains
“the Word, logos, does violence to the heterogeneous multiplicity of
the living world by reconstituting it under the sign of identity, the as
such and in general—not ‘animals’ but ‘the animal’” (Animal Rites
66).
Ralph Acampora—after noting that most domesticated animals do,
in fact, in the context of shared forms of life with humans, treat x-as-x
whereby x’s cultural signification is understood and honored (certain
surfaces are for sleeping, certain containers are for drinking vessels,
etc.)—suggests sensitivity to metaphoric “as-ness” (even without the
ontologic “such-ness”) suffices to mark somebody as being-in-a-
world—and some/many other (nonhuman) animals are thus attuned
(Acampora 28, 29). Moreover, Acampora, stressing the importance
of socialization and acculturation to any concept of world, elaborates
further:

[T]reating x-as-x can mean thinking through x’s identity

and/or reflecting on x’s place as a being among other
beings (or against the background of Being at large).
But this would be too narrow a delimitation and tends in
the direction of excluding worldhood from all but those
whom we might call ontologicians. It seems to me that
Heidegger here is captivated by the philosopher’s
prejudice of insisting that another being must approach
the world metaphysically or ontologically in order to
exist in it (at all). (29)

Similarly, Kelly Oliver concludes:

Given Heidegger’s analysis, we might imagine that in a

sense, animals are by definition, creatures without a
conception of world; that humans are, by definition,
creatures with a conception of the world; and that these
definitions refer more to how we use the terms animal,
human, and world—to our concepts and language—
than they do to the creatures themselves. (198)

Derrida extends the stakes of these criticisms of Heideggerian

conceptualizations of animal, human, and world by arguing that in
the process of figuring capacity for worlding “man,” Heidegger links
said capacity to a certain nationalist myth of language, and in doing
so, he participates in “what deeply binds a certain humanism, a
certain nationalism, and a certain Europocentric universalism”
(Derrida, “Geschlecht” 168). Heidegger’s thesis regarding the hand
relied not on zoological knowledge but made recourse to the idea of
Geschlecht—a German word that can be translated “sex, race,
species, genus, gender, stock, family, generation or genealogy,
community” (Derrida, “Geschlecht” 162). As Derrida notes, in the
work of Heidegger’s predecessor and founding figure of German
Idealism Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the word pulled in competing
directions; on the one hand, it held nationalist connotations, and on
the other hand, Fichte’s geschlecht opened onto a supposed but still
to be constituted cosmopolitan “nonnatural but spiritual” “we” that
included in its humanism all that aspired to “spiritual freedom
engaged toward the infinity of its progress” (Derrida, “Geschlecht”
163). Fichte is a figure that links Heidegger to two of the most
influential philosophers of (self)consciousness and world, Immanuel
Kant and Georg Hegel. Fichte is an influential theorist of self-
consciousness and self-awareness, contributing the thesis-
antithesis-synthesis structure to the Hegelian tradition.
In attempting to distinguish the geschlecht of man and the animal,
Heidegger recalled, indirectly, a metaphysics predicated on the idea
of a teleological essence in “humankind,” “human species,” “human
race.” How could a supposed difference in essence among man,
animal, and stone stave off the assumption of a difference in degree
and telos, as Heidegger had hoped, when difference is cast in terms
of relative poverty? If as Heidegger suggests, “The world is always a
spiritual world”—world is of spirit and therefore metaphysical—then
his theses would appear to suggest relative degrees of spirit across
his key terms (Heidegger, Introduction 34). Or as Derrida would put
it, regarding the animal’s purported privation of “world,” “This is a
thesis which, in its median character, as clearly emphasized by
Heidegger (the animal between the stone and man), remains
fundamentally teleological and traditional, not to say dialectical”
(Derrida, Of Spirit 57). The two competing logics—degree versus
kind—merge with the thesis that animal essence is a poverty. This
confluence of competing values—lack and alterity—as we saw in the
previous chapter and further elaborated in this one, is the logic of
racially hierarchizing humanity, which crystalized in Hegel’s
conception of the African as “animal man” and as I will argue
presages that of Heidegger.
 We might press Derrida’s critique further by inquiring into the
reciprocal production of blackness and animality in Heidegger’s
thought, in particular, which can be gleaned from his defense of the
pre-Socratics in Introduction to Metaphysics. Defending the
“beginning of Western philosophy” from unflattering characterization
—namely that of primitivity—he sought to clarify that the pre-
Socratics were not merely “highgrade Hottentots” but that the origins
of the Western tradition were great even in their putative “beginning.”
Remarking, according to some ill-informed critics:

In principle, the Greeks then become a kind of

highgrade Hottentots, and compared to them modern
science represents infinite progress. Quite apart from
the particular nonsense that is involved in this
conception of the beginning of Western philosophy as
primitive, it must be said: this interpretation forgets that
the subject here is philosophy, something that belongs
among the few great things of man. Whatever is great,
however, can only have had a great beginning.
(Heidegger, Introduction 12, emphasis added)

Here the “Hottentot” is a trope, an antipodean figure, cast as

Dasein’s negative and oppositional term, signifying the limit case of
the intentional attitude or comportment, of thinking as such, and the
dimming of world.29 By recalling this quote, I not only aim to expose
the linkages of blackness and animality in Heidegger’s thought, but I
also suggest that there is perhaps an unmarked Hegelianism, a
teleological myth of world history informing Heidegger’s concept of
the Hottentot here—indeed, the term “Daesin” was used most
notably by Hegel, to refer to human existence or presence, prior to it
becoming Heidegger’s signature concept. We might well discern the
antecedent of a Heideggerian “captivation” and world privation in
Hegel’s infamous summation of the African’s lack in the following
quote:
 At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again.
For it is no historical part of the World; it has no
movement or development to exhibit . . . What we
properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of
mere nature, and which had to be presented here only
as on the threshold of the World’s History. (99)

Could Hegel’s the African be the metaphysical antecedent of

Heidegger’s the animal? And what of the African’s permanent and
unchangeable stonelike state?30 As in the case of Heidegger’s “the
animal,” in Hegel’s thought there is a familiar equivocation between
lack and alterity: Is the African fundamentally of a different order of
being or merely lacking? And if lacking an essential quality does that
then make “the African” than of a different order of existence?31 The
figure of the African, as one lacking in self-consciousness and
fixated in and by nature (or environment), was introduced in the
previous section of this chapter and extended into the subsequent
section.
We might press Derrida’s critique further still, with the help of
Glissant, by asking: How might Heidegger’s rejection of mere
grasping, in the name of worlding, relate to a “certain humanism, a
certain nationalism, and a certain Europocentric universalism” that
precisely relies on a myth of conceptual grasping, of the world as
such? Glissant contends that when considering the development of
Western imperialism—from “discovery” and territorial expansion to
anthropological ethnography—the verb to understand in the sense of
“‘to grasp’ [comprendre] has a fearsome repressive meaning” (26).
Imperial “Myth,” Glissant argues, approaches worlding via a
“grasping” that demands “Transparency” and thus interdicts opacity
—that which cannot be reduced and mastered by myth’s system of
intelligibility or is withdrawn from conceptualization itself—obscuring,
potentially even forestalling, the movement of what he terms
“Relation.” The verb “to grasp,” Glissant remarks, “contains the
movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them
back to themselves, a gesture of enclosure if not appropriation”
(192). Contra “this version of understanding,” Glissant declares, “Let
our understanding prefer the gesture of giving-on-and-with that
opens finally on totality” (192). Relation for Glissant is “an open
totality evolving upon itself” (192). Clarifying further:

That means that, thought of in this manner, it is the

principle of unity that we subtract from this idea. In
Relation the whole is not the finality of its parts: for
multiplicity in totality is totally diversity. Let us say this
again, opaquely the idea of totality alone is an obstacle
to totality. (192)

Totality, here, should be distinguished from the idea of the world.

Glissant’s totality is speculative theory that resists the lure of the
essentialisms I have just described. “Totality,” in Glissant’s work, is
the poetic force of the putative referent of the world, obliquely—
indeed, opaquely—

gesturing toward what cannot be grasped or reduced to essence. Yet

a certain idea of totality—the world as such—that presupposes
graspability and preconceives totality in the mode of transparency is
precisely what Glissant hopes to keep at a critical distance. Totality,
veiled rather than graspable, the world as such proves to be a
beguiling myth.32
I concur with Derrida’s point regarding the confounding polysemic
valences of geschlecht in Heidegger’s thought, as well as Derrida’s
contention that Heidegger’s evocation of geschlecht recalls a
German idealist myth of national literature: “ineradicable nature” and
“national imagination” (Fichte cited in Derrida, “Geschlecht” 165),
and in light of Sylvia Wynter’s argument about the roles of the novel
and speculative fiction in globality as concept and imperial practice, I
argue that a certain myth of essence and history is inaugurated and
popularized in philology and with the advent of the novelistic form
itself, whereby speculative fiction emerges as a privileged site for
interrogating this problematic.33 Namely, the entanglement of literary
form and genre with an imperialist and racially sexuating mode of
grasping, I suggest, draws black mater into the orbit of the animal
and animality into the domain of the black.
In what follows, I argue that Nalo Hopkinson’s 1998 speculative
novel Brown Girl in the Ring performs a critique that shatters the
globally hegemonic metaphysics of the world—indeed, of a world
relation—that transversally voids the black and the animal and their
respective worlding(s). I am interested in tracing how an injunction
against an avowed commonality in being, or humanity, by an
ontologizing conception of racialized gender paradoxically provides
access to an alternative—a realm of reality (commonly disqualified
and discredited by a racially exclusionary common sense), a sense-
ability that “operates or becomes manifest as an ability in the
realities from which this other realm or mode is excluded” (Scott,
Extravagant, 175). The mind-body-social nexus in Brown Girl in the
Ring indicates a reality discredited (a black[ened] reality) at once the
experience of the carceral and the apprehension of a radically
“redistributed sensorium.”34 I argue that black mater holds the
potential to transform the terms of reality and feeling, therefore
rewriting the conditions of possibility of the empirical. If, as Darieck
Scott instructs, blackness is “an embodied metaphor, the lived
representation that grants access to unlived possibilities,” I seek to
limn what vertiginous states introduce as possibility in the narrative. I
ask, if an essential feature of your existence is that the norm is not
able to take hold, what mode of being becomes available, and what
mode might you invent (120)?
 The Veil of the World
But can we escape becoming dizzy? And who can affirm that vertigo does not
haunt the whole of existence?
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

They say I am 730, say I spaz out. FB is ill, she’ll wild out. Can y’all feel my
pain? I can’t let it slide. How could I smile when I’m hurtin’ so bad inside?
—Foxy Brown, “730”

[I] comforted myself that my sense of alienation and now-heightened visibility

were not inherent to my blackness and my femaleness, but an uncomfortable
atmospheric condition afflicting everyone. But at the gyroscopic heart of me,
there was and is a deep realization that I have never left the planet earth. I
know that my feelings of exaggerated visibility and invisibility are the product of
my not being part of the larger cultural picture. I know too that the larger cultural
picture is an illusion, albeit a powerful one, concocted from a perceptual
consensus to which I am not a party; and that while these perceptions operate
as dictators of truth, they are after all merely perceptions.
—Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Hopkinson’s story focuses on three generations of black Caribbean-

Canadian “seer women” and their struggle for physical and psychic
survival in the isolated, walled-off urban center of Toronto known as
“The Burn.” The names of the women, Mami-Gros Jeanne, her
daughter Mi-Jeannne, and granddaughter Ti-Jeanne, allude to the
Derek Walcott play Ti-Jean and His Brothers, which explores the
epistemological problems wrought by slavery and colonialism,
particularly the loss of indigenous knowledge and the gap between
colonial knowledge and its applicability in the lifeworld of a colonized
person. In an exploration of similar questions, Brown Girl in the Ring
uses tropes of “African religion,” in particular spirit possession and
aspects of “double-consciousness” such as burdened “gift” and
“second sight,” to explore the modern grammar of representation
and its economies of value. In effort to limit my analysis to aspects of
the text that most serve to elucidate its implications for the
theorization of world, onto-epistemology, and representationalism at
stake in my analysis, my reading focuses primarily on the scene
when Ti-Jeanne initially experiences visions while on the streets of
The Burn.
“The Burn” is the cordoned off, economically devastated, urban
core of near-future Toronto. As gleaned from a series of newspaper
headlines the narrative provides, colonialist and environmentally
racist governmental policies underlie the city’s collapse, one crises
sets off another: the province of Ontario refuses to settle an ongoing
land-rights dispute brought by First Nations Temagami peoples, then
an international trade embargo, the Canadian government funding
cuts to the province leading to unemployment, failures of mass
transit, deadly rioting, and eventually roadblocks at the borders of
the city (Stein 216). In the aftermath of the city’s political, social, and
economic collapse and the large-scale riot that emerged in its wake,
with the city aflame and experiencing an extreme case of “white
flight,” those with the means and mobility to flee to the suburban
perimeter did so (Wood 317). Such a state of affairs might be best
read allegorically, a fictional underscoring of an insight of Rinaldo
Walcott:

A critical engagement with coloniality therefore

demands that we see the mutual imprint and the
overlap between the ‘reservation,’ the ‘housing project,’
and ‘the priority neighborhood’ (the latter is the name
given to archipelagoes of poverty in Toronto), the
project of deportation and the dispossession of people
beyond Canada’s borders. In each case the very
terminology delineates a specific if limited space, and
an out-of-place-ness for those marked as abject and
waste within the boundaries of the nation-state of
Canada. (Walcott 100)

Abandoned by public governance systems and commerce and

economically at the mercy of centrifugal forces, inner-city Toronto
has developed an alternative, informal economy based on
interdependence and care, one that is nevertheless beset by a
ruthless drug lord named Rudy. The premier of Toronto, suffering
from heart failure, had recently become aware of something the
public had not: the sudden emergence of a zoonotic virus is making
it untenable to continue the porcine organ donor program. Rather
than publicly admit the failure of the porcine program, the premier
exploits the discourse of animal rights and promotes a volunteer
program based on “people helping people” all while representatives
of the ailing leader hire Rudy and his “posse” to procure a human
heart from someone in The Burn by deadly means. Ever eager to
capitalize on the city’s decline, posse members include Crapaud,
Crack Monkey, Jay, and Tony, all characters introduced on the
streets of The Burn at the start of Ti-Jeanne’s epic quest to defeat
Rudy and his posse, but unfortunately, she is not able to do so
before they claim her grandmother’s heart for the premier.
No longer under the cover of rights and protection, and in an
attempt to expropriate what resources remain in The Burn, such
exploitative practices reveal the racialized and colonial dynamics that
undergird “volunteer” donor programs. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes
notes in Commodifying Bodies:

[C]ommercialized transplant medicine has allowed

global society to be divided into decidedly unequal
populations—organ givers and organ receivers. The
former are an invisible and discredited collection of
anonymous suppliers of spare parts; the later are
cherished patients, treated as moral subjects and as
suffering individuals. Their names and their biographies
and medical histories are known, and their proprietary
rights over the bodies and body parts of the poor, living
and dead, are virtually unquestioned. (4)

Capitalism, as Cedric Robinson teaches us, is always racial

capitalism. Despite a preoccupation with concerns of the organismic
body in the field of capital, this orientation to the problem of capitalist
mechanization of the body is one the new materialists have failed to
attend to and is the subject of the final chapter.
The analysis concerning race and animality is not as it might
appear. This is a chapter exploring neither the racial politics of
zoonosis nor a mode of capitalism that places under erasure
distinctions among black(ened) humanity, land, and animality via an
economy predicated on the racialized expropriation of life and
mereology of extraction, subjects aptly handled by thinkers such as
Nicole Shukin, Neel Ahuja, and Rachel Stein; nor is it even an
examination of how the ideal of animal rights and the humane
becomes a pretext for the ontological dislocation of black(ened)
people, a topic taken up in the previous chapters. Rather, it is about
how the idea of the world as such makes such economies of value
imaginable and hegemonic at the register of assumptive logic.35
Expropriations of the flesh are as determined by metaphysics, or the
idea of the world as such, as by capitalist logics, in truth, the
assumption of world privation facilitates the deadly mechanization of
life at the center of the text. Thus, Ti-Jeanne must open herself to
supernatural powers and counterintuitive truths that exceed her
sense of self and reality as well as challenge the coordinates of the
given world in order to confront the tragic mystery surrounding her
mother and grandmother.
When the reader is first introduced to the narrative’s protagonist,
Ti-Jeanne, we learn that “Ti-Jeanne could see with more than sight”
(Hopkinson 9). Her spectacular visions of the premature deaths of
others in The Burn threatened a total loss of self and initiated fear
“like ice in her chest” (Hopkinson 19), followed by feelings of vertigo.
Ti-Jeanne’s burdened “gift” of “second sight” opens up the question
of reality for Ti-Jeanne. “Ti-Jeanne hated the visions” (Hopkinson 9)
not only because of their at times frightening content and
overwhelming immediacy but also because no one else could see
them. They threatened her sense of self and reality.
But Ti-Jeanne was not alone in experiencing visions. Other women
in her family had the “second sight.” As the story unfolds Ti-Jeanne
learns “second sight” is a “gift,” an ability inside of debility, and she
must invent a way of being and knowing “world” that approaches this
constitutive paradox.36 Departing from Du Bois’s highly influential
formulation of double-consciousness, Ti-Jeanne’s “second sight” is
not deployed by Hopkinson in pursuit of recognition within the terms
of mimetic reality. Rather the female subject of double-
consciousness in Hopkinson’s text explores the limits of
representability itself, ultimately exchanging a bid for recognition for
an exploration of the potential enabling powers of myth. The prelude
to the narrative’s first full account of Ti-Jeanne’s prophetic yet
terrifying vision is a scene of sexual street harassment immediately
followed by a frightening encounter with her mother (Ti-Jeanne only
knows her as “blind Crazy Betty”) on the streets of The Burn while
running a simple errand for her grandmother, Mami-Gros Jeanne.
While making her way through the streets of The Burn, Ti-Jeanne
caught a glimpse of Rudy’s posse, men she was accustomed to
avoiding. Tony, a man we will come to learn is the father of the baby
she held in her arms, was among them. Pulse thumping, gaze
averted while edging past the men, Ti-Jeanne tried to appear very
interested in picking her way through the garbage-strewn sidewalk
(Hopkinson 16). A voice called out to her: “‘Hey, sister, is time we get
to know one another better, you know!’ . . . ‘Ah say,’ Crack [Monkey]
hollered, ‘is time I get to know you better!’ The men’s mocking
laughter spurred Ti-Jeanne to move faster. She hugged Baby closer
to her and scowled at Crack” (Hopkinson 16). As a vision manifests,
Ti-Jeanne is dislocated in spacetime: simultaneously taken out of
herself and pulled deeper into herself, her voice, vision, and thoughts
recede as an emergent sense takes over.
Ti-Jeanne, now immersed in “second sight,” abruptly froze, “not
trusting her eyes any longer to pick reality from fantasy” (16). She
saw before her Crack Monkey, Rudy’s “right-hand man” (Hopkinson
16), “a wasted thing, falling to the ground and gasping his last”
(Hopkinson 16). For one of the other men, Crapaud: “Metabolic
acidosis. Cirrhosis of the liver. Rum” (Hopkinson 16). The third man,
Jay, killed “running to the aid of his sweetheart” (Hopkinson 16), a
trans sex worker; her would-be attacker, a john with knife in hand,
would eventually alter course with the gutting of Jay. Interspersed
with folksongs and italicized, the shift in tense and references to
rhymes and riddles inject the narrative’s realism with the mythical
quality of time suspended or a dreamlike or magical state.
Ti-Jeanne could not see her own death; that of her child, Baby; or
that of her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Tony. She could not see the
deaths of anyone close to her; she also could not see “blind Crazy
Betty” until the woman was right in front of her, her mother’s
sightless eyes turned toward Baby exclaiming, “That is my child!
He’s mine!” (Hopkinson 17). Announcing the ambivalence that
accompanied Baby’s birth stemming from constrained
circumstances, irreducible to the sum of socioeconomic factors, for a
woman still young in age, Crazy Betty continued, “What you doin’
with my baby? You can’t make a child pretty so! You did never want
he! Give he to me!” (Hopkinson 17).37 The resonant quality of the
woman’s words sprang from the circumstance that, unbeknownst to
Ti-Jeanne, the woman was in fact her mother, Mi-Jeanne, and like
Ti-Jeanne she was a “seer woman.” The “gift” of “second sight” ran
along the maternal line, and the woman Ti-Jeanne had known as
“blind Crazy Betty,” or simply as a “bag lady,” had not benefited from
having her gift cultivated and supported by relations—psychic,
spiritual, social—that would sustain her.
For most of the narrative, Mi-Jeanne’s identity as Ti-Jeanne’s
mother is concealed by her ominous image as “blind Crazy Betty.”
Although Mi-Jeanne is presumed missing, as “blind Crazy Betty” she
recursively appears in the narrative as the specter of madness and
incommunicability. The mystery surrounding Mi-Jeanne’s identity and
the revelation of maternity is primarily relayed through the
fragmented perspective and memory of others, especially that of
Mami Gros-Jeanne and Ti-Jeanne. The precipitating events that led
to Mi-Jeanne’s disappearance are relayed through flashback and the
exchange of traumatic memories between Ti-Jeanne and Mami. Like
Ti-Jeanne, Mi-Jeanne was a seer, and like Ti-Jeanne, she refused
Mami Gros-Jeanne’s help but for different reasons. Mi-Jeanne’s
psyche was overcome by waking nightmares that presaged the
violent traumatic events of the riots. By the time Mami realized her
daughter was having visions, the enormity and intensity of the
visions had already overwhelmed Mi-Jeanne, “[a]nd the powers of
the visions had driven her mad” (48). Mami hoped that through the
cultivation of Ti-Jeanne’s “gift” of “second sight,” Ti-Jeanne might be
spared from what happened to her mother. But for that to be
possible, Ti-Jeanne would have to reimagine the nature of her
“second sight” and the coordinates of the given world. For the time
being, Ti-Jeanne rebuffed: “What I was to tell you, Mami? I don’t
want to know nothing ’bout obeah, oui” (Hopkinson 47). Mami
replied, hoping to clarify both the significance of Ti-Jeanne’s visions
and convey the urgency of Ti-Jeanne’s predicament, “Girl child, you
know better than to call it obeah. . . . Is a good thing, not a evil thing.
But child, if you don’t learn how to use it, it will use you, just like it
take your mother” (Hopkinson 47). Now afraid, Ti-Jeanne could do
nothing but stare at Mami (Hopkinson 47). In hoping that “if she
ignored the second sight, it would just go way” and dismissing her
grandmother’s teachings as “old time nonsense,” Ti-Jeanne clung to
an empirical reality ordered by a teleological mode of Reason and
Universality (Hopkinson 20, 37). But ignoring the visions was not
diminishing their unsettling power. Ti-Jeanne worried: “Mami, this
ain’t the first time I see something like this. I going mad like Mummy,
ain’t it?” (Hopkinson 46). In moments when Ti-Jeanne suspected her
own madness, memories of her mother and of the frightening
encounter with “blind Crazy Betty” alternated in her mind without Ti-
Jeanne ever realizing that her mother and “blind Crazy Betty” were
the same person.
In accordance with the modern grammar of representation, in Ti-
Jeanne’s memory, her mother inhabits a space in and as madness,
nonsense, and chaos. In other words, the black maternal figure
functions as a signifier that apportions and delimits Reason and the
Universal.38 In the aftermath of the riots, her mother became nearly
synonymous with the disorienting enormity and chaotic origin of The
Burn. For Ti-Jeanne, the riots “were mixed up in her mind with
memories of her mother lying helpless in her bed, besieged with
images of the worst of the rioting before it happened” (Hopkinson
48). Ti-Jeanne remembered that her mother had a vision back when
the riots were just starting. In the days that followed, her mother
appeared to go mad, “complaining that she was hearing voices in
her head” (Hopkinson 20). Her mother disappeared soon after the
voices had started, “run away into the craziness that Toronto had
become. She had never come back” (Hopkinson 20).39 Ti-Jeanne
worried, “Maybe it is hereditary?” This was an anxiety that
overdetermined the apprehension of both her mother and
grandmother as well as obscured the power and force of the abilities
constitutive to the disorienting debility of her own “second sight”
(Hopkinson 20).
When the visions started, Ti-Jeanne attempted, by the forces of
Will and Reason, to dis-identify with that which would potentially
sustain her and by implication elude the matrilineal mark of
foreclosure ascribed to black mater and related, racially abject
worldmaking practices. Having already dismissed what Mami was
trying to teach her as “old time nonsense,” Ti-Jeanne initially refused
to accept the disruption of common reality that her sense-ability both
performed and symbolized, even as hegemonic reality attempted to
foreclose the perception of her reality and of a shared being in a
reality such as hers—a reality that necessarily could not be held in
common; in truth, its foreclosure inaugurated the common sense
(Hopkinson 37). In the case of her mother, a sense-ability without a
spiritual (initiation and ritual practice) and social locus, Mi-Jeanne’s
psyche was in ruins. Her reality and the capacities her sense-ability
roused were foreclosed by a common sense that apprehended her
as monstrosity. Mythologized as “blind Crazy Betty,” she became an
anonymous feature of the generalized image of The Burn as
antipodean dilapidation. When the black female (maternal) figure
appears, if she appears, she appears as the work and revelation of
myth.
There were many names for what Mami, Mi-Jeanne, and Ti-
Jeanne were: “myalist, bush doctor, iyalorisha, curandera, four-eye”
(Hopkinson 218); the supposed incontrovertible “truth” of black
worldmaking as paradigmatic teratology and “nonsense” has the
racialized exchange and circulation of the derisive term “obeah” (and
related markers such as “mumbo-jumbo”) as an essential exponent.
The term “obeah” (and the lifeworld it is purported to represent) is a
recurring flashpoint for characters in the novel: a dramatic contest
over the meaning of “obeah” punctuates the narrative’s arc, making it
arguably the central conflict of the novel, one that emblematizes the
unsettled convergence of the racialization of epistemic authority and
sense perception with that of the time and place of Africa in New
World blackness under conditions of imperial Western modernity.
While Ti-Jeanne is undoubtedly the narrative’s central
consciousness, the recursive shifts in narrative perspective to that of
Mami Gros-Jeanne—as a griot figure, healer, symbol of
communalism—and the nonlinear work of time and memory function
to place pressure on or introduce irony into Ti-Jeanne’s perspective.
Exploring the caesura between the grandmother’s voice and the vital
knowledge it both possesses and is possessed by and troubling an
ocularcentric apprehension of reality that is similarly haunted by
raciality, the novel resignifies double-consciousness wherein Ti-
Jeanne’s passage between the “two worlds” and its accompanying
vertigo marks a desire for that which is anticipated but cannot be
fully brought into legibility from within the terms of the modern
grammar of representation in any form other than nonsense.40 Like
Mi-Jeanne before her, Ti-Jeanne risks her sense-ability—its
anticipatory and transformative function, which is contiguous with its
debilitating power—in an attempt to seek a place and an explanation
within a science-fictional reality wherein all phenomena can be
presumably explained within the terms of Western (scientific)
rationality.41 While Ti-Jeanne understands herself in the terms of a
Hegelian “rational” subject, both the science-fictional world she
seeks and the Hegelian (and Heideggerian) discourse that
undergirds it position her and her grandmother in the same space as
“blind Crazy Betty,” a black and bestial space of privation of reason
and world, a reality Ti-Jeanne is not yet ready to confront.
 On that street and immediately following her immersion in “second
sight,” upon looking into her mother’s face and its self-inflicted, dug-
out eyes, Ti-Jeanne saw the specter of her own (un)becoming: “The
old fear of madness made Ti-Jeanne go cold. . . . Madwoman in front
of her. Hard-eyed men just behind” (Hopkinson 17). She thought,
“But at least the men had something behind their eyes, some spark
of humanity” (Hopkinson 17). Face-to-face with dually gendered
images of social death—in the forms of her mother’s visage, which
she no longer recognizes, and the huddle of men, a site of gendered
violence’s spatial and substitutive logics—Ti-Jeanne clung to a
common reality and sense of humanity that she will eventually have
to shed in order to, however provisionally, spark life on
nonhegemonic terms and to keep her sense-ability intact. In the
interval, Ti-Jeanne chose the men’s “something” over her mother’s
seeming nothingness or, more precisely, vacuity. She attempted to
turn and run back the way she had come only to find herself
transported to a green tropical meadow, where, at the end of a
narrow, downward-curving dirt path, a figure came over the rise,
leaping and dancing up the path:

Man-like, man-tall, on long, wobbly legs look as if they

hitch on backward. Red, red all over: red eyes, red hair,
nasty, pointy red tail jooking up into the air. Face like a
grinning African mask. Only is not a mask; the lips-
them moving, and it have real teeth behind them lips,
attached to real gums. He waving a stick, and even the
stick self paint-up red, with some pick and crimson rags
hanging from the one end. Is dance he dancing on
them wobbly legs, flapping he knees in and out like if
he drunk, jabbing he stick in the air, and now I could
hear the beat he moving to, hear the words of the
chant: “Diab’-diab’! Diab’-diab’! Diab’-diab’!”
(Hopkinson 18, italics in original)
Upon opening her eyes, she found Tony standing beside her in
Roopsingh’s roti shop. “In disorientation,” Ti-Jeanne asked over a
raucous sonic mix of soca and customers yelling their orders through
aroma-filled air boasting of curry, frying oil, and stew peas with rice,
“What happened? Is where we was?” (Hopkinson 19). While Ti-
Jeanne had hoped “if she ignored the second sight, it would just go
away,” the visions overwhelmed her sense of self-willed ocularcentric
agency and thwarted her attempts at backward movement. Her
visions’ sublime vertiginous disruption of proprioception creates an
interval for Ti-Jeanne to move beyond representationalism and
Western scientific empiricism in particular. But precisely because it is
a threat to identity in the terms of “Self/World” described by Wynter
at the beginning of this chapter, she initially resists its force and
affect (“Ceremony” 46).
For Ti-Jeanne, the approach of the Jab-Jab is synonymous with
the arrival of death in the form of atavism and disordered being: the
Jab-Jab’s wobbly legs and tail portend the threat of life out of order,
a disabled life, a figure described as having a “face like a grinning
African mask” (Hopkinson 18). As observed by many scholars, “the
African mask,” a fetish of nineteenth-century anthropology, exceeds
mere representation, as the fetishized mask is perceived as the
synecdochic-embodiment of the African’s purported stonelike
atemporal opacity and disordered metaphysics more generally, such
that African masks and people are not merely correlates but appear
interchangeable.42 Whereas for Heidegger, the hand is the
synecdoche for thought, which is the synecdoche for world-making
rich in spirit, historically in the West, the fetishized mask is the
synecdoche of Hegel’s Africa or the spiritless impoverishment of
thought and world. Michelle Wallace has described the fungibility of
African (art) objects and African people in the following terms:

The fate of African art objects was not unrelated to the

fate of the human bodies also removed from Africa
under less than ideal circumstances—some of them
sold or just handed over and some of them
 kidnapped . . . The greatest difference then, between
the bodies of our ancestors and these tribal objects is
that the bodies were allowed to die (therefore enabling
us to replace them), whereas the tribal objects can
never die, given their curious half-life on the back
shelves of Western art . . . It might be useful to think of
them [museum and gallery collections] as ruins. (465,
467)43

The authorized disposability of black people that Wallace describes

with the rather truncated phrase—“allowed to die”—sits somewhat
ironically, even if not altogether unsurprisingly, next to her
observation that “African objects were salvaged for exhibition or
sale” (463) only to find a deadly synthesis in the exhibition and sale
of black people: “entire villages were sometimes shipped over to
Europe, England, and the United States and placed on display in
zoos and circuses” in the “general chaos” that accompanied the
annexation and colonization of the African continent in the late
nineteenth century (463).44 Wallace concludes, “No doubt, many of
the objects that made it either to the New World, Britain, and Europe
were probably destroyed one way or the other” (463). No doubt,
indeed. We know that the name “Venus,” practically synonymous
with the terror and pleasure of exhibiting people, does not index a
single life, but many.45
Moreover, black people’s relation to the world of objects cannot be
properly understood in the terms of what Quentin Meillassoux calls
Kantian correlationism or of the question of perceptual integrity
between subject and object, as black peoples’ fungibility with objects
is a primary function of blackness in “the” world (in the making of
“the” world) and forms an essential condition of possibility for both
Kant’s questioning of subject-object relations and the emergence of
globality as a conceptual horizon.46 So for black people it is not that
the question of perceptual integrity is not a problem for
contemplation; rather, the question of subject-object is thought in a
world that primarily annunciates blackness as the fungibility of
people and objects while steadfastly equating subjecthood with the
possession and dispossession of objects (human and nonhuman)—
objects that necessarily haunt the distorted perceptual terms of the
Kantian-subject and thought-world relationship, whereby black mater
signifies the formlessness of noise, and noise is produced as
isomorphic to black mater, reciprocally.47 Therefore, black
contemplation of the question of subject-object, including thought
that exceeds its logic, must contend with and cannot help but occur
in a context effected by the indistinction and distortion race
introduces into these very terms.48
Given Man’s historical horizon of possibility—slavery, conquest,
colonialism—the Western metaphysical matrix has race at its center
in the form of a chiasmus: the metaphysics of race (“What is the
‘reality’ of race?”) and the racialization of the question of
metaphysics (“Under whose terms will the nature of time, knowledge,
space, objecthood, being, and causality come to be defined?”). In
other words, the question of race’s reality has and continues to bear
directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of reality
itself. Though the notoriously antiblack pronouncements of exalted
figures like G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, or David Hume, for
instance, mark neither the invention of metaphysics nor its
conclusive end, the metaphysical question of race and that of the
foreclosure of black mater in particular as race’s status-organizing
principle marks an innovation in the governing terms of metaphysics,
one that would increasingly purport to resolve metaphysical
questions in terms of relative proximity to the spectral figure of “the
African female” or, more precisely, that of black mater. In probing and
radicalizing the indefinite distinction between immanence and
transcendence, their gendered and racialized prefigurement as the
staging of the black mater(nal)’s nonrepresentability, Hopkinson’s
novel challenges the terms that ground both attempts to distinguish
and combine science and fiction as well as speculation and
realism.49
What I want to stress here is that both the reigning hegemonic
conception of the human thought-world correlate as well as the idea
that ontological unification is both desirable and attainable by means
other than violence are essential onto-epistemic aspects of
antiblackness historically and contemporarily. The dominant order of
appearances and its representationalist logics are forged through
and by what Denise Ferreira da Silva has termed the “global idea of
race,” yet this onto-epistemic violence is commonly understood as
merely the proper apprehension of reality and justified on that basis.
Representationalism’s ontological propositions and effects
commonly rely on a problematic material reductionism that I argue is
secured by the idea of race in particular. The mater of racial being
and its “hieroglyphics of the flesh” have been the primary measure of
being(human) and a principal site for maintaining and extending
representationalist rationality.50 The presumed primacy and
transparency of (racial) mater is called upon to adjudicate “reality,”
“fact,” and “truth,” in general and as such. In the process,
nonrepresentationalist systems of inquiry and modes of ontology are
cast in the racialized terms of a teratology, whereby the so-called
fetish is its signal anxiety.
Simon Gikandi has described the doubleness of the fetish as “a
figure that is located at the heart of culture and ritual and yet seems
to appear to us in its perceptual nature, against reality.” Embalmed in
a paranoid discourse that mystifies their ritualized forms and
functions in the movement of West African religion and everyday life,
whether in the explicit terms of “race” or the supplementary
discourse of “culture,” African objects, and masks in particular,
appear, one could argue, as not only “against reality” but as the
foreclosing of the reality principle—in this sense, masks become
fungible or metonymic with the related signifiers of black mater.51
The mask’s frightening appearance stems from a selective, yet
lawlike, figuration of anxiety in antiblack gendered terms, regarding
“a dangerous potentiality in all perception and representation” that
“reality itself is open to construction,” such that the relation between
observable experience and external reality is one of vast potentiality
rather than determinism (Simpson 11, emphasis added).
 Indeed, the world is not as it appears. It is revealed later in the
novel that the Jab-Jab is a manifestation of Ti-Jeanne’s patron spirit
Papa Legbara or Eshu—in her consternation, she initially
misrecognized him and the helpful messages he provided.
Throughout the novel, the appearance of Eshu and possession by
Eshu is one of her greatest sources of strength for defeating the
ruthless drug lord Rudy and, more importantly, for her and her
mother’s survival (M. Coleman, 11). That her patron spirit is Eshu is
significant at the very least because the Eshu in Brown Girl is a
messenger and, like Ti-Jeanne, passes between worlds.
Nevertheless, in Ti-Jeanne’s attempt to confirm the integrity of her
own relation of form to image, she necessarily has to pass, at the
very least, through the gendered, antiblack associative links I have
just described. The image of the Jab-Jab recalls the fungibility of
African objects (masks) and people as well as the conflation of
Africa, more generally, and West African religion, in particular, with
mythic irreality and the teratological, associations that precede Ti-
Jeanne’s attempts to order her reality. It is no wonder that such
circular logics and paranoid relations would induce misapprehension
and the dread of vertigo.
In the passage above, vertigo—that sense of unhinged reality, a
communion with death and that realm which exceeds life—seems to
threaten a total loss of self as incommensurable metaphysical
frameworks and sensory maps meet. This episodic experience is
made possible by what Frank Wilderson has called a “paradigmatic
necessity,” namely that blackness is “a life constituted by
disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation”
(“Vengeance” 3). A life constituted by disorientation has as its
essential feature what Fanon diagnosed as an “aberration of
affect”—autophobia and self-aversion—an effect of realizing
selfhood in the terms of our present global hegemonic mode of the
subject: its transindividual and systemic scales of value “woven out
of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” imposes an antiblack
system of meaning and affective economy (Wynter, “1942” 45). In
global hegemonic terms, the African is cast “out of the world” and is
thus without standing in relation to the constitution of the reality
construct.52 It is not an absence of alternative metaphysical
frameworks and perceptual matrices that produces the vertigo I
describe; rather, vertigo is an effect of the inability of these
alternatives to find footing within “the world” due to ever-renewed
processes of foreclosure that take the nullification of black mater as
the horizon of the reality concept and threshold of the sensible world.
For Ti-Jeanne, “to assume a culture, to support a civilization”
under these terms is to be possessed by a metaphysics that
produces egoic and filial conflicts and disintegration as well as a
desire for “one human being who was totally dependent on her and
would never leave her” (Hopkinson 25). Within the logic of the
specific civilization in which she finds herself, within the language it
speaks and that speaks it, as a “Negro” one will find herself
biochemically altered, its physicalist correlation vertiginous (Wynter,
“Sociogenic”). In a gloss of the work of physicist David Bohm,
Wynter concludes, “Transformed meanings have led to transformed
matter, to a transformed mode of experiencing the self” (“Sociogenic”
38). Assuming the rhetorics of possession, Wynter states further:

[A]nother mode of conscious experience takes over.

This mode is one that compels her to know her body
through the terms of an always already imposed
‘historico-racial schema’; a schema that predefines her
body as an impurity to be cured, a lack, a defect, to be
amended into the ‘true’ being of whiteness.
(“Sociogenic” 41)53

Thus, sensorium and its faculties are “culturally determined through

the mediation of the socialized sense of self as well as the ‘social’
situation in which the self is placed” (Wynter, “Sociogenic” 37).
In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre describes existential
vertigo in terms that return us to the site of an ominous narrow path,
one whose feared balefulness is not understood as manifestly
figural, as in the form of a Jab Jab, but whose causality is
annunciated affectively. And yet its existential terms also recall the
racialized, gendered, and sexual conditioning of anxiety:

Vertigo announces itself through fear; I am on a narrow

path—without a guard rail—which goes along a
precipice. The precipice presents itself to me as to be
avoided; it represents a danger of death. At the same
time I conceive of a certain number of causes . . .
which can transform that threat of death into reality . . .
Through these various anticipations, I am given to
myself as a thing; I am passive in relation to these
possibilities; they come to me from without; in so far as
I am also an object in the world, subject to gravitation,
they are my possibilities. (Sartre 66)

Reading this canonical passage on existential vertigo in light of the

gendered sexual history of conquest and enslavement makes
perceptible the visceral nature of anxieties that orbit the status of
objects. Framed in essentialist terms, blackness marks a violation of
gendered and sexual norms such that race—once ontologized—
fixes blackness, regardless of “sex,” in the “feminine position” as that
passivity and stasis ascribed to objecthood and death, or objecthood
as a form of living death. In this frame, the predominant one—
blackness, womanhood, female sex, passivity, objecthood, inertia,
death, and matter—form an unbreakable chain and negative telos or
declension. For a black woman, such as Ti-Jeanne, to be “riddin by
spirits” is to be possessed by a gendered sexual redundancy, an
intensification of death in and by objecthood. Paradoxically, here
objecthood serves to feminize a womanhood considered to be of
questionable feminine standing by way of placing her being in
common under erasure; in other words, it genders black womanhood
on the register of her object status only to dispossess her gender of
the fullness of being (human). In sum, according to the ontologized,
gendered metrics described, the object’s nonbeing as blackened
status figures black womanhood a superposition or the state of
occupying two distinct and seemingly contradictory human and
object worlds simultaneously—a predicament that underwrites both
the separation of “subject” and “object” in Western ontological
discourse and exposes the impossibility of consistently keeping
these terms apart. Thus, I argue that rather than simply restore
activity to matter or militate against the charge of passivity in the
exclusive terms of defining agency by activity, an alteration of the
object’s blackened gendered status necessitates a transvaluation of
the gendered symbolics of passivity and the inoperability of its sliding
substitutions, which I will argue, in the following chapter, is modeled
in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.”
Brown Girl in the Ring is a novel that perhaps should be
understood not as a mixing of genres but rather as a performance of
their deconstruction—literary genres and those genres of the human
that apprehend black mater as the precipice of nothingness. In
posing the question of onto-epistemology at the register Hopkinson’s
text poses it, as an intervention into the modern grammar of
representation, operative dualisms—science-fiction, fact-belief,
observation-projection, realism-fantasy—are destabilized,
problematizing generic codes and conventions, their terms of
legibility and historical-national organization, and their bonds of
signification and constitutive oppositions displaced. These narrative
strategies underscore the manner with which Brown Girl in the Ring
refuses to be an “object of anthropological desire” (Ferreira da Silva,
Toward xxii). Brown Girl in the Ring’s philosophical inquiry into onto-
epistemology and perceptual reality destabilizes the ground of
“ethnographic authority” rather than invites it and deauthorizes not
only Hegel’s racial telos but also the foundational empiricism of
Franz Boas as well.54 Ferreira da Silva has shown that as a
knowledge project that addresses man as an object, Franz Boas’s
cultural anthropology tied certain bodily and mental configurations to
different global regions as Boas’s conceptualization of “the primitive
mind” sought to explain sense perception in terms of the “laws” of
“cultural development” that relied upon and extended a logic that
made globality and raciality coextensive.55
Rather than read Brown Girl in the Ring through the imperative of
anthropological translation or map its proximity to some ideal of
Western secular scientific rationality, I am most interested in the way
Yoruba and related cosmological systems function in the novel as
tropes in service to a generative critique of the racialized, gendered,
sexual fictions of ontology and subjectivity I have just described.
Diasporic practices of world-making potentially act as a mode of
redress for onto-epistemic violence to the extent that said praxes
preclude the monopolization of sense that authorizes antiblack
(Euro)modernity. Ti-Jeanne ticked them off on her fingers: “Shango,
Ogun, Osain, Shakpana, Emanjah, Oshun, Oya, and Eshu” and
would need to call upon them, the “old-time stories,” and even Crazy
Betty/Mi-Jeanne to possess and aid her in her battle with Rudy,
ultimately recovering her mother in the process (Hopkinson 204).56
Troping rather than rehearsing Yoruba religious practice, in Brown
Girl in the Ring, the invocation of the orishas does not so much act
as a guarantor of Africa as the “essential base” of New World
cosmological praxis. Rather, it marks the process of altering terms
and objects from that of “Africa” as a paranoid discourse to that of
blackness as an existential predicament such that Africa is
understood and problematized as an invention of imperial Western
modernity and its grammar of representation.57 This is a vertiginous
circuit whose vicissitudes and paradoxes must necessarily include
both the anticipation and indeterminacy of alternation between
paranoid and deliberative modes of onto-epistemology.
Awaiting neither “the science of culture” (anthropological
historicity) nor the authentication of what is or is not “Caribbean” or
“African” (“ethnographic authority”), this altered course reveals that
blackness is an existential predicament that precisely and decisively
unmoors the fictions of origin and integral (human)being. The Middle
Passage is neither place nor historical past but statelessness, a
processual (un)becoming, the (dis)continuous iterative unsettling of
origin and being, and a challenge to the question and terms of origin
writ large; therefore, it confounds rather than permits the
compensatory gestures discourses of “hybridity” and “syncretism”
offer to (racial) ontology.58
Even when it is to their great detriment, or perhaps even especially
in those instances, the novel’s characters of different racial, gender,
age, and class positionalities participate in a signifying process that
negates, rejects, misapprehends, and misnames what has already
been prefigured void. Mami-Gros Jeanne’s empiricist praxis and
interventions—her onto-epistemology—lie buried under the signifiers
of superstition and nonsense. The author’s use of dramatic irony
performs and exposes the impossibility of black mater to be either
re-presented or known in the modern grammar of dialectical
subjecthood and authority; what emerges from this narrative strategy
is not an affirmation of the positive value of either “immanence” or
“transcendence” but rather a (re)valuation of deferral, the ongoing
pursuit of a praxis that is not already determined by those terms, fails
to signify in those terms, and mutates those terms and their grammar
beyond recognition.
As the novel unfolds, Ti-Jeanne gradually relinquishes a phantasy
of the will (unified and rational, self-directed subjectivity), or
sovereignty, as the seat of agency, a phantasy perhaps all the more
beguiling because of the ways abandonment, disposability, and
segregation act to ensure life’s irresolution in The Burn, an
irresolution that extends into existence as the ever-presence of
dreadful anticipation, psychic diremption, and (dis)possession of the
flesh. Ultimately, Ti-Jeanne discovers that receptivity to and
assumption of the orishas as ontological co-constituents may not
only provide a means for survival but may offer a sense of life
beyond mere survival. Thus, Ti-Jeanne’s (dis)abling predicament, or
vertiginous state, provides Ti-Jeanne some other mode of relating
where the other is neither an agent of your aggrandizement nor of
your diminishment but the arrival of the inoperability of the binary
between the two and a suspension of relation on those terms, thus
making way for the unforeseen. Going deeper into blackness rather
than fleeing its trace, Brown Girl in the Ring is an allegory for
unsettling modes of cognition and sense-making that authorize
antiblack metaphysics, including those of Heidegger and Hegel.
Antiblack metaphysics, as foreclosure, positions the existence of
blackened reality beyond the conceptual borders of the dialectical
encounter that underwrites representationalism’s hegemonic
processes of worlding. However, the novel does not simply advocate
one representationalist schema that is presumed to be more
comprehensive or offer more accurate re-presentations of existing
entities over another; rather, it allegorizes the potential enabling
effects of disordering the hegemonic mode of reality and self–world
relation. The idea of a unitary, finite “reality” and “world” is an
imperial invention.
In Brown Girl in the Ring, Ti-Jeanne must forgo faith in the idea
that there is an all-encompassing transcendental structure—“reality,”
“the world,” “truth”—that settles matters of existence once and for all.
Instead, she measures claims to existence based on their
metaphorical resonance and ontological effects upon a world rather
than within “the world.” In ineluctable co-constitution, where self and
world are internal (but not reducible) to each other, what
arrangement of existence, modes of relationality, and agential
possibilities emerge? Rather than assume that the epistemic
purchase of inquiry into ontology resides in the measurable distance
between representation and referent, Ti-Jeanne asks instead what
worldings do particular ontological claims (dis)enable? In this
important sense, Ti-Jeanne’s reorientation to the question of world
serves as an analytic for interrogating what representationalism
claims to do.59
In conclusion, in Brown Girl in the Ring, vertigo functions as the
precipice of a new consciousness and “inchoate theoretics” (Scott,
Extravagant 64)—where “sense and non-sense have yet to be
differentiated” (Marriott, “No Lords” 522).60 Vertigo provides an
alternative to “the tyrannies of our common reality,” where positivist
knowledge is forged through epistemic coercion, expropriation, and
relations of direct domination (Scott, Extravagant 26). I have argued
that Western science and philosophy’s foundational authority and the
reproduction of the scientific matrix of classification necessitates and
is maintained by the recursive symbolic foreclosure of black mater
and dislocation of black(ened) gender, maternity, and sexuality in
hegemonic ontology or the idea of the world as such. Vertigo, here,
is a measure and means for the disordering and inoperability of a
metaphysics that takes the black mater(nal)’s nonrepresentability as
its enabling condition. In vertigo, we may limn the potential to
disarrange metaphysics via a transvaluation of (human) being and a
reconfiguration of gendered sexual embodiment by means of an
emergent sensorium. Disordering metaphysics and metaphysics
disordered: “Ti-Jeanne felt the gears slipping between the two
worlds” (Hopkinson 19). In this, Ti-Jeanne’s vertigo is both the
apprehension of unlived possibilities and the salvific irruption into
consciousness of discredited sensation, of other ways of living, other
modes of life that provide a dizzying sense of vivifying potentiality.
Figures P.1a and b. Ezrom Legae. Chicken Series (details), 1977–78.
Drawing on paper. Courtesy of South Africa National Gallery.
Figure P.2. Wangechi Mutu. Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus, 2005.
Glitter, collage, ink on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in.
Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los
Angeles.
Figure P.3. Wangechi Mutu. Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine
Tumors, 2005. Glitter, collage on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12
in. Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los
Angeles.
Figure P.4. Wangechi Mutu. Cancer of the Uterus, 2005. Glitter, collage,
fur on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi
Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
 Figure P.5. Wangechi
Mutu. Uterine Catarrh, 2005. Glitter, collage on found medical illustration
paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and
Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Figure P.6. Wangechi Mutu. Adult Female Sexual Organs, 2005. Collage,
packing tape, fur on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in.
Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los
Angeles.
Figure P.7. Wangechi Mutu. Ectopic Pregnancy, 2005. Glitter, collage, ink
on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi Mutu.
Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Figure P.8. Wangechi Mutu. Tumors of the Uterus, 2005. Collage on found
medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi Mutu.
Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Figure P.9. Wangechi Mutu. Indurated Ulcers of the Cervix, 2005. Glitter,
collage, ink on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright
Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Figure P.10. Wangechi Mutu. Fibroid Tumors of the Uterus, 2005. Collage
on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi Mutu.
Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Figure P.11. Wangechi Mutu. Primary Syphilitic Ulcers of the Cervix, 2005.
Collage, packing tape on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in.
Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los
Angeles.
Figure P.12. Wangechi Mutu. Cervical Hypertrophy, 2005. Glitter, collage,
ink on found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi
Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
 Figure P.13. Wangechi Mutu. Ovarian Cysts, 2005. Glitter, collage on
found medical illustration paper, 18 × 12 in. Copyright Wangechi Mutu.
Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Figure P.14. Haeckel, Ernst. Stem-Tree of Plants, Protists, and Animals
(1866). Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 2 vols. Georg Reimer,
1866.
 Figure P.15. Haeckel, Ernst. “Discomedusae.Scheibenquallen, 1904”
Haeckel, Ernst. “Kunstformen der Natur (1904).” Prestel, München (1998).
Figure P.16. One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack, 2004. Cut-and-
pasted printed paper with watercolor, synthetic polymer paint, and
pressure-sensitive stickers on transparentized paper, 68.5 × 42 in.
Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los
Angeles.
 3

“Not Our Own”

Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s

“Bloodchild”

Sexual reproduction is only one, and arguably not even the most predominant,
kind of reproduction that is found in nature; bacterial budding, rhizomic
replication, spore production, viral infection, symbiosis, bacterial recombination
—such reproductive models challenge not only our humanness but also (and
perhaps more profoundly) our animalness.
—Susan Squier, “Interspecies Reproduction”

Species reeks of race and sex . . .

—Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

A guiding conviction of Becoming Human is that we must attend to

the material histories of our categories, as they are given shape and
vitality by way of, and inside of, organismic bodies, even if (or
especially if) ultimately our aim is to be rid of received categories
because of their world-wrecking capacities and death-dealing
effects.1 Otherwise, we will most likely build on foundations we would
be better off destroying. If species divisions and membership have
fundamentally been a question of reproduction, whereby the scene
of birth is determinant of taxonomy, then this chapter asks: What
could be gained from the cognitive estrangement of reproduction and
birth? How might estrangement ironically facilitate contact with flesh,
a discursive hapticality, the meeting of matter and meaning, on
different terms and guided by an alternative orientation to the flesh?
What unexpected sense of freedom could be gained by passing
through possibilities just beyond the edge of the given world?
This chapter underscores the reach of antiblackness into the
nonhuman—as (anti)blackness conditions and constitutes the very
nonhuman disruption and displacement recent scholarship invites. I
discuss how racial slavery, conquest, and colonial ideas about
gender, sexuality, and “nature,” more generally, have informed
evolutionary discourses on the origin of life itself and our ideas of
cellular biology by looking at the racialized history of the theory of
symbiosis in relation to Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.” I demonstrate
that the racialized controversies and anxieties, concerning the
fortification of the sovereign body, accompanying the development of
the theory of symbiosis reveal the extent to which categories of
“race” and “species” are homologous such that antiblack and
colonialist histories have informed the very forms scientific discourse
can take.
In a reading of “Bloodchild,” I draw out a materialist conception of
the body that upends the conception of the organismic body as terra
nullius, or empty, vacant space appropriable for the Self that many
want to defend and idealize.2 “Bloodchild” reestablishes fleshly
embodied subjectivity as a multispecies processual environment
characterized not by Self-control but the transfer of control rather
than a sovereign “I.”
This chapter joins the final chapter of this book in meditating on
the possibilities of mutation. This one focuses on the mutation of
literary forms and idea(l)s of the body while the other looks to the
mutation of bodily forms and considers what mutational possibilities
reveal about the autopoesis of antiblackness as well as the scientific
and philosophic discourses concerning species.
One could argue that Octavia Butler is best conceived as a
singularity. She is a writer that invites reconsideration of how
conventional literary histories and generic categories fare when
confronted with randomness or the aleatory. I open a discussion of
Butler, genre, and tradition with an evocation of mutation, the
generative failure of transcription, as a way of suggesting that
Butler’s fiction invites reimagination of that which goes under the
heading of “African American literature.” This tradition should be
imagined not as a single vertical, linear line or chronological
teleology but as literary history’s mutation, the generation of new
forms—or even as a rhizomatic, horizontal multiplicity and dynamic
process with multiple genealogies.
Another way to approach the questions of genre and tradition
might be to think about Octavia Butler’s fiction as an asignifying
rupture.3 In other words, we should think of her fiction as a black
feminist and queer reassembly in an elsewhere and else-when of
early black speculative works such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The
Comet, Charles Chesnutt’s The Goophered Grapevine, and George
Schuyler’s Black Empire.4 I draw upon Deleuze and Guattari’s
conception of “asignifying rupture” because the emplotment of Butler
in a traditional, arborescent genealogy of African American literature
has far too often led to readings that miss too many of her thematic
concerns and interventions into both African American literature and
science fiction. And perhaps these readings especially obscure her
interventions into African American literature via the science fictional
and the unsettling of realism as a privileged mode of political
critique.5 Arguably, Robert Heinlein’s Hugo Award–winning military
science fiction novel Starship Troopers and James Tiptree Jr.’s (or
Raccoona Sheldon’s or Alice B. Sheldon’s) Nebula Award–winning
“The Screwfly Solution” are the most resonant intertexts for the short
story at the center of my analysis: “Bloodchild.”6
In my reading, “Bloodchild” is thematically linked to the African
American literary tradition not so much through its intertextual
reexamination and revision of identifiable African American literary
predecessors but in how it takes up and revises the motifs and
conventions of science fiction, offering up for examination the way
science fiction’s genre strictures are shaped by racialized, gendered,
and sexual histories of conquest, slavery, and colonialism. One of
the achievements of the African American literary tradition is that, in
the main, it has displaced the oppositional hierarchy of aesthetics
and politics, making the critique of racialization, conquest, slavery,
and colonialism central thematic preoccupations coextensive with its
artistry, creativity, and generative imagination. Indeed, it is in African
American as well as postcolonial literature that conquest, slavery,
and colonialism have persistently been revealed as determinant of
the Western literary imagination writ large. With “Bloodchild,” Butler
broadens both traditions, African American and postcolonial, by
poignantly challenging Eurocentric (andro)anthropocentricism, as
well as the imperialist dimensions of terrestrial and extrasolar
narratives of exploration, discovery, conquest, and settlement. Her
story tarries with dislocation and loss of identity not simply as defeat
or the loss of tradition but also as a processual opening to
unforeseeable, emergent modes of belonging and existence.7 I find
myself in agreement with Mathias Nilges that Butler’s novels are
“less about the value of embracing change than about the struggle
with the necessity of having to do so” and “the psychological struggle
that arises out of confrontation with change” (Nilges 1337).
Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” also horizontally extends genealogies
of feminist science fiction, which include such works as Ursula Le
Guin’s Hugo and Nebula Award–winning The Left Hand of Darkness
and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time by questioning the
Cartesian dualistic thinking that grounds gendered and sexual
colonial fantasies of subjectivity, sovereignty, and agency and
assigns social value to sexual difference, linking these feminist
concerns to queer and trans contestation of the inflexible terms
through which sexual difference is understood. Patricia Melzer has
argued that “To read science fiction in conjunction with feminist
theories can . . . foster a new and more intimate understanding of the
theories, their limits, and their co-option by dominant culture” (10). In
How Like a Leaf, Donna Haraway takes this argument one step
further with the assertion that “science fiction is political theory”
(120). Moreover, “locating feminist theory in cultural texts contests
the separations of cognitive realms, such as creativity and abstract
thought, on which the Western-defined concept of theorizing rests,”
shifting discourses away from a hierarchical structure of theory-
building and toward more open, multimodal, and interdisciplinary
approaches within feminist inquiry (Melzer 10–11). Similarly, in
Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, Wendy Gay
Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon locate the radical
potential of “queer SF” not solely in the estrangement of gender,
sexuality, and corporeality, issues commonly thought to be the sine
qua non of queer theory but more fundamentally in SF’s potential “to
think thought itself differently” or to “queer thought itself,”
“defamiliarize and denaturalize taken-for-granted constructions of
what it means to be, and to live, as human,” and to “imagine
alternative ways of living in the world as a sexual/ized subject” (3–4,
6). The result, according to Pearson, Hollinger, and Gordon, “is a
field that is coming to understand that knowledge of social systems
and ontological questions is as necessary to any conception of
alternative (future) societies as is knowledge of science and
technology per se” (7).
Critics have often underappreciated the role of ontological
questioning or speculative thought in the work of black writers,
instead favoring sociological readings of African American literature.
My particular interest, in this chapter and in this book as a whole, lies
in a question that has heretofore not been pursued: In light of a
history of antiblack raciality that has equated speciation with racial
taxonomy, how might a latent theoretical analysis and critique of
what Cary Wolfe has termed the “discourse of species” exist inside
of African American literature? The contiguity of discourses of
racialization and speciation, I argue, is a central, if not the central,
thematic preoccupation of Butler’s fiction in particular. What I hope to
show is that by reflecting on and revising the conventions of science
fiction and the fictions of science, Butler brings to light how the
science fiction genre performs in relation to the logics of conquest,
slavery, and colonialism and invites a reexamination of the role of the
biological both as a regulatory scientific discourse and fleshly archive
of the productivity of the organismic body in the (un)making of
imperial Man. Thus, the politics of subjectivation, the movement of
difference in and as speciation, matter, and materiality emerge as
persistent thematic concerns in Butler’s fiction.
Sticking with the conceptual metaphor of the asignifying rupture, it
could be argued that with Butler we see the emergence of a new
lateral shoot of black feminist and queer science fiction. It is difficult
to imagine how the work of Nnedi Okorafor, Nisi Shawl, Nalo
Hopkinson (discussed in chapter 2), and on and on would have
emerged without the queer reproduction of mutation and the
rhizomatic.
 New Worlds Old
[I]n the beginning, all the world was America.
—John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

In his log entry for November 23, 1492, Christopher Columbus

coined the term “cannibal,” a word that purported to both serve as a
descriptor of the Taino and identify the threat that they represented
(in Hulme 83–84, 86).8 As Kyla Tompkins notes, “cannibalism has
signified the total primitive otherness against which [white] Western
rationality—and its installation of the putatively ungendered and
deracinated ‘human’ as its subject—measures itself” (Racial 94).
This signifier set in motion both the ontological disfigurement of the
“Native” in the Americas and presaged the absurd constitutive
contradictions of “universal humanity,” namely human recognition
with and as racial hierarchy and violence—which is to say human
recognition with and as enslavement and colonial terror. Columbus
and his crew’s abjection of the Taíno and the Caribbean natural
environment, viscerally embodied as fear, disbelief, excitement, and
repulsion, establishes the centrality of both “the body” and
aesthetico-affective experience in “universal history.” A cultural
phantasy that extends into science fiction, the dread of antipodal
threat was and continues to be principally one concerning the
monstrous recombination of orifices and appetites that both establish
and elide the human–animal distinction that Tompkins might term
queer alimentarity—filed teeth, ferocious maw, all-devouring womb,
gaping mouth, and “toothed vaginas” (Creed 27, 28, 122).9 “The
New World” would be discovered in mythic time.10
Colonial power and its affective schema reorganize and renew
themselves through the subversion of both distinctions between
indigenous peoples and the ontologized border between the human
and the animal, Man and environment, even when these distinctions
and borders are erected under the auspices of colonial authority. Not
unlike “universal history,” science fiction’s representational strategies
are indebted to a colonial mode of aesthetico-affective-cognition.
The genre’s historical resonances and elisions commonly rely on
alternating practices of substitution, conflation, and redaction. John
Rieder, in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction,
maintains:

It is not a matter of asking whether but of determining

precisely how and to what extent the stories engage
colonialism. The work of interpreting the relation of
colonialism and science fiction really gets under way,
then, by attempting to decipher the fiction’s often
distorted and topsy-turvy references to colonialism.
Only then can one properly ask how . . . science fiction
lives and breathes in the atmosphere of colonial history
and its discourses, how it reflects or contributes to
ideological production of ideas about the shape of
history, and how it might, in varying degrees, enact a
struggle over humankind’s ability to reshape it. (3)

Thus, science fiction, as a genre, has both revealed and obscured

the erasure of histories of colonialism in the production of the fiction
of universality.
Octavia Butler’s 1984 short story “Bloodchild” evokes in order to
turn to new ends a colonial representational and affective schema.11
The colonial specter of being devoured is embedded in a
representational politic that both racializes animal appetites and
animalizes human appetites. Butler’s critical awareness of the
organismic body as a historical agent inspired the author to use her
fiction as a vehicle to ceaselessly interrogate and transform the onto-
theological asymmetry and (meta)physical violence that authorized
Columbus’s hyper-visceral encounter with the Taíno and the
incalculable primal scenes that follow its example.
I want to suggest that it is precisely the nonteleological relation of
political commitments and viscera, no doubt commonly shared, that
makes Butler’s highly evocative and highly theoretical meditation on
the discursive-material body and subjectivation in “Bloodchild” so
complex and important. For colonialism is not merely an opening up
of new possibilities, a “new world” becoming available to the “old”
one—it also provides the impetus behind “cognitive revolutions in the
biological and human sciences that reshaped European notions of its
own history and society” (Rieder 4). However, this chapter is not
merely interested in revolutions of thought but also revolutions of
being, affect, and desire; it also asks how science fiction might do
something other than “transpose and revivify colonial ideologies” by
disrupting and redirecting economies of being/feeling/knowing at a
gut level. If as Derrida suggests, metonymy is essentially (and
perhaps even inevitably) what happens at the edge of orifices, in
other words, the capture of alterity by a “sacrificial symbolic
economy” of “infinitely different modes of conception-appropriation-
assimilation of the other,” whereby the literalness or symbolicness of
the eating is ethically appositional rather than dualistic and ultimately
undecidable, the question is indeed “how for goodness sake should
one eat well?”: the question comes back to “determining the best,
most respectful, most grateful, and most giving way of relating to the
other and of relating the other to the self” (Derrida, “Eating” 114).12
Kyla Tompkins tells us, “Eating is an act through which the body
maintains the fictions of its materiality, both discursively and
biologically.” Evoking Judith Butler: eating is performative, a
“ritualized repetition . . . through which physicality and political
subjectivity coalesce in the flesh as it is ritualistically constituted
through the repetitive ingestion of materials” (Tompkins, “Everything”
206, 207). In “Bloodchild,” there is an attempt to establish another
performative, to transform ritual. This chapter concerns the practical
fact of being a feast for others as an ontological opening and ethical
problem.
Butler’s fiction persistently examined the biopolitical stakes of
colonial histories of conquest and contested colonial imaginaries and
affective economies in science fiction.13 Most frequently, this
examination took the form of a protracted investigation that parsed
different modalities of symbiosis and questioned presumed
irreconcilabilities between parasitic and mutual symbiosis, often
contemplating the promise and perils of symbiogenesis for the
evolution of the human species. Symbiosis was initially a term used
to describe people living together in a community; the term was
adopted in the 1870s by German biologists to describe a long-term
relationship between two (or more) different species to the relative
benefit or detriment of each evolutionary partner. After over a century
of debate, the theory of evolutionary association has been further
divided into four classes: mutualism (benefit for both),
commensalism (benefit for one; neutral for the other), amensalism
(costly for one; neutral for the other), parasitism (benefit for one;
costly for the other) and synnecrosis (costly for both). However, even
these distinctions struggle to account for the complexity of
evolutionary association that can shift over time. The biologist Lynn
Margulis, famous for her work on endosymbiosis (i.e., where one
evolutionary partner lives inside the other), advanced a theory called
symbiogenesis, which argues that the origin of life itself is symbiotic
and that mutual interaction, cooperation, and dependence among
organisms is as important if not more evolutionarily significant than
Darwin’s natural selection (Margulis and Sagan, Symbotic 6).
Butler offers an extended meditation on the possible forms
organismic and societal symbiosis can take in “Bloodchild” in light of
enslavement and colonial histories. In fact, the term “colonialism,”
Eric C. Brown explains in Insect Poetics, “replays one of the most
visible ways in which humans and insects have been compared:
insect ‘colonies’ take their name from the Latin verb colere, meaning
‘to cultivate,’ especially agriculturally.” This poetic Latinization of the
zoological world extends the bygone Roman Empire into the realms
of contemporary biological science and political theory (Brown,
Introduction xiv). In Butler’s fiction, and in “Bloodchild” in particular,
interspecies relations open up the question of what it means to be
(human), rather than neatly map onto intrahuman relations and
histories.
 This chapter aims to critically examine the stakes, possibilities,
and problems of trans-species metaphors at the interface of Butler’s
fiction and its criticism. To this end, I advance three related
arguments regarding Butler and “the discourse of species.” Firstly,
Butler’s fiction does not annul species distinctions; neither does it
simply abandon the category “human,” as both the establishment
and the abandonment of species distinctions have been integral to
racism and colonialism. Rather, it radicalizes and transforms the
aesthetico-affective-cognitive politics of embodied difference rather
than attempt to overcome (the movement of) differentiation. To
accomplish this, Butler exposes how received ideas about species
are always a question of power, which as Donna Haraway puts it,
“reek of race and sex” (When 18). In other words, this chapter
investigates how logics of antiblackness and colonialism have
preconditioned and prefigured the development of debates and
theories regarding the origin of life itself and across the scales of
biological discourses. Secondly, in investigating how Butler goes
about unsettling a theory of the subject and subjectivity grounded in
imperial histories of conquest, slavery, and colonialism, I conclude
her oeuvre is not an unqualified endorsement of symbiosis, as some
feminist posthumanists have claimed but rather a complex
meditation on the promise and perils of symbiogenesis, symbiosis,
and parasitism under conditions of unequal power and between
beings with radically different subjectivities and corporeal semiotic
logics. Thirdly, some readers have interpreted “Bloodchild” to be
about slavery. Rather than engage in an interpretive act that
overrides the centrality of speciated difference in the story by
substituting species for race, potentially reifying the idea that race is
speciation, instead I read “Bloodchild” as a meditation on the
possible conditions and terms of mutual adaptability,
communicability, and reciprocal responsibility across lines of
radically discontinuous speciated embodiments and sensoria.14
Science fiction is a highly metaphorical genre and has historically
been a productive site of intervention, where extrasolar narratives
analogically critique terrestrial human conflicts, and Butler’s
narratives frequently possess the explicit and metaphorical
dimensions of slavery and colonialism. Butler’s Kindred and Wild
Seed include direct comments on histories of enslavement in the
United States and Africa, and the Xenogenesis series considers the
question of colonial intrusion and settlement as well as nationalist
resistance to that process.
However, it’s worth considering what we might find if we were to
resist the anthropocentric tendency to read nonhuman
representations exclusively through the metaphorical terms of intra-
human histories. What if we read the story in light of and with an eye
for the politics of species? Rather than evacuate the nonhuman from
the narrative, might it be possible that slavery metaphors and intra-
human analogy obscure recognition of the unique form Butler’s
critique takes and why it matters? After all, the plot of “Bloodchild” as
well as its character development, symbolism, and themes are
articulated through a detailed and committed articulation of speciated
difference as it emerges in and through encounter with discontinuity.
What if it is not by analogy or metaphor but through the semio-
material production of species that the text reveals its analysis of
unequal and asymmetrical power relations?15
The emphasis in “Bloodchild” on the interspecies encounter is the
specific route through which the narrative challenges the racialized,
gendered, and expansionist conception of “the human” that
underwrites Eurocentric human exceptionalism and its fraudulent
universalism. Critics’ metaphoric readings often bypass the
difference species makes for understanding the stakes of those very
histories and undercut a fuller appreciation of the disruptive potential
of Butler’s intervention. Ultimately, it is through a critique of the
relational politics of species, rather than by recourse to the
substitutional logic of human–animal metaphor, that Butler is able to
disrupt racialized, gendered, and colonial hierarchies instituted by
what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms the “transparency” thesis,
whereby Europe’s affectability is transferred elsewhere—to other
peoples, species, and spatiotemporal environments.16 Butler imbeds
her critique of the relational politics of species in a transformative
philosophy of subjectivation and embodied subjectivity.
To the extent that the Western (literary) tradition and its critics
imagine freedom in the terms of what Ferreira da Silva calls “the
transparency thesis,” then Butler’s critical rewriting of the body and
subjectivation will continue to trouble such an imagination. According
to Ferreira da Silva, the “transparency thesis” is the idea—produced
in Western philosophy and science—of a knowing subject that is not
primarily determined by exteriority but rather determines itself. The
“transparent I” is underwritten by the privileging of the notion of
interiority over exteriority and fantasies of “self-determination” as
self-sufficiency, “the will” as self-discipline, and rationality as “self-
regulation” such that the “transparent I” defines itself in opposition to
the “affectable I” or the historical-cultural phantasy of the racial other
as outer-determination, or lacking capacities of interiority that enable
one to decide his essence and existence (Ferreira da Silva, Toward
40).17
According to Ferreira da Silva, philosophical and scientific
discourse have instituted both “transparent subjectivity,” associated
with self-determination, temporality, and interiority, and “affectable
subjectivity,” associated with outer-determination and spatiality in the
terms of a racially hierarchical universality. As Alva Gotby notes, in a
reading of spatiality in Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of
Race, transparent subjectivity becomes racially coded as white,
while affectability is located in the bodies of those who are not white
and thus seen as coming from “elsewhere” in space. The body is
then figured as a central signifier of the racial and one that is
connected to other forms of spatiality, such as nature. In
representations of race, the body can be understood as a link and
mediator between subjectivity, as “interiority,” and the world, as
“exteriority” (Gotby 8).18 As Gotby further notes, for Ferreira da Silva,
race is not simply “a negative category, and it is not a category that
works by excluding various groups from the notion of humanity.
Rather, it is a productive category, a substantive, if fragmented, set
of ideas that are instituted through implicitly or explicitly racialized
representations of modes of subjectivity” (Gotby 6). Eurocentric
human exceptionalism and imperialism render non-Western
environments, creaturely life, and peoples as simultaneously
biological threats and abject figures of affectability or outer-
determination rather than self-determination and interiority. This is a
biopolitic Butler would challenge by creating a story that disrupts its
gendered, sexual, and ontological presuppositions by rejecting three
interrelated cultural phantasies: the Self as sovereign,
(self)consciousness as “Proprietor of his own Person,” and what I am
describing as the conception of the organismic body as terra nullius,
or empty, vacant appropriable space.19
I believe “Bloodchild” is best understood as an examination of the
co-constitutive nature of embodied subjectivity and environment.
Thus, from the outset, the human organismic body is a multispecies
processual environment characterized not “by centralized fixed
control, but the transfer of control” rather than a sovereign “I”
(Oyama 186). Similarly, human history and politics are also
reimagined as a processual unfolding, where humans might not hold
the balance of power. Moreover, “Bloodchild” invites the reader to
consider the possibility that intra-human desire, affect, and unequal
relations of power are mutually imbricated in the dynamics and
processes of nonhuman bodies and worlds including those of insects
and microorganisms, such as parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi,
and bacteria. Butler asks us to consider, in a moment when we are
contemplating the apocalyptic end of the species, how might we
parse what is harmful transmutation versus what is merely different
or unrecognizable or strips one of a certain phantasy of mastery and
control?
 A Future Beyond Immunity?
The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat,
eat this or not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one
must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no
other definition of good (du bien), how for goodness sake should one eat well
(bien manger)? And what does this imply? What is eating? How is this
metonymy of introjection to be regulated? And in what respect does the
formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought?
In what respect is the question, if you will, carnivorous?
—Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well”

“Bloodchild” tells the coming-of-age story of a young man, Gan,

faced with a difficult decision. He must decide whether he will
incubate the eggs of an alien species or offer his sister in his place.
This decision is especially vexing due to the entangled history of the
two species: After fleeing from slavery and death on Earth, his
people, Terrans, have found themselves on a planet populated by an
insectoid people called Tlic.20 Initially, humans respond to the Tlic
with hostility and mass murder, killing them “as worms” (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 25). Despite direct conflict, the Tlic are now hosts for a
hostile people, and they have established the Preserve for human
settlement. The Preserve is a highly contained community; its human
occupants are restricted to its borders, and it is governed in a top-
down fashion by the Tlic.
The Tlic loosely share features with the centipede and a family of
insects called Oestridae—often referred to as a parasitic fly. Some
species grow in the flesh of mammalian hosts, others grow in the
gut. Enticed by body heat, their larvae hatch under the skin. The
ongoing growth and development of the larvae requires the flies to
feast on their hosts. If any segment is left behind, say in the process
of attempted removal, it dies and rots, introducing a bacterial
infection in the body of the host. Conversely, when left undisturbed in
the host’s body, the larvae are relatively painless and have
bacteriostatic properties, keeping wounds free of infection. The fly
typically finishes the larval part of its growth cycle in four to eighteen
weeks, upon which it will unceremoniously crawl out of the flesh and
fly away.21
The shadow of past interspecies war looms: many humans
continue to view the Tlic as an alien and oppressive species, and
many Tlic have deep ambivalence about whether they should seek
compromise with a hostile species. Nevertheless, both peoples have
something to gain from accommodating the other. The humans,
having escaped enslavement and genocide, have gained a new
livable world, and the Tlic larvae grow stronger, larger, and more
numerous when human bodies incubate their fertilized eggs.
Due to the Red Queen effect,22 where evolutionary partners’
adaptations become incompatible, the Tlic can no longer rely on
local hosts. The local animals that were once host for their eggs are
now poisoning their young, killing them before they can complete the
larval stage of development. This leaves the Tlic desperate and near
extinction. Human surrogacy enables the Tlic to be a “healthy and
thriving” people again (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 25).
Gan must decide whether hosting the eggs in exchange for a new
start on another planet is mutually symbiotic or a parasitic
compromise of his humanity. The answer to his dilemma largely
rests on the definitions of “host” and “compromise” that the two
peoples are able to effect. Both terms can imply pernicious
parasitism or, conversely, mutual accommodation or adaptation.
Historically, both peoples have committed horrific crimes against the
other. Humans, upon arrival, made an attempt at conquest but
ultimately failed. The Tlic, having discovered the benefit of human
hosts, established breeding programs, which some Tlic want to
revive, where humans would be kept as breeding stock in pens. The
“Preserve,” the tightly controlled and bordered Terran community, is
the outcome of these events.23 To complicate matters further, the
Tlic who wants to impregnate Gan is T’Gatoi. She is both the top-
ranking official that governs the Preserve and a close friend of his
mother, Lien, since childhood. T’Gatoi helped raise Gan and was
herself incubated and born from the body of Gan’s father. Indeed,
whether “host” implies one who provides what is needed and desired
or one who is parasitized will be decided based on the delicate and
subtle maneuverings of risk and accommodation in a symbiotic
relationship of unequal power and asymmetrical subjectivity: Terrans
have bio-reproductive power, and Tlic have military might. While
some feminist critics have mistakenly understood symbiosis as
incompatible with asymmetry and hierarchy, as explained above,
symbiosis does not actually imply the absence of incommensurability
and hierarchy; rather, symbiosis is a theory that considers the
different forms interdependent relations can take.24
In my view, “Bloodchild” is a meditation on the embodied mind’s
encounter with other species, particularly insects, parasites, bacteria,
fungi, protozoa, and viruses, which are the dominant forms of life
composing our world and bodies. It explores how we, at the registers
of affect, desire, and the organismic body, accommodate other
species; the story also shows how the organsmic body adapts with
and as other species. It asks: Is our embodied subjectivity a site of
accommodation and cooperation among different species, or will we
immunize ourselves from the alien, the stranger, and the unknown?
25 Embodied subjectivity is reimagined as a site of both mutual

symbiosis and struggles for dominance as well as modes of

conviviality that exceed the terms of this binary.26
In “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,”
Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber demonstrate that genomic individuality or
the “one genome/one organism” view is not only misleading but
erroneous, as “neither humans, nor any other organism, can be
regarded as individuals by anatomical criteria” and are instead
complexly holobiont or an “integrated organism” composed of host
elements and symbionts (327). They argue the prominence and
medical successes of the “germ theory of disease” has effectively
obscured the life-giving properties of microbial infections and
antagonistically cast microorganisms in general as disease-causing
“germs” and an “enemy of man” (329). Indeed, the discipline of
immunology has been called “the science of self/non-self
discrimination,” whereby the immune system is portrayed “as a
defense network against a hostile exterior world”: “In this view, the
immune system is defensive ‘weaponry,’ evolved to protect the body
against threats from pathogenic agents: worms, protists, fungi,
bacteria, and viruses. Accordingly, if it were not for the immune
system, opportunistic infections would prevail (as they do in cases of
immune deficiencies) and the organism would perish” (Klein, quoted
in Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 330). However, recent studies suggest
that an organism’s immune system is in part created by the resident
microbiome and is less a weapon and more a mediator.27 Moreover,
the authors go on to suggest that evolution likely selects not for
individuals (host or symbionts) but for holobionts. For instance, the
mitochondria suffusing every cell of the human body have their own
independent genome. Mitochondria live in the body and are essential
for such vital functions as converting food into energy (Adenosine
triphosphate or ATP), cell growth, and cell death, yet they are
genetically “nonhuman” despite being passed along the maternal
line. Moreover, within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are
estimated to outnumber human cells ten to one.28 These
communities, called microbiome, are so crucial to the cells that host
them that some have called them the “second genome.”29 Similarly,
in “Bloodchild,” skin is no longer perceived as a limit to so-called
alien or external forces but a contact zone for interspecies
encounters and accommodations characterized by risk and
compromise.
In “Bloodchild,” skin is reimagined as a two-way door to one’s
“home”: a door that can be opened inward and outward. Home is
simultaneously an edifice, a body, a planet, and a sense of belonging
to a heterogeneous whole. Gan states with respect to his sister, “We
had always been a unit, she and I” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 7). A
family inhabits a home, where family includes more than human
agencies housed by and living beyond the skin. These agencies, in
this case Gan’s—so-called biological—family members, take
different positions with respect to the Tlic generally and to the
prospect of impregnation in particular.30 Gan’s older brother Qui
believes impregnation is a repulsive and intolerable compromise of
his masculinity and identity as a human while his younger sister,
Xuan Hoa, unquestionably views it as an honor—we are to assume
as a result of an uncritical acceptance of the conflation of
womanhood with motherhood. Lien, Gan’s mother, is deeply
resentful of the terms and conditions of the Terran–Tlic partnership,
but the nature of her resentment, like resentment itself, is left
somewhat irresolute by the author. But it is implied that it is rooted in
a sense of protectiveness of Gan and an unwillingness to
compromise her sense of identity even despite an awareness of the
necessity of doing so. These characters represent different positions
one could take with respect to hospitality. Ultimately, Gan will
renegotiate the assumptive terms of compromise so that risk and
reciprocal responsibility are acknowledged rather than rejected,
stressing the value of mutual adaptation for all parties involved.
When Butler introduces T’Gatoi, we learn that she shares some
important features with Oestridae or parasitic flies: T’Gatoi “liked our
body heat and took advantage of it whenever she could” (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 3). Butler continues, “She simply came in, climbed onto
one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm”
(O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 4). The Tlic provide their host their sterile
eggs for food, which enhance vigor and prolong life, potentially even
doubling the average human life span (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 3). Tlic
eggs, like those of parasitic flies, have properties that protect the
body from disease.31 According to Gan, his father “who had never
refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he
should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have
been slowing down, he marries my mother and fathered four
children” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 3). Gan’s mother, Lien, knows at
least one of her children will be called upon by the Tlic, by T’Gatoi in
particular. She resents the terms of the relation, which she
expresses initially by refusing T’Gatoi’s offer of her sister’s sterile
eggs. Eventually, “unwillingly obedient” she swallows its contents
with an “It’s good. . . . Sometimes I forget how good it is” (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 4–5). To complicate matters further, the eggs are not
only regenerative but also a powerful narcotic. As is typical in
Butler’s fiction, “Bloodchild” presents a world that complicates its
asymmetries of power by comingling benevolence and coercion,
generosity, and self-interest.
The kinship bond uniting T’Gatoi and Gan is by no means equal
and symmetrical. The Tlic generally and T’Gatoi in particular
dominate the arena of political power. Not only is she the official that
governs the Preserve, she also protects the Terrans from the Tlic
who would just as soon parasitize humanity without providing
humans any accommodation, potentially to the point that it put their
own survival at risk yet again—a survival they had only just
recovered with the arrival of Terrans. At the very least, for this
reason, Lien demands that her children respect and take care of
T’Gatoi:

T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people

wanted more of us made available. Only she and her
political faction stood between us and the hordes who
did not understand why there was a Preserve—why
any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some
way made available to them. Or they did understand,
but in their desperation, they did not care. (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 5)

The Tlic could easily be likened to the insects, parasites, viruses,

fungi, and bacteria that challenge the very notion of human
dominance. The following exchange between Lien and T’Gatoi
implies that, as on Earth, human dominance and control should not
be assumed. Lien responds to T’Gatoi’s coercive power (albeit tacit)
over her and her children bitterly: “I should have stepped on you
when you were small enough” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 7). However,
this “old joke between them” is an empty threat between lifelong
friends and asymmetrical rivals. During Lien’s lifetime, T’Gatoi was
never small enough for Lien, or any other Terran, to step on.
Furthermore, T’Gatoi would still be young after Lien dies from old
age, despite already being three times Lien’s age (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 7). Dominion in this scene becomes an “old joke”;
conviviality and rivalry comingle.
Myra Hird has called into question the ideology of what Margulis
called “big like us,” which concerns “concentrating on creatures that
easily bear human ocular scrutiny—creatures we can see unaided
by technology as though creatures ‘big like us’ resemble the majority
of life” (The Origins of Sociable 21). Hird argues that the ideology of
“big like us” has left three million years of living organism activity in
the Proterozoic and Archean underresearched: “This effects a
double privileging of organisms as autonomous individuals and
sexual reproduction” (The Origins of Sociable 66). Hird adds,
“Perhaps we could imagine, as no doubt science fiction writers have
already, our eyes to have microscopic vision, enabling us to focus
immediately upon the microbial world unimpeded by what must then
be unfathomably oversized species. Perhaps then we might
overcome the myopia that defines our natureculture border to be
with animals” (The Origins of Sociable 21). What if human
domination is provisional, circumscribed, and contingent upon
nonhuman agencies—in other words, a ruse? Consider the following
excerpt:

[T’Gatoi] parceled us out to the desperate and sold us

to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus,
we were necessities, status symbols, and an
independent people. She oversaw the joining of
families, putting an end to the final remnants of the
earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit
impatient Tlic. . . . It was a little frightening to know that
only she stood between us and that desperation that
could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at
her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I
would remember that she too had been outside, had
seen. (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 5, emphasis added)32
His mother’s admonishment to “take care of her” qualifies both
human and Tlic agency in the story. For both Terran and Tlic, agency
would only be relational and therefore not a matter of individual
autonomy. The Tlic cannot biologically reproduce without hosts, and
this sets inescapable limits on their agency—interdependency.
Terrans, having escaped enslavement and genocide, gain a “new
livable world” that hastens them to abandon the phantasy that
identity and autonomy are the source of agency (Jacobs 91). For
Terrans, the Tlic symbolize the limit of such a phantasy: affectability.
“Bloodchild” seems to suggest that human agency is always
compromised and is always simultaneously a form of subjection on
dual registers—language and biology. Here the body is not only
subjected by the intra-human politics of culture: the “intra-human”
relation is itself the effect of trans-species encounters. Butler
challenges readers to confront the fact that the sovereign “I” and the
human body’s integrity are already breached and violable.
Naomi Jacobs notes that in the classic dystopian novel the world
is “drained” of agency—“of an individual’s capacity to choose and to
act, or a group’s capacity to influence and intervene in social
formations” (Jacobs 92). In a dystopia, the capacity “to choose” and
“to act” are undermined because the spheres of “thought” and
“action” are so severely controlled (Jacobs 92). Jacobs elaborates,
“The realm of subjectivity is such a regime’s primary locus of social
control; without a clear sense of self, a citizen of a dystopia will feel
no need to rebel, even if means of rebellion were available” (Jacobs
92). The classic dystopian text presumes that a clear sense of self is
derived from an inviolable sense of individual identity, self-definition,
and self-determination. Thus, classic dystopias speak “from and to
the humanist perspective, in which the unique, self-determining
individual is the measure of all things” (Jacobs 93). Without these
attributes one does not have a “truly human” life: “Indeed, such self-
determination is sometimes offered as a characteristic that sets
humans beings apart from (other) animals” and, I would add,
primitivized peoples (Jacobs 93). The primitive community has long
been imagined as the obverse of the sovereign individual, held to be
the bedrock of a Western civilization that has left behind the
prehistorical primitive mind and primal horde with one notable
caveat: in a recapitulation of one of anthropology’s archetypal
themes, Freud, in Group Psychology, once again casts individuality
as the mark of civilization and collectivity as the mark of primitivity.
As noted by Celia Brickman in Aboriginal Populations of the Mind:
Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis, Freud equates group mind
and the unconscious, presenting both as tantamount to the mind of
so-called primitives

out of which modern individuality is seen to have

emerged at a certain point in evolutionary history but
into which it can be resubmerged when in the presence
of a crowd. Through this identification of primitivity with
the crowd and with the unconscious, the primitive—
racially other—human is once again shown to be the
past of modern, civilized society, still present in the
unconscious as in the colonies, always threatening to
overcome modern European civilization should its
members let down their rational guard. (Brickman 94)33

In “Bloodchild,” the self-determining and self-defining subject is

“dismantled” and “demolished” (Hurley 205).34 However, rather than
lament this existential predicament or try to recuperate a spurious
notion of individuality, Butler replaces it with a radical conception of
subjectivity that sees generative possibility in relational subjectivity
and agency emerging from “these very ruptures and violations”
(Jacobs 91, 92). In effect, Butler suggests that agency can only be
exercised interdependently. In the following scene, Gan is
unexpectedly introduced to live childbirth, and his sense of his own
humanity pivots on how he interprets what he saw.
En route to a call box, a pregnant man, or N’Tlic, named Bram
Lomas accidently stumbled into Gan’s family’s lives. He had hoped
to contact T’Khotgif, the Tlic whose grubs he incubated, but
unexpectedly began the advanced stages of labor before reaching
T’Khotgif. The transition from the breeding pens of past generations
to the interspecies joining of families in the present carried with it the
stipulation that Tlic were responsible for easing the passage of their
young. T’Khotgif had the responsibility of supporting and facilitating
Lomas’s labor; she would provide an egg that would dull pain and
promote healing. Qui goes in search of T’Khotgif as Bram would
soon give birth. The grubs were releasing poison, and as they ate
their way out of their egg cases, their movement under the skin was
visible. Soon, they would begin to consume their host if birth was
delayed any further. The time between sickness and removal is a
crucial determinate of whether incubation is a lethal parasitism or a
potentially mutual, yet bloody, symbiosis—equally determinant, of
course, are the social conditions, between the two peoples, initiating
and surrounding birth. T’Gatoi immediately steps into T’Khotgif’s
role. With her stinger, T’Gatoi eases the birth as much as possible,
but despite her best efforts, the absence of T’Khotgif’s egg makes
this an unusually difficult birth. T’Gatoi recruits Gan’s help. He must
slaughter an animal, an achti, and return with its flesh so it can be
fed to the grubs in exchange for Lomas’s life. Despite being a
member of an agropastoral family, Gan had never killed an animal
and only begrudgingly shoots an achti before he returns to his living
room only to witness what he imagines is his fate as T’Gatoi
performs a surgery reminiscent of a cesarean.
The entire episode is a bloody affair. Despite having seen
drawings and diagrams of birth his entire life, Gan is unprepared for
the viscera of the live birthing scene. As he watches T’Gatoi bite
away the egg case and lick away the blood, he wonders, “Did she
like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—or die at all?” (O.
Butler, “Bloodchild” 17). Now confronted with the full potential of birth
that can lead to a painful death, Gan is no longer willing to
accommodate T’Gatoi’s larvae. What he once regarded as mutual
symbiosis, he now views as “wrong, alien”:

I had been told all my life that this was a good and
necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of
 birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was
painful and bloody, no matter what. But, this was
something else, something worse. (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 16–17)

Two events happen in succession that produce opposing feelings

about the developing human–Tlic partnership, forcing Gan to
confront the decision that awaits him. When T’Khotgif finally arrives,
her concern for Lomas, and not just her children, temporarily
restores Gan’s faith in the Tlic–human partnership. She expresses
concern about Lomas’s health, as well as her children’s well-being.
She had planned to be by Lomas’s side, despite the possibility that
her attendance might exacerbate her deteriorating health, as she is
dying from illness. Her name had been the last thing Lomas said
before he lost coherence. But Gan’s faith in interspecies partnership
was shaken once again by his brother’s admission that, while out of
sight, he had seen years before a man killed by the Tlic who had the
responsibility of caring for him during childbirth. Without an achti or
neighbors nearby, the man in his painful desperation begged for
death. Preventing him from enduring further pain, his Tlic slit his
throat. The grubs, even then, continued to eat.
Gan, now ambivalent and terrified, contemplates suicide. T’Gatoi
enters the kitchen and finds a distraught Gan. She offers
reassurance: “That was bad. You should have not seen it. It need not
be that way.” She regrets what Gan has witnessed, and she
expresses gratitude for what Lomas made possible—another
generation (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 23). Looking at her, Gan wonders
“how much I saw and understood there, and how much I only
imagined” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 23). He protests, “No one ever
asks us, You never asked me.” Initially unresponsive to his protest,
she eventually responds with a question. She asks if he used the
rifle to shoot the achti and “do you mean to use it to shoot me?” (O.
Butler, “Bloodchild” 24). His response is equally indirect: “What does
Terran blood taste like to you? . . . What are you? What are we to
you?” Initially saying nothing, T’Gatoi eventually offers an enigmatic
response: “You know me as no other does. You must decide.” When
Gan demands once again that she ask, she replies with a question:
“For my children’s lives?”35 (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 24).
This dialogue is necessarily cryptic. One of the most challenging
dimensions of the story is that it suggests communicability across
speciated worldings is possible while also foregrounding that
communication is marked by opacity: Gan and T’Gatoi’s
communicability exists outside of a shared framework of perception
and meaning yet is collaborative and reciprocal. Thus, for Gan and
T’Gatoi, shared meaning ultimately lies beyond speech despite being
unquestionably interactive. Through their relation, Butler reveals that
parasites and microorganisms mark the limit of liberal humanist
conceptions of subjectivity characterized by autonomous agency and
consent. However, does such a limit necessarily foreclose the
possibility of mutual symbiosis, or is abject parasitism the only
interpretive frame available? This is what Gan must decide.
Here is where I believe the story emphatically stresses its
deconstructive impulse with regard to liberal humanist touchstones—
sovereignty, agency, choice, diplomacy, reciprocal obligations, and
especially self-determination. For Butler, self-determination is
ultimately self-defeating, particularly when it becomes synonymous
with self-ownership, a concept in and of itself indebted to slavery.36
In attempting to demonstrate that there is an “intrinsic association”
of self and own in John Locke’s thought, Etienne Balibar in “My ‘Self’
My ‘Own’: One and the Same?” suggests Locke “appeared to have
inaugurated and actually invented a conception of individual
subjectivity that places it within the realm of consciousness and
practically identifies it . . . with the possibility of self-consciousness”
(23). Balibar argues that Locke “progressively creates or elaborates”
an equation of self and own, a metaphysical event that arises at the
semantic and syntactical level in the Second Treatise of
Government, by taking advantage of the double meanings of “my
self” and “my own;” both terms, by making them separate words,
invite them each to be read as pronouns and possessive
expressions. For instance, “my self” can be read either as “the self
that is mine, that is my own self, or simply that is my own” but also
by analogy, it self as in “its self, the self that belongs to it, that is its
own self, or that is its own” (Balibar 24). These “grammatical
subtleties,” Balibar writes, inaugurate what Crawford Brough
MacPherson has called “possessive individualism” (24).37 Such a
metaphysical fact or event rests upon the idea that consciousness is
the operator of a mental system that appropriates the self to itself,
“where ‘appropriate’ at the same time means to identify with and to
make a property, a separated or private property of, and where also
itself should be heard as it(s) self, in a mirror construction:
consciousness appropriates my self to my self” (Balibar 26–27).
Similarly, the word “own,” which is both adjective and verb, signifies
either to acknowledge or confess, as well as to possess or both,
further cementing a metaphysical fact that functionally make self and
own near equivalents, whereby the circularity of the argument places
identity and identification on one side of an equation and
appropriation and property on the other such that the two sides
continuously exchange their functions: “So what I can consider as
me, myself, is my self, and “my” self is some “thing” that I own, or
that I must own (confess) is mine, was done or thought by me, has
become my own because I appropriated it to me by doing it or
thinking it consciously” (Balibar 27).
Thus, claims to self-ownership are paradoxical in that they reject
the master’s authority but not the property relation. Such a
speculative identity casts the Self as “Proprietor of his own Person,”
ironically conscripting being to the domain of competitive markets
and proprietary claims, which naturalize the oppositional hierarchical
relations of their production and suppress the heterogeneous
agencies that shape market events.38 The social contract’s
speculative identity is, therefore, haunted by a sovereignty it
theoretically aimed to dethrone but ultimately only appropriates for its
Self.
Gan seeks reassurance that he is not simply an “animal,”
biological matter sans avowed relationality, significance, and agency
(in other words, an object [of property]) by exclaiming: “Ask me,
Gatoi . . . I don’t want to be a host animal. Not even yours . . . You
use us” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 24). T’Gatoi, somewhat reassuringly,
responds, “We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and
join our families to yours. You know you aren’t animals to us” (O.
Butler, “Bloodchild” 24). However, this answer is more indirect and
obscure than it seems. Butler’s fiction consistently exposes and
sharply criticizes the assumption of human superiority and the
exploitation that results from it: in particular, the deadening
objectification that accompanies the tropological designation of
beings as “animal.”39 T’Gatoi’s protest “You know you aren’t animals
to us” suggests that theirs is not a relation limited to unidirectional
dominance and objectification, whereby the fundamental role that the
animalized play in (re)producing the Self is denied. An essential
feature of objectification is that the relational tie itself does not even
register as a form of relationality at all. Thus, such an objectification
proceeds as if “the animal” lies outside the sphere of influence that
generates the conditions of one’s agency. Tlic need hosts for
reproduction; they are symbionts, a companion species for
humans.40 This grants humans forms of power and agency
stemming from interspecies co-evolutionary relationality, albeit
beyond a liberal humanist frame, which the Tlic are, out of necessity,
beginning to appreciate. As host “animals” began killing Tlic young
prior to the arrival of Terrans, the arrival of the Terrans was the
beginning of a new way of relating to hosts—as partners. As a result,
the Tlic have been revivified, the use of host animals has been
brought to a near standstill, and exceedingly bloody, painful births
like Lomas’s are becoming increasingly rare.
Butler’s alternative account of the “subject” and “agency” in the
interspecies evolutionary encounter exceeds consciousness and
self-determination: Gan or the human host might be an object of the
Other’s agency but in the absence of objectification; on a biological
register, beyond speech, the reproduction of the species is
dependent upon the host’s cooperation. Such a notion of “object”
beyond “objectification” places pressure on the presumed inertia
thought to cohere to “objects” because, in this case, the object—the
host—makes renewed subjectivity possible. Without the host’s
cooperation, the species’ futurity is foreclosed, and the Tlic would
return to a state of impending extinction. For the Tlic, humans do
have agency and significance; they engender Tlic that are “healthy,
and thriving.” In exchange, the Tlic, like many other nonhuman life
forms that affectively vex us, provide sanctuary—“a livable space on
a world not our own” (O. Butler, “Afterward” 32). The “not our own”
here is important. Ownership of “the world” and even of “the self” is
being outright challenged. T’Gatoi returns the charge of
objectification: “your ancestors . . . they survived because of us. We
saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried
to kill us as worms” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 25, emphasis added).41
Butler troubles the imperialist impulse that underwrites the scientific
exploration of terrestrial and extrasolar outer space and the inner
space of the organismic body simultaneously as well as the science
fiction genre such explorations inspire by disestablishing its subject.
In “Bloodchild,” human attempts at colonial settlement of an alien
planet rebound such that humans find their colonial ambitions
thwarted, and they themselves become not colonized, or in an
inverted role but located in an uncharted social position rather than
territory: partnership. Here T’Gatoi asks Gan to be accountable to
the genocidal telos humans attempted to impose on Tlic upon arrival.
This impasse is reconciled by the mutual acceptance of risk and
vulnerability that comes with interdependence and symbiosis. Gan
could have been selfish and offered his sister in his place. After all,
rather than abject T’Gatoi’s young, Xuan Hoa would be “proud” to
give birth to them. T’Gatoi assures him that she would take Xuan
Hoa as a substitute. However, Butler forcefully suggests that the
rejection of interdependent relations, even with their risk and
vulnerability, is self-destructive: When T’Gatoi asks “Would you really
rather die than bear my young, Gan?” and later if “you would have
destroyed yourself?,” questions as much existential as they are
practical, Gan responds, “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s
Qui’s ‘way.’ I wonder if he knows” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 29).
Ultimately, Gan assumes the vulnerability and risk that comes with
symbiosis out of a surprisingly emerging affection for T’Gatoi’s
affection and desire for what he had previously feared and abjected.
Gan affirms his decision to gestate T’Gatoi’s young both verbally
(“Yes”) and to himself: “Take care of her, my mother used to say.
Yes” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 29). The standalone sentence, as Laurel
Bollinger suggests, represents a full affirmation of the decision he
has made (“Placental” 334–335).42 T’Gatoi must adapt and accept
compromise as well. When T’Gatoi insists that Gan surrender his
gun (as the Tlic have outlawed human possession of guns), Gan
replies, “Leave it here! . . . if we’re not your animals, if these are
adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a
partner” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 26). Gan accepts the risk of death
involved in bearing T’Gatoi’s young in exchange for T’Gatoi’s
assumption of the risk of Terran violence, including that Terrans
could potentially kill the children implanted in their bodies.
What is significant here is not only Gan’s conscious acceptance of
risk or Gan’s negotiation of shared risk but also (and perhaps more
importantly) the revelation that mutual risk had been there all along.
The significance of this compromise lies in the revelation that
affectability and mutual vulnerability had always already been
constitutive to their relationality. Gan’s family had that gun the whole
time and would have had it whether or not it was ever brandished in
front of T’Gatoi. Mutual symbiosis can potentially become a deadly
parasitism, but symbiosis potentially carries this risk as symbiosis is
a process of “becoming with,” not a guarantee of a pregiven
arrangement. Gan learns that if he were to reject this vulnerability or
his affectability, he would become the phantasmagoric parasite
Terrans project onto Tlic. Thus, sovereignty, in the form of absolute
freedom, is a dangerous ideal as it stands in opposition to the
recognition of relationality (in this case, a relationality that crosses
boundaries of species).
In Butler’s narrative, absolute human autonomy is not presented
as a viable alternative to accommodation and adaptation. This
revision of activity as receptivity and agency as other than
sovereignty is a provocative call for a radical politics of
accommodation that challenges the forms of dominance the text
evokes, including but not limited to slavery, colonialism, and
imperialism. While this receptivity is a form of vulnerability, Butler
suggests that attempts to reject interdependence and the abilities of
adaptability are self-defeating (even self-destructive) and thwart
potentially mutually beneficial symbiosis. Butler presents a picture of
embodied subjectivity that is not unitary, wholly autonomous, and
impenetrable but is characterized by receptivity and context-
dependent agency. Both the Tlic and Terran must adapt and
accommodate the other or else face mutual extinction (Green 172).
In Gan’s case, it is an “unusual accommodation”—male pregnancy.
In Butler’s story, men share the burden of societal expectation to
bear children as well as the pain and physical risks of childbirth,
challenging the often-unquestioned presumptions of
heteropatriarchal culture. “Bloodchild” departs from the rivalrous tone
of traditional male pregnancy narratives, in which they commonly
seek to penetrate and master a female domain. Emblematized by
Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, historically, these characters have
tended to privilege the powers of procreation and disavow the pain
and burden of sexist societal expectations. In the following scene,
egg implantation is reimagined as interspecies lovemaking, when
T’Gatoi impregnates Gan:

I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to

do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the
familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then, the blind
probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless,
easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against
me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into
mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered
Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved
inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain
and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs.
When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly
ashamed.
 “I’m sorry,” I whispered. (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 28)

The queer and feminist criticism on “Bloodchild” has suggested

that it is perhaps this scene of interspecies lovemaking, rather than
the theme of male pregnancy, that more profoundly disrupts
heteronormative gender assumptions.43 Elyce Helford argues that
T’Gatoi recalls both “female and male [sexual] positions” and further
states, “T’Gatoi’s action embodies both possession of the female
egg and male penetration” (264).44 Similarly, scholars have argued
that T’Gatoi has “masculine” powers and “patriarchal authority” as
she is the official in charge of the Preserve. Some have even
suggested that in “Bloodchild,” “masculine” social power, penetration,
and ejaculation coincide in the character T’Gatoi, and, thus, the
proliferation of these “masculine” symbols inescapably point to a
male referent.
I would argue that she has masculinized powers in that she
pursues and penetrates Gan in a context where she holds the
balance of “phallocentric” power—generally imagined to be a male
domain. Furthermore, I maintain that in this scene it is species
difference rather than the drama of metaphorical exchange and
substitution that unsettles gender and sexual essentialism. For
instance, in the insect family oestridae, it is the female that scouts
the host; it is her “ovipositor” that penetrates the skin and releases
the fertilized egg into the pierced host. However, the female fly’s
ovipositor does not conform to the anthropocentric logic of
dimorphism, which problematically purports to faithfully identify
human forms and subjectivities and is problematic with respect to
insects as well.45 It is only by way of an (Euro)
(andro)anthropocentric logic of substitution that one can interpret
T’Gatoi as a “masculine” character or indexes a male referent. Such
a reading reduces the story to a simple reversal of gender and
sexual roles that can only be appraised for their success or failure to
reject patriarchal heteronormativity. Yet, T’Gatoi is neither reducible
to a metaphor for “man” nor “male penetration” as penetration is not
something only males can do, an observation her ovipositor incites.
Departing from a heteronormative anthropocentric mapping of the
organism, her ovipositor vexes the imagination and invites the reader
to reimagine the organ of sex, reproduction, and ejaculation.46 The
ovipositor unsettles the presumption of dimorphism and underscores
that signifiers such as “masculine” and “feminine” as well “female”
and “male” are other than ontological pregivens.47 Oestridae do not
adhere to heteropatriarchal presuppositions of sexuated embodiment
and sexuality.
“Bloodchild” unties reified notions of sex and reproduction in order
to knot them in an unfamiliar way in the narrative: a way that
suggests sexual difference is, to evoke Eva Hayward, dispersion
rather than binary—and I would add, troubling even the notion of sex
difference as a continuum. Such an insight underscores that sex is
superabundant with respect to reproduction. Moreover, in
“Bloodchild” reproduction is more than a biological imperative but
also encompasses suprahuman evolutionary processes and a
dynamic life history—the subject of the subsequent chapter.48 Thus,
“Bloodchild” breaches the terms of dominant logic’s tethering of
sex/gender and reproduction rather than reinforces limiting and
misleading notions of biological essentialism and determinism. Such
logics have, of course, been primary to the poesis of antiblackness
that casts black(ened) people as inverted and/or alternately
excessive and deficient vis-à-vis sex and gender.49
Similarly, Gan’s “male pregnancy” is not an exploration of the
feminine position but a feminized position—that of being subjected to
the Other. Gan is not “feminine” because his body is an incubator for
T’Gatoi’s children but rather because pregnancy is one of the more
prominent symbols of affectability and interdependence in a culture
that equates interdependence, compromise, and accommodation
with castration. And for that reason, these attributes have been
feminized and/or deemed unmanly. Like T’Gatoi, the figure of Gan
does not map neatly onto gender stereotypes.
“Bloodchild” encourages the reader to examine and challenge
common assumptions of womanhood—including the equivalence of
woman with female, feminine, biological reproduction, sexual
reception, and motherhood—through the introduction of a
nonmimetic reflection or recalcitrant analogy that emphasizes
difference as much or if not more than similarity between terms.
Here Butler reveals that “nature” does not mirror human
constructions, undercutting the solipsism that often underwrites
animal metaphors. Thus, “Bloodchild” problematizes the solipsistic
metaphorism it would appear to invite: the theme of “male
pregnancy” provides an uncanny reflection that unsettles rather than
stabilizes the anthropocentric logic of nature analogies. Indeed, as
Elizabeth Wilson notes, it is too reductive to transpose our
subjectivities and identity categories onto the nonhuman. If we
assume the nonhuman simply mimics human, cultural and social
forms, now routinely marked “queer” or “trans” for instance, then we
miss the possibility for “nature” to work on us “contrariwise, to render
those familiar human, cultural, and social forms more curious” as a
result of their affiliation with “nature,” not as “knowable through its
association with familiar human forms, but because it renders the
human, cultural and social guises of queer less familiar and more
captivated by natural and biological forces” (284).50
As Amanda Thibodeau notes, “the desire to encounter aliens is
almost always accompanied by a desire to demonstrate human
strength, ingenuity, and ambition—three traits often appropriated by
a masculine imperial ideology that penetrates unknown or virgin
frontiers,” but “Bloodchild” upends rather than inverts the
heteronormative constructions of subjectivity, empire, exploration,
and genre that rely on, to use Anne McClintock’s phrase, “imperial
thrust” (263).51 Anne McClintock has argued that British imperialism
erected a patriarchal narrative on colonized lands thought to be
“passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history,
language, and reason,” and in so doing the so-called virgin lands of
Africa, Asia, and Americas were “libidinally eroticized” (22, 31). One
of the more striking features of Butler’s scene of penetration and
impregnation is that it not only parodies and upends this relation but
also that the narrative as a whole exposes impenetrability and
inviolable masculinity as a phantasy inimical to the phenomenal
experience of Man’s embodiment. Pressed against each other,
through improvised precepts and intertwined with each other they
experience a hapticality where Gan is neither engulfed nor defeated
and as a result feels oddly ashamed that he found this provisional
togetherness so threatening.52
What is at the center of “Bloodchild” is an articulation of embodied
subjectivity that is typified by receptivity rather than mastery.
Receptivity here should not be confused with passivity. Receptivity is
the processual experience of embodied humanity—the active, but
not always conscious, process of receiving and participating in an
encounter—not the totalizing identity implied by the term “passive.”53
Thus, Butler can provide incisive, critical commentary on the
Anthropocene while also suggesting that the Anthropocene stems
significantly from a futile rejection of the fundamental receptivity of
embodied experience. Suggesting that embodiment entails
receptivity does not imply that the organismic body is inert, inactive,
or non-agential; rather, it clarifies the agency of the body by situating
the organism’s agency within an “interactive model of causality,”
which includes not only the embodied mind but also its environment
and nonhuman agencies, evolutionary history, and culture—all in a
network of relationality (Birke 22). Butler’s articulation goes beyond a
conception of the body awaiting the inscription of culture by narrating
the body as agential in the shaping of corporeal vulnerability. Biology
and culture are, to use Karen Barad’s term, agentially “intra-active”
(Barad, Meeting the Universe 210). Thus, to have a body is to be
enmeshed in a network of relations where humans are not always in
control or even conscious participants. Thereby, human agency is
not the practice of centralized fixed control but the transfer of control
(Oyama 186). Derrida has argued that “language” has served as a
kind of armature with respect to the vulnerability of embodiment, but
paradoxically, this very armature produces a second “vulnerability”
as humans are vulnerable to the caesura between language and
meaning.54 Receptivity is what links the organism to its existential
predicament.
 Butler exposes and confronts (hetero)sexist, male anxiety about
the specter of submission to the Other. Such submission often
carries with it the specter of slavery and the annihilation of the self.
Butler seems to suggest that the body’s receptivity is more
accurately viewed as an invitation to turn toward, rather than away
from, co-adaptation and improvisational identities. (Fe)male
reception need not be equated with inaction, a lack of agency, or
dispossession. “Bloodchild” diagnoses the colonial and sexual
crisscross of this anxiety, which often equates passivity with sexual
reception. That Man equates virility with impermeability in a zero-
sum game of power not only forecloses the pleasures of reception
but also mistakes accommodation for parasitism, symbiosis for
slavery, and symbiogenesis with extinction.
In this sense, social contract philosophy and scientific discourses
of symbiosis are analogues, or better yet, they co-produce fictions of
the Self that underwrite the transparency thesis in that they
establish, unquestionably, freedom (understood as mastery and self-
possession) as the privileged value over and against the black(ened)
and queerly gendered figure of the slave.55 In so doing, Kant and
Locke not only prefigure “self-possession,” “sovereignty,” and “self-
determination” as effectively property in whiteness, but Locke
equated the drive toward such a notion of freedom and simultaneous
movement away from the black(ened) figure of the slave with the
preservation of life itself: quoting Locke, “freedom from absolute,
arbitrary power is so necessary to and closely joined with a man’s
preservation that he cannot part with it but by what forfeits his
preservation and life together” (quoted in Ferreira da Silva, “Toward”
52).56 While some feminist, posthumanist critics have looked to the
scientific theory of symbiosis as a possible antidote to neo-Darwinian
depictions of “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” I argue that the
liberatory possibilities of symbiosis and its metaphoric use in
posthumanist theory must be carefully considered alongside critical
reflection on the antiblackness that has historically accompanied
developments in scientific discourse and biotechnology. Those that
accompany the theory of symbiosis include Lockean ideals of
freedom as they travel with and are extended into the realm of the
biological.
I argue that racial discourse is not simply a by-product of the
discourse of species, but rather race and species discourses are
homologous and symbiotic. To this point, even the notion of the
symbiosis of race and species I reflexively and critically deploy here
cannot fully escape the racialization embedded in the very
discursivity of symbiosis. As I will demonstrate, biologist Lynn
Margulis’s theory of symbiosis emerged against a backdrop of
hierarchical racialization, and at times her theorization, and that of
other scientists, reintroduced tenets of popular and scientific racism,
where black(ened) people are imagined as of another order than “the
human” species, even if only by implication.
One could get the impression that for pioneering biologist Lynn
Margulis bacteria are the most interesting life on Earth and that all
other life is merely an embellishment. According to Margulis and her
son, American science writer Dorion Sagan, “The creative force of
symbiosis produced eukaryotic cells from bacteria. Hence all larger
organisms—protoctists, fungi, animals, and plants—originated
symbiogenetically. But creation of novelty by symbiosis did not end
with the evolution of the earliest nucleated cells. Symbiosis still is
everywhere” (Acquiring Genomes 55–56). To put it another way,
Margulis argues that multicellular life began with the eventual fusion
of independent prokaryotic cells and microbes drawn into a symbiotic
relation, and this fusion generated the first eukaryotic or multicellular
organisms. All species, including humans, originate from symbiosis
and continue to perpetuate the symbiotic relation. For instance,
microorganisms in our stomach eat food we cannot digest in
exchange for a place to live and reproduce, and those in our
intestine emit critical vitamins (Bollinger, “Placental” 326). In Margulis
and Sagan’s view, increasingly complex life forms are the result of
intricate and multidirectional acts of association with other life forms
(Haraway, “Encounters” 112). Therefore, complexity emerges where
organisms from different taxa comingle. Bacteria disrupt our sense of
stable, recognizable taxonomy as they constantly swap genetic
material, frustrating any notion of bounded species (Haraway,
“Encounters” 112).57 An organism like the human body comprises
forms that partner with, fuse with, or parasitize other forms; this
symbiotic enmeshment then engenders ever more intricate
associations. This continual but directionless process of protracted
symbiotic association is the “engine” of biological diversity.
One consequence of this symbiosis is symbiogenesis: the
introduction of a new species that results from the merger of two
distinct species. Perhaps Margulis’s most radical argument is that
symbiogenesis likely produces evolutionary novelty; in other words,
symbiogenesis is speciation itself (Acquiring Genomes 8). Margulis
and Sagan stress that the cell rather than the genome is “the crucial
knot of structure and function in the biological world” (Haraway,
“Encounters” 114). Symbiosis, this once controversial theory, has
become biological orthodoxy.58 However, not all symbiosis is the
same, as it may be more or less mutually beneficial, or it could lead
to the absorption of one entity by another, which is termed
“endosymbiosis.” Scientists have been divided over whether or not
endosymbiosis is a form of parasitism. For those who view
endosymbiosis as parasitism, they have often rendered it analogous
to slavery, a figuration that at times explicitly recalls the historic
enslavement of black(ened) people in the Americas. From its earliest
introduction on, some biologists likened symbiogenesis to slavery, as
noted by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan:

In both merged and free-living forms, the descendants

of all four kinds of bacteria still live today. Some say the
four types are mutually enslaved, trapped in plant and
as plant. Today each of the former types of bacteria
provides clues about our ancestry. (Symbiotic 34)

When advocating for the theory of symbiogenesis (therefore arguing

against reactionary readings of Darwin), it seems to have gone
unnoticed that Margulis and Sagan also present their theory in highly
racialized terms, even occasionally referring to symbiotic cells as
“miscegenated”:

[T]he co-opting of strangers, the involvement and

infolding of others into ever more complex and
miscegenous genomes . . . The acquisition of the
reproducing other, of the microbe and genome, is no
mere sideshow. Attraction, merger, fusion,
incorporation, co-habitation, recombination—both
permanent and cyclical—and other forms of forbidden
couplings, are the main sources of Darwin’s missing
variation. (Acquiring Genomes 205, emphasis added)

Here, Margulis, in defending mutualism, actually extends, however

ironically, the slippage between race and species by relying on a
term (“miscegenation”) coined by a proslavery, prosegregationist
Civil War propaganda pamphlet, to illustrate the value of her theory
and of mutualism itself. Margulis and Sagan’s elaboration of their
theory implicitly hints at the racial anxiety and apprehension that met
the introduction of their theory while also instantiating the theory’s
long-standing historic racial logic.59 “Miscegenation” draws its
etymology from the Latin miscere “to mix” and genus “kind.” Now,
genus is a rubric that can include organisms of different species—
organisms are generally thought to be of different species if sexual
reproduction cannot produce a fertile offspring. The etymology of
genus developed in the context of an evolving conception of “race.”
In Latin, genus can mean “family, gender, type, and descent” and in
Greek genos designates “kin, stock, race.” The term “miscegenation”
was coined at a time when the country was vexed by debates
concerning the Civil War. “Miscegenation” and the specter of the
disappearance of a “distinct” “white race” was a source of anxiety for
some. The term’s origin has been tied to an anonymous antiblack
and anti-Republican political tract from 1863 called “Miscegenation:
The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American
White Man and Negro.”60 Initially attributed to the Republican Party,
the pamphlet was a hoax but was widely distributed in the US North
and South, popularizing the term (Kaplan, 273–343). Thus, the
notion of “race mixing” and “miscegenation” was a technology of
antiblack politics.61 The notion of “miscegenate” cells instantiates
what I have argued is the homology and symbiosis of “race” and
“species” and exposes how the racial politics of human sexual
reproduction has shaped scientific discourse concerning symbiosis,
including nonsexual reproduction.
Margulis and Sagan’s elaboration of symbiosis relies on the all-
too-readily available metaphor and even metonymic link between
race and species, including the one posited between animals and
black(ened) humans.62 Such affiliation has historically implied that
“miscegenation” was coterminous with zoophilia. The resultant child
born of such a union was thought to be of indeterminate racial, or
ontological, status. Indeed, in centuries prior to the Civil War, some
doubted that such a child would be fertile, hence the shared
etymology of “mule” and “mulatto.” The particular import placed on
sexual reproduction by this drama of substitution and exchange, as
discussed in the subsequent chapter, establishes black maternity as
an object of scientific scrutiny and figured black(ened) wombs as the
cause of a crisis of taxonomy. Thus, black(ened) wombs were
endowed with a peculiar kind of agency, one where the womb
sexually reproduced disorder and indeterminate taxonomical forms.
Margulis and Sagan’s “miscegenate” cells place race on the
evolutionary scene prior to the emergence of the human species and
at the introduction of (multicellular) life itself. It is curious that this
scientific discovery is couched in the language of the sideshow,
considering the “sideshow attraction” turned the conflation of
blackness and animality into an industry that drew on virtually all
branches of the life and social sciences. The fabulation of African
slaves and colonial subjects with tails and fur were the objects of
sideshow attraction.
Bacteria are racialized, even thought to be enslaved, and as
Bonnie Spanier has noted, also gendered.63 This is perhaps
unsurprising given the historical development of the theory of
symbiosis (Spanier 56). It continues to rehearse anxieties about
individualism, self-ownership, and the nature of freedom. In this
case, conceptions of the pure, bounded individual have been
tethered to ideals of the pure, bounded race. This history exposes
the manner with which antiblack slavery shapes scientific
conceptions and debates concerning the significance of symbiosis
for narratives of evolution. Because evolutionary theories are so
often framed and freighted with gendered, reproductive, and sexual
anxieties about racial slavery, this often shapes their reception and
may even delay their acceptance, as in the case of symbiosis. It is
only recently that it has been understood as fundamental to a
modern scientific viewpoint.64
Posthumanist feminism has also quite frequently exchanged
species for race, even, or perhaps especially when they have
attempted to counter spurious evolutionary claims. For instance,
Donna Haraway states in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and
Nature in the World of Modern Science, “At the end of Dawn,
[Octavia] Butler has Lilith . . . pregnant with the child of five
progenitors, who came from two species, at least three genders, two
sexes, and an indeterminate number of races . . . Butler’s fiction is
about miscegenation, not reproduction” (378–379). However, Dawn
is from a series, Xenogenesis. Xenogenesis is defined as the
production of offspring that are entirely and permanently unlike either
parent. It is a form of (re)production that produces offspring that fail
to reproduce the parents. In other words, xenogenesis is novel
speciation rather than genetic variation within a species.65
Haraway’s praise and criticism of the Xenogenesis trilogy has
shaped and continues to inform critical reception of the writer. For
instance, Cathy Peppers in her interpretation of Xenogenesis builds
on Haraway’s formulation:

Where the African-American narrative of slavery finds

its origin in miscegenation, rather than the “purity” of
the races, the cyborg narrative of human identity might
find its origin in a sociobiological determinism. But
 rather than reinforcing the story of the “pure, bounded
individual” who “evolves” through competitive “survival
of the fittest,” it finds our origins in genetic
“miscegenations”—mutations, symbiosis. Perhaps we
are “biologically determined” (“our fate is in our
genes”), but not in the ways we usually think. (52)66

In this case, fluid borders and subversion of taxonomic distinctions

affect further racialization. Thus, the subversion of binaries need not
be seen as in opposition to establishing them. Instead, both their
establishment and transgression are possible routes for the
monopolization of power as power’s subversion may very well be its
reorganization.67
Thus, raciality is not a derivation of “species” but is homologous
and contiguous with biological constructions of species and evolution
and, therefore, not simply a by-product of “speciesism” but rather an
interdependent, coterminous, co-articulator of “the animal question.”
Considering that black(ened) people have been represented
historically as the fusion of the human and animal, history would
caution us against a quixotic celebration of hybridity or the
transgression of species boundaries. The transgression and
subversion of speciated boundaries is at least as central, if not more
fundamental, to the production of animalized blackness and
blackened animality as the semblance of an absolute distinction
between human and animal. In fact, antiblackness does not require
choosing one strategy—strict boundaries or hybridity—over the
other; provisional designations, contradiction, absurdity, and
arbitrariness are antiblackness’s stock-in-trade. As I have
demonstrated throughout this book, the fields “human” and “animal”
are populated based on the ever-shifting needs of Eurocentric
(andro)anthropocentricm.
“Bloodchild” ends on a hopeful note. Gan and T’Gatoi’s
relationship suggests that mutual adaptability could potentially
transform being, including parasitism, into preservation, albeit of a
different and unexpected nature. Affirming her commitment to the
Tlic–Terran partnership and to Gan, specifically, who is now pregnant
with her children, the final words of the story are T’Gatoi’s: “I’ll take
care of you” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 29). Thus, the story ends with
what appears to be a social contract, but it is not a social contract
that rehearses the racialized and colonial terms in which freedom
and the political society have been defined in both the philosophical
and scientific discourses I have just recalled, but rather it is a
contract with affectability itself and, thus, deconstructs and displaces
these terms: a willed Self dispossession. At the end of the story, Gan
breaks with the patriarchal tendency to substitute Man’s vulnerability
by displacing it onto “woman,” namely his sister Xuan Hoa. Xuan
Hoa has been socialized to assume the physical and symbolic
vulnerabilities of childbirth and motherhood, but rather than exploit
this socialization, Gan turns toward rather than away from
affectability.68 When T’Gatoi states, in an attempt to reassure Gan,
“Terrans should be protected from seeing,” Gan “didn’t like the sound
of that” (O. Butler, “Bloodchild” 28). The physical vulnerabilities of
childbirth and sociogeny on a multispecies planet more generally
should not be cast as abject or loom as a specter; they should be
confronted outright. As Gan states, “Not protected. Shown. Shown
when we’re young kids, and shown more than once” (O. Butler,
“Bloodchild” 28–29). “Bloodchild” is a bildungsroman but perhaps not
only in the usual sense in that it tells the story of Gan’s coming of
age but also in another important and urgent sense: it may even
inspire maturation in the reader in relation to received racialized and
colonial ideas about the social contract, subjectivation, and the terms
through which freedom is imagined.
In conclusion, for Butler power is immanent to and inseparable
from “the body,” which she suggests materializes at the intersection
of biology and culture. Rather than present a unitary human body
that is the summation of discursive effects, in Butler’s fiction the body
is a contingent and mutable unfolding. With the emphasis placed on
interactivity rather than mastery, it is ineluctably affectable and
interdependent. Butler’s corpus identifies the multiple exchanges
among human and nonhuman bodies, generatively acknowledging
that humanity and nonhuman species are part of a wider pattern of
relationality and not discrete, unitary monads that preexist
interspecies exchange. While affectability is a form of vulnerability,
Butler suggests that attempts to reject interdependence are self-
defeating (even self-destructive) and thwart potentially mutually
beneficial symbiosis. As a consequence, the subject of politics is
estranged from precepts of liberal humanism predicated on the
assumption of sovereignty and self-directed agency. The political is
now the ever-expanding processual field of the relational dynamics
of life in ceaseless flux and directionless becoming.
In Butler’s narrative, absolute human autonomy is not presented
as a viable alternative to mutual accommodation. The (social) body
is reimagined as a discursive and multiscalar complex system of
bodies inside of bodies that have differential capacities, powers,
activities, and aims. Butler’s revision of human embodied subjectivity
as multispecies interactivity is a provocative call for a praxis of
being/feeling/knowing that can accommodate accommodation and
challenges the forms of dominance the texts evokes including but
not limited to slavery, conquest, colonialism, and imperialism. Such a
praxis might very well leave “the human” behind. Imagining a new
world, then, demands the reimagining of the human body.
 4

Organs of War

Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the

Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde

Is a metaphysics of race more or less serious than a naturalism or biologism of

race?
—Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit

I felt the battle lines being drawn up in my own body.

—Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

Gendered and sexual imperial discourses on “the black female body”

provided the conditions of possibility for the historical emergence of
the generic construction of “the animal”—a term elastic enough to
include humans and nonhumans. The transcultural adoption of our
current hegemonic and specifically biocentric conception of “the
human,” in its distinction from “the animal” as defined in the onto-
teleological terms of natural science and philosophy, articulated
black female abjection, in particular, as a prerequisite of human
qualification in the newly conceived globalizing terms that
occasioned “Discovery.” This history’s preoccupation with sexual
difference and maternity is often evoked by a Latin phrase: partus
sequitur ventrem (delivery follows the womb). But as I will show, this
could just as easily be evoked by contemporary racial reproductive
health inequity.
I demonstrate that racism not only posits cleavages in womanhood
such that black womanhood is made to be a gender apart, an other
gender, but also that antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-
called biological sex is modulated by “culture.” In other words, at the
registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness produces differential
biocultural effects of gender and sex. Such a frame raises the stakes
of recent feminist materialism’s inquiry into both the
inter(intra)actional relations of discursivity and materiality as well as
the gendered politics of hylomorphism, or the form-matter distinction.
Thus, antiblack formulations of gender and sexuality are actually
essential rather than subsidiary to the metaphysical figuration of
matter, objects, and animals that recent critical theory hopes to
dislodge.
The operations of racialized sexuation and maternity are essential
to what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine,” or the
recursive attempt to adjudicate, dichotomize, hierarchize, and stage
a conflict between “the human” and “the animal.” Agamben stresses
that while it is commonly and devastatingly exteriorized, this conflict
is first and foremost a conflict within Man. While Agamben fails to do
so, we might name this conflict within Man: race. Yet, the ordering of
nonhuman nature is also not reducible to a demand for racial
hierarchy, as the domination of environs and nonhuman forms of life
was a privileged expression of conquest as well. Neither “race” nor
“species” is merely symptomatic, but rather they are contiguous and
interdependent. To make matters more confusing, this abutting is
often the case at the register of semantics. As Darwin would state in
Descent of Man, “race” and “species” are virtually synonymous and
thus parsing “race’s” heteroglossia or various meanings is perhaps
only perceptible by its contextual appearances.
The final chapter of Becoming Human concerns the interrelation of
scientific and philosophical discourses of race and species as well as
continues the previous chapter’s investigation of mutation,
speculating on both its potentiality pernicious and vitalizing force by
examining figurations of the black female body in genetics,
evolutionary discourse, and works by Audre Lorde and Wangechi
Mutu. I argue that Mutu’s alternating aesthetic strategies of
exposure, allegory, and mutation articulate the potentiality for the
inoperability of biopolitical calculations of personhood and the
forestallment of antiblack economies of life. In other words, her
aesthetic strategies reveal a potential (with neither guarantee nor a
manifest horizon of possibility—but a potential, nonetheless) for
mutation beyond a mode of thought and representation that
continually adheres to predefined rules and narratives that legitimate
antiblack ordering and premature death.
It would appear that speculation regarding the (im)materiality of
genetic race has overshadowed the more fundamental (and
materially pertinent) question of how racialized environments are
embodied. Or as Clarence Gravlee succinctly notes, “The common
assertion that ‘race is not biology’ may be correct in spirit. But it is
too crude and imprecise to be effective. It does not adequately
challenge the reductionism and genetic determinism of biomedical
science or popular culture, and blinds us to the biological
consequences of race and racism as socio-cultural phenomena”
(53).1 In other words, the controversy surrounding the “reality” of
genetic race has forestalled a fuller recognition of the
biopsychological consequences and somatic materialities of
antiblack racism. An exclusive focus on the domain of DNA
undercuts what could be a fuller consideration of both the agentic
capaciousness of somatic processes and the life-and-death stakes
of that capacity.2
Sylvia Wynter would argue that this overinvestment in DNA is a
symptom of biocentrism. A purely biological definition of what it
means to be, biocentrism is undergirded by a genomic principle: that
“the human” is a purely biologically determined mode of being.
Biocentrism is characterized by Wynter as the belief that we are
“biological beings who then create culture” (“Biocentric” 361).
According to a biocentric logic, human cultural practices are
linearly determined by groups’ bio-ontological composition. “Racism,”
Wynter argues “is an effect of the biocentric conception of the
human” (“Biocentric” 364, emphasis added).3 She contrasts this
belief system’s reductive investment in DNA as substratum and
mechanistic causation with an alternative:

My proposal is that we are bioevolutionarily prepared

by means of language to inscript and autoinstitute
 ourselves in this or that modality of the human, always
in adaptive response to the ecological as well as to the
geopolitical circumstances in which we find ourselves.
(“Biocentric” 361)

Wynter has expanded upon this view, which she calls the
sociogenic principle. Sociogeny defines (human) being in a manner
that is not reducible to physical laws. In fact, said laws are
redefinable as sociogenetic or nature-culture laws because culture is
not only what humans create but also what creates human being.
However, sociogeny differs from previous and contemporaneous
theories of nature-cultures in that desire and affect play a decisive
role in the concept. Wynter argues that a “culturally imposed
symbolic belief system” serves as the internalized sanction system
that motivates behavior, biochemically affirming or negating in
dynamic relation to societal norms and values prior to any reflective
process. A species-specific opioid (reward and punishment) system
serves to induce its appropriate behaviors through the mediation of
each person’s subjective experience of what feels good and what
feels bad to and for each person (Wynter, “Sociogenic” 54). If the
organismic body delimits the human species, then the body is itself
culturally determined through the mediation of the socialized sense
of self as well as through the “social” situation in which this self is
placed. The transformation of subjective experience is culturally and,
thereby, socio-situationally determined with these determinations in
turn, serving to activate their physicalist correlates (Wynter,
“Sociogenic” 37). Thus, subjectively experienced, visceral processes
take place such that their functioning cannot be explained in terms of
only the natural sciences, of only physical laws. Alex Weheliye rightly
distinguishes Wynter’s sociogeny from sociobiology, cautioning:
“Wynter does not focus on the origins and adaptive evolution of race
itself but rather on how sociogenic principles are anchored in the
human neurochemical system, thus counteracting sociobiological
explanations of race, which retrospectively project racial categories
onto an evolutionary screen” (Weheliye 27).
 Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s famous axiom in Black Skin, White
Masks “beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny,” a
reworking of Ernst Haeckel’s theory of evolution, Wynter’s
sociogenic principle draws on Fanon’s observation that the individual
(ontogeny) does not simply emerge and unfurl via species
membership (phylogeny) in its natural scientific conception but in
dynamic relation to a sociocultural situation (sociogeny). Fanon
speaks of how the social situation, in this case, implicit knowledge of
a “historico-racial schema” (40) alters the psyche and the nervous
system’s biochemical dynamism prior to the reflectivity of
“consciousness” (“Sociogenic” 36). In the case of the human
species, the sociogenic principle is the information-encoding,
organizational principle of each culture’s criterion of being/nonbeing
that functions to artificially activate the neurochemistry of the reward
and punishment pathway as if it was instinctual, doing so in terms
needed to institute the human subject as a culture-specific and
thereby semiotically defined, if physiologically implemented, mode of
being and sense of self. In contrast to a biocentric view of the
species, Wynter argues, “We can experience ourselves as human
only through the mediation of the processes of socialization effected
by the invented tekhne or cultural technology to which we give the
name culture” (“Sociogenic” 53, emphasis added).
Wynter once stated, “For me, Black Studies is about enabling the
exit from the substitute religion ‘evolution,’ a substitute religion which
represses the fact that once language has co-evolved with the brain,
the process of evolution was followed by the Event of human auto-
institution, of autopoesis!”4 In other words, the technology that is
culture, Wynter argues, is evolutionarily significant such that with the
emergence of semantic technologies humans gained a technology
that developed the power to direct the specific terms of the nervous
system’s order of perception and categorization, harness its drives to
its now culturally defined sociogenetic own, and even override the
genetic-instinctual sense of self where necessary, activating, by their
semantic reprogramming, the opioid system (reward and
punishment) in culture-specific terms as if it were instinct. Thus,
semiosis plays a determinant role in the adaptive processes of both
culture and biology, meaning and biochemical affect. Wynter argues
that racism deploys “coercive semantic technologies” and
“systemically imposed role[s]” that reify bodies into types or
prescriptive categories, and these types and prescriptive categories,
in turn, trigger affects, sensations, and behaviors reflexly, activated
by pervasive associations that predefine and assign responsibility to
those made representative of a type (“Sociogenic” 48, 58, 42).
In this chapter, thinking with Wynter’s argument that this
choreography has evolutionary significance and against a biocentric
conception of the species, I want to push her theory of sociogeny
beyond an exclusive focus on the nervous system and problematize
the question of the “auto” of poesis by reinscripting the embodied
self as a kind of openwork produced by a lattice of agencies rather
than primarily self-authored closed system. In particular, I want to
investigate how breast systems and reproductive systems more
generally are also sociogenic. In other words, I argue that the matter
of sex itself, the very biologic stuff of sexual difference, is imprinted,
altered, and transmuted in dynamic relation to the antiblack
technologies of culture and explore antiblackness’s potential
evolutionary significance via the epigenome. In turning to the
epigenome, I query how might we register distinctions in the quality
of being, stimulated and directed by antiblack ecologies, without
reintroducing racial difference or speciation in/as racial difference
and its hierarchies.
Departing from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that
of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that
the matter of black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better
understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of
iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological,
environmental, and cultural. Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the
Different Classes of Uterine Tumors crucially reveals the stakes of
this intra-activity as it pertains to the semio-material history of “the
black female body,” reproductive function, and sex(uality) as
opposable limit and linchpin of “the human” species in scientific
taxonomies and medical science. Mutu’s art provides insightful
commentary on systematicity in general, but for our purposes, it is
notable for its constructive reorientation of the theorization of race
via a reflexive methodological practice of collage, one that reframes
the spectatorial encounter from that of a determinate, Kantian, linear,
teleological drama of subjects and objects to that of interactive
processes and indeterminate feedback loops. Thus, this is not a
study of a reified object but of an interactional field that includes
material objects but is not limited to them. Moreover, I assume
diverse (im)material agencies and affectivity without pretending to
exhaust causality.
While Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors
presents an art object for interpretation, the nature of that object may
perhaps surprise because, as I will demonstrate, the object is tripled,
interactional, and chiasmatic—a material and immaterial interactant.
In other words, the material object is offered for interpretation but so
is the process of interpretation itself—hence, the art object is best
conceived neither solely in its material existence nor in the
actualization of symbolic interpretation but rather in the chiasmatic
and seemingly infinite interactive meeting of matter and systems of
representation in the semio-affective field of visuality. The collagist
work(s) might thus be described as mise-en-abyme. Like Histology,
this study is equally concerned with the material object, its
corresponding “politics of representation,” and the very process that
produces the material object as both an effect of discourse and an
actant that exceeds and perturbs the operability—cognition and
affective resonance—of the governing system of representation.5
After opening with a consideration of Mutu’s work, this chapter
turns to Audre Lorde’s insights to achieve a fuller appreciation of
Mutu’s artistic practice. Lorde’s The Cancer Journals was one of the
first critical treatments of female reproductive cancers to put forth an
understanding of the body as an emergent and discursive-material
inter(intra)actional system and to emphasize that semio-affective-
psychic relations are crucial determinants of physiological
processes. The disjunctive co-presence of Mutu’s provocative
exploration of the possible social determinants of reproductive illness
with its converse, our difficulty in speaking about racialized disease
frequencies without naturalizing them (in the terms of speciated
difference, however convoluted, or portraying them as inevitable)
invites a reevaluation of Lorde’s contention in The Cancer Journals
that carcinogenesis is a feedback loop encompassing biological,
psychological, environmental, and cultural efficacies. Therefore it is
neither a matter of individualized disease nor inferior biology but
rather a somaticization of politics. Lorde’s work is edifying for our
thinking in that she was able to broaden our conception of politics—
and by politics, I mean war—to include gross health-related
inequities in mortality and debility while also noting that the frame of
war resides both within and beyond the subjectivist domain. Perhaps
most crucially, Lorde theorizes nonsubjectivist modalities of agency
without losing the acuity of her critique of the social power
differentials endemic to war’s exercise. These aspects of her
critique, I will argue, are instructive for reframing and expanding our
understanding of the parameters, operations, and stakes of
necropower for the theorization of sex-gender and natality and vice
versa.
In the pages that follow, I intend to investigate how Lorde’s Cancer
Journals and Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine
Tumors elucidate antiblackness as it pertains to at least three
interrelated systems—biology, temporality, and semiosis—and are
generative for clarifying the complex nature of their mutual
production. First, specifically in light of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema
Naturae and Ernst Haeckel’s iconicity as an artist as well as an
architect of the science of species, Mutu’s art exposes how the
performative epistemological mechanisms of both classical
aesthetics and biocentric, scientific taxonomical systems and the
limits therein are problematized and (op)posed by objects
themselves, human and nonhuman alike. As shown across the
chapters of this book, “species” and “race” have never been fully
disaggregated. In fact, logics of race are determinate of logics of
species, and ecologies of antiblackness shape epistemologies of
scientific thought and their taxonomies that purport to divide human
from animal. In what follows, the line dividing Man from animal is
blurred such that the plasticity of un/gendered black(female)ness
permits objects to converge and/or be substituted across received
orders of animacy and species. With Mutu, there is a working
through that repeats this movement but with a critical difference.
Employing aesthetic strategies of exposure and allegory, Mutu
mutates these system’s received logics and aesthetic hierarchies.
Racism is an aesthetics and a politics of aesthetics. It debilitates and
seeks to transmogrify and produce blackness as grotesque: the
material embodiment of abeauty. And, thus, racism targets the
beauty of blackness. What Mutu and Lorde are invested in is a
counterclaim of beauty in what would otherwise be perceived as
antithetical to beauty: the grotesque. Second, Mutu unflinchingly
exposes both the racialization of female reproductive systems in the
field of representation and the embodied systemic inequities that
have materialized as a consequence through the unique prism of
female reproductive disease including its perhaps most devastating
form—cancer. If the body remains purely a discursive abstraction,
we potentially lose our ability to gauge the consequences of racism
for the organismic body. Histology, ironically, abstracts from the flesh
only to return us to it anew, such that we may limn the stealth
anatomical pathways of terror made mundane and interpret
quotidian violence’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh” that would otherwise
remain undecipherable. Third, Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and
Mutu’s art are productive for reconceptualizing antiblackness as the
processual unfolding of an iterative and inter(intra)active system
without a predetermined terminus, encompassing human and
nonhuman agencies.
I contend that while antiblackness is terrifyingly persistent and
ongoing as a system, antiblack racism and its (somatic) effects
nevertheless unfold processually, bearing the capacity to take form
as “event” and within the ontological expanse of “emergence” rather
than reflect a passive “legacy” emanating from a reified foundation or
immutable structure.6 An event is primarily identifiable by its effects,
which cannot be precisely known in advance but rather emerge in
time, in the making of time. Whether be it the extraordinary that
retroactively introduces its causes or that which nonspectacularly
organizes possibilities, an event disrupts a progressivist realization
of possibility and creates new possibilities by changing or displacing
the limit between possibility and impossibility. To put it another way,
my precise interest concerns the restoration of event to history, how
antiblack conditions of possibility are shaped by emergent contexts,
and how this process occurs within the fold of the iterative assembly
of semiotic, environmental, and biological systems, both antiblack
and radically ahuman, in a manner that is nondeterministic in its
teleology.
I close both this chapter and this book with a coda that considers
recent developments in the biological sciences and biotechnology
that have turned their attention to narrating the problem of “racial
health disparity” in reproductive health. This work on the epigenome,
mostly housed in the regulatory sciences—epidemiology and public
health—possesses contradictory potential and thus uncertain
possibilities with respect to (dis)articulating the antiblack logics that
have conditioned the symbiosis of racialized teleological determinism
and evolutionary thought (whereby a developmental conception of
“the human” is only one of its most obvious instantiations).
 Genealogical Mutations
Kenyan-born, Brooklyn-based Wangechi Mutu is known for her
mixed-media collages featuring ink and paper drawings or watercolor
paintings of gelatinous black female figures. Mutu’s works are set in
fecund, imagined landscapes, exploring postcolonial paradoxes and
technological possibilities. In the case of Histology, her work
investigates black women’s alienation in US-based globalizing
circuits of media and representation. Mutu’s technique of collage—
the alternation of discordant juxtapositions with seamless transitory
states—catalyzes the irresolute becoming of what Deleuze calls
assemblage.7 Mutu’s collages invite viewers to reflect on their
aesthetic judgments as the perceived harmony or discordance of
elements is undergirded by historically situated taxonomies and
typologies (often scientific). More to the point, Mutu’s collages reveal
the extent to which Western science and visual art share and
mutually constitute what is a racialized, gendered, and sexualized
imperial economy of aesthetics, desire, and affect.
In Histology, three traditions of photography are juxtaposed—
ethnography, pornography, and fashion—highlighting their homology,
bespeaking their commonalities, mutual constitution, and tangled
roots. Here, popular scientific magazines such as National
Geographic are implicated in the fetishistic voyeurism of
pornographic magazines such as Black Tail, which are nevertheless
rather arbitrarily divided on newsstands in accordance with the
ritualistic enactment of genre.8 As Amber Musser reminds us in
Sensual Excess, “the scientific/pornographic gaze’s desire” is that of
“visual knowledge as ‘truth’” (49). The inclusive slash linking
“pornographic” and “scientific” echoes a confluence of desire for
what Glissant critically refers to as “transparency” and Musser,
elsewhere, calls “flatness,” whereby black female figures function as
“a homogenous signifier of the flesh” (Sensational 155). Not unlike
the surgical glove, the plastic wrap that sheathes pornography
attempts to regulate touch and the presumed contaminations therein.
But the plastic wrap is rather belated even hypocritical, a sleight of
hand that seeks to mystify an intertextual sexual cross-pollination
that has already occurred, promiscuous and still flourishing in these
genres’ tracing, cutting, and pasting of forms. Alessandra Raengo
notes that the use of materials such as rabbit fur in works like
Histology act as a materialization of desire for a tactile encounter
with porno/ethnographic figures “that was already present, but also
disavowed, in the glossy aesthetics of the female figure of
pornography or advertising. Yet, as much as Mutu’s surfaces are
seductively glossy, they are also exceptionally moist: splattered with
blood and other bodily fluids coming from improbable places and
received with improbable pleasure by the subjects in the works
themselves” (Raengo 79).
In Histology, a proliferation of provocative visual phrases suggests
the generic promiscuity I have just described. A squatting leg
becomes a nose, a stereotypic pose grafted onto a stereotyped
feature; parted legs and the triple play of bush—coiffure, pubic, and
wild, uncultivated territory in black glittery opalescence (Figure P.3,
P.5, P.7, P.9, P.10, P.12). Black, no longer mythologized as white’s
opposite—absence; here, black is dichroic, an anamorphic
abundance of color (Figure P.4). The black glittered hair situates the
full spectrum of color as constitutive to blackness rather than
emblematizing a pregiven yet visualizable cut in the human.
Cephalopod and serpentine forms, fur, smoldering eyes, and packing
tape create incongruous countenances superimposed on found
nineteenth-century medical illustrations of vulvas and tumors
(uterine, ovarian, and cervical), cancers, ulcers, cysts, catarrh,
prolapses, hypertrophy, and ectopic pregnancy (Figure P.4, P.9, P.10,
P.11, P.13). Before these sprawling decentering images, viewers are
provoked into examining how they define and measure humanity,
theirs and that of others.
Mutu’s work is not that of natural history—cataloguing types or
artifacts thought to represent types—an approach Bridget R. Cooks
has described, in Exhibiting Blackness, as “the compulsion to place
Black artists within a framework of discovery and primitivism” (2).
Instead it examines histories of biocentrism in the field of visuality
and their sociogenic material-discursive consequences or, in this
specific instance, the way raciality’s taxa intrudes upon what it has
already conditioned: the operations of biological reproductive
systems—whereby the efficacies of the body must contend with what
they are entangled with: racism’s debilitating and deadly force
(Cooks 1–2). Yet, in Histology, not unlike biological systems,
antiblackness and spectatorship are reconceived as iterative,
processual, interactional systematicity that while totalizing is neither
absolute nor bound by the spatiotemporalized fiction of foundation or
an origin proper to the past but an open-ended, looping
indeterminacy, one whose terminus must necessarily remain
unknown.
What we find in Mutu’s visions of zoology and botany is a return,
not so much a recapitulation but rather a mutation of German
biologist Ernst Haeckel’s foundational aestheticized evolutionary
theory. In the history of Western imperialism, geologists,
archeologists, surveyors, and mapmakers (among others) employed
ink and watercolor media for taxonomizing “foreign” people and
environments as well as to generate an artistic industry that
documented European “discoveries” for scientific and popular
consumption—these two domains, the popular and the scientific,
never quite being separate. In privileging watercolor and ink drawing
as media of critique, I will demonstrate that Mutu turns the medium
against the very taxonomical imagination that gave rise to its
prominence as a technology of representation. Mutating the
aesthetic philosophy and artistic practice subtending Haeckel’s
evolutionary thought, Mutu’s art highlights the efficacy of
randomness, offering something other than the foundational and
prevailing antiblack depictions, created by Haeckel and his
contemporaries.
Haeckel was a preeminent architect of scientific taxonomical
thinking. He described, named, and illustrated thousands of species
before placing them in a genealogical tree, guided by the aim of
relating all life forms (Figure P.14). Additionally, Haeckel identified
the cell nucleus as the carrier of hereditary material; described the
process of gastrulation; and was an important, if controversial,
contributor to embryology (Richards 4).9 He provided initial
formulations of concepts such as anthropogeny, phylum, phylogeny,
and stem cell. Haeckel even established an entire kingdom of
creatures, the Protista—representing them visually in stunning detail,
in what are now canonical images in the history of Western visual
culture. Haeckel was a scientist of well-known theoretic and artistic
acumen. In 1866, he coined the term “ecology,” the study of relations
among organisms and their environment.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Haeckel was possibly the
world’s most famous evolutionary theorist. According to Haeckel’s
biographer, philosopher and historian of science Robert J. Richards,
more people at the turn of the century were carried to evolutionary
theory on the torrent of Haeckel’s visually arresting and theoretically
rich publications than through any other source, including those
authored by Darwin himself (Richards xviii). Known internationally as
a promoter and popularizer of Darwinian theory, Haeckel’s own
expertise lay in marine invertebrate biology. To this day, no other
investigator has named as many creatures—radiolaria, medusa,
siphonophores, sponges—as Haeckel (Richards xviii). Drawing
inspiration from the Romantic Naturphilosophie of Goethe,
Humboldt, and Schleiden—thinkers who insisted that the
understanding of organic forms required not only theoretic
consideration but aesthetic evaluation as well—Haeckel honed his
considerable artistic talent in keeping with these principles,
illustrating all of his books by brush or ink, believing that a proper
assessment of the development and function of organic forms
necessitated a studied attentiveness to their artistic qualities
(Richards 8–9). In the words of Richards, “Haeckel’s talent with the
artist’s brush served him no less than his dexterity with the scientist’s
microscope” (8).
Haeckel believed that his theory of recapitulation, which he termed
the “biogenetic law,” was evidenced in an inherent and apparently
transparent progressivist taxonomic order, captured in his succinct
axiom, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Haeckel’s cardinal
principle held that the embryo of a species goes through the same
morphological stages as the phylum went through in its evolutionary
history; thus, the embryo in its development chronologically passes
through the successive morphologies of its nearest and most distant
ancestors. In the case of the human embryo, one begins as a single-
celled organism, just as biologists presume life on earth began in a
unicellular mode; upon passing through a stage of gastrulation, a
cuplike form is produced, similar (Haeckel believed) to a primitive
ancestor that plied the ancient seas; then, the embryo takes on the
structure of an archaic fish with gill arches and then that of a primate,
before acquiring the form of a specific human being (Richards 502).
Despite the objections of those who take issue with the
progressivist orientation essential to Haeckel’s thought, I argue that
in terms of somatic theories of race, Naturphilosophie and
evolutionary theory were less a cacophony of irreconcilable opinions
and more a chorus.10 In a set of specific examples far too long to
relate, biocentric hierarchy either cast what were purportedly
preexisting (yet ever changing in number) biological races in the
terms of a (perpetually shifting) taxonomy of species; or conversely,
when theory posited a singular origin of humanity comprising what
was presumably a single human species, it was nonetheless
presumed that the species was occasioned with immutable divides
which could ultimately justify the postulation of amalgamated or
intermediate “types.” Thus, the question of “race” was never
conclusively separated or disengaged from the question of “species.”
For instance, Darwin used both terms, “species” and “race,”
interchangeably in The Descent of Man, at times even using the term
“sub-species” to refer to people.11 To put it another way, the
disaggregation of a conception of race as “type” within a presumably
shared humanity from the positing of race as “species” in a
discontinuous (in)humanity, was never fully completed—nor could it
be—in discourses dependent upon the promiscuous use of the term
“race”; instead, the issue of race’s ontology was indefinitely deferred.
Therefore, I would argue that in sum these positions, polygenesis
and monogenesis respectively, were more of a threshold effect than
opposing positions: what they lacked in logical clarity they more than
made up for in complementary social and political agendas.
Identifying a core of agreement at the center of early biological
science’s branching thought, Stephen Jay Gould claimed that taken
as a whole both schools of thought maintained that “however flexible
in future movement, the scale of human races could still be ranked
from lower to higher—and recapitulation provided the major criterion
for ranking” (Gould 127).
When applied to the morphology of humanity by a burgeoning
science that anticipated, and indeed pursued, validation of its
metaphysical order in observable somatic phenomena, Haeckel’s
signature articulation of progress in evolution asserted directly that
the telos of evolution was evidenced in an observable and, Haeckel
maintained, progressivist hierarchy of the races. Haeckel maintained
that the laws of nature revealed their evolutionary aims and
organizational structures in a graduated achievement of civilization.
Haeckel surmised that the role of the scientist was to hone skills of
discernment necessary for delineating the metrics and scales given
by nature. Believing it possible to relate all of humanity according to
relative degree of intellectual and cultural advancement, Haeckel’s
metrics placed human “races and species” in a stem-tree that ranged
from “simple” to “complex” forms and societies.
While the occupants of the various branches shifted considerably,
moving higher or lower with each successive edition of Generelle
Morphologie, the text never wavered from its low estimation of
blackness. The tiers occupied by American Indians and the
Japanese, for instance, shifted up or down with developments in
popular culture—the wide popularity of literary depictions of the
American Indian as “Noble Savage” in nineteenth-century Germany
—or with developments in diplomacy such as Japan’s concerted
effort at “modernization,” which included a new constitution directly
modeled on Germany’s in 1889. But each edition remained
remarkably stable in its decisive and emphatic antiblackness
(Richards 248–250). Haeckel’s depiction of blackness did not
conform to the model of vertical movement I have just described but
was dependent upon the operations of addition or subtraction—more
or fewer black groups. This racial arithmetic taken as a whole
effectively produced “blackness” as incomparability and discontinuity
—ultimately revealing a static otherness that defines blackness as a
genealogical isolate and unassimilable in relation to all others
(Richards 75–77).
Perhaps this hierarchical and teleological view of race on
Haeckel’s part is unsurprising since, as Gould notes in Ontogeny
and Phylogeny, the “very first sustained argument for recapitulation
in morphology was cast in a racist mold” (Gould 126). In his 1797
work, German physician and specialist of forensic medicine Johann
Heinrich Ferdinand von Autenrieth argued that completed forms of
“lower” animals are merely earlier stages in the ontogeny of “higher”
forms. Autenrieth then spoke of “certain traits which seem, in the
adult African, to be less changed from the embryonic condition than
in the adult European” (quoted in Gould 126). In fact, several of the
leading pre-Darwinian recapitulationists ranked humanity according
to what Gould has termed “the-primitive-as-child argument” (128).
As Histology’s proliferation of lips, breasts, hair, noses, and vulvas
framed by speculums and nineteenth-century medical drawings
suggests, comparative anatomists utilized “[a]ll parts of the body . . .
minutely scanned, measured, and weighed,” in an effort to claim a
material basis of race so that they might “erect a science of
comparative anatomy of the races” (Brinton 48). It is commonly
presumed that conceptions such as recapitulation are the exclusive
products of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative
anatomy, yet Gould has shown such views were not singularly
evidenced in sciences laying claim to the materialist ground of the
body. As evoked in Histology, skulls were indeed collected and
compared, perhaps most infamously by craniologist Samuel George
Morton, but “the primitive-as child argument” performed better for
theories claiming insight into the immaterial and ephemeral
dimensions of human personality, such as intelligence, character,
personality traits, moral faculties, criminality, and aesthetic value—
relying more on inference than on direct empirical observation
(Figure P.13). The purview of the immaterial liberated scientists from
an ill-fated quest predicated on an undeliverable promise—the
discovery of incongruous yet transparent material forms that would
prove an innate racial scale organized the species rather than
racism.
What I claim is that imperialist racist rationale drove a demand for
a material basis of scientific evidence in general and was the engine
of species designations in both humans and nonhumans. The pursuit
of an observable and comparative basis of racial taxonomy and
typology is central to the rise of empirical science, an organizing
principle, not a matter merely incidental to it. In light of a dauntingly
elusive material basis for their imperial rationale, speculative theories
concerning mental traits would allow recapitulationists to rely more
on products of the mind than on physical criteria for ranking in a
matter now relieved from the constraints of data: paleontologist and
zoologist E. D. Cope argued, “Some of these features have a purely
physical significance, but the majority of them are . . . intimately
connected with the development of the mind” (293). Founder of
Social Darwinism Herbert Spencer claimed that “the intellectual traits
of the uncivilized” recur in “the children of the civilized” (89). Lord
Avebury (John Lubbock), the English leader of child study, compared
“[m]odern savage mentality to that of a child,” stating, “As we all
know, the lowest races of mankind stand in close proximity to the
animal world. The same is true for infants of civilized races” (4). Of
course, that the purportedly immaterial—mind, mentality, morality,
intelligence, character, personality traits, moral faculties—as
embodied practices have a quotient of materiality is actually an
inconvenience to measurement’s rationale because matter does not
conform to the dictates of racial logic.
 Figure 4.1. HMS Challenger from Charles Wyville Thomson’s Report on
the Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS Challenger During the Years
1873–76. Thomson, Sir C. Wyville, ed. Report on the Scientific Results of
the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger During the Years 1873–76. 6 vols. Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1878–1895.

Claims of knowledge of the so-called immaterial properties of the

“savage,” “the uncivilized,” and “the lowest races of mankind” relied
upon the imperial expedition and its—literary and visual—
representational maps for navigation, which commonly maintained a
coextensive relation among African humans, animals, and territories.
Social Darwinist Benjamin Kidd contended:
 The evolution in character which the race has
undergone has been northwards from the tropics. The
first step to the solution of the problem before us is
simply to acquire the principle that [we are] dealing with
peoples who represent the same stage in the history of
the development of the race that the child does in the
history of the development of the individual. The tropics
will not, therefore, be developed by the natives
themselves. (51)

As in the example of Kidd, recapitulation was commonly cited as a

rationale for the conquest of Africa. Similar ideas are perhaps most
immediately recallable in light of the canonical first verse of Kipling’s
most famous hymn for colonialism:

Figure 4.2. HMS Challenger Route: The HMS Challenger’s voyage

spanned four years and covered close to seventy thousand nautical
miles. “Then and Now: The HMS Challenger Expedition and the
Mountains in the Sea Expedition.” NOAA Ocean Explorer Podcast RSS
oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/03mountains/background/challeng
er/challenger.html. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
 Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden (Kipling, “The White Man’s
Burden”)

Friedrich Schiller, godfather of Naturphilosophie and Haeckel’s

favorite poet, exposes that Western scales of being and their
representational modes (modeled in the Kipling verse) relied upon
the might of an imperial fleet: “The discoveries which our European
sailors have made in foreign seas . . . show us that different people
are distributed around us . . . just as children of different ages may
surround a grown-up man” (qtd in Gould 126).
In the early 1870s, Charles Wyville Thomson, a naturalist at the
University of Edinburgh, proposed an expedition to sound the
oceans of the world in order to discover the chemical composition,
temperatures, and depths of their various waters as well as survey
their marine life. A fighting ship was dispatched by the Royal Navy,
HMS Challenger, as the research trip was fully within the purview of
the military. The ship was graphically depicted in paint and ink
(Figure 4.1). Upon removal of most but not all of its guns, the ship
was fitted with dredging and other equipment needed for the
accomplishments of the expedition’s goals. In December 1872, the
three-mast ship with Captain George Nares and his crew of two
hundred men aboard, along with six scientists headed by Thomson,
embarked on a three-and-a half year voyage. In all, the ship traveled
to the Canary Islands, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, Australia,
New Zealand, Fiji, the East Indies, Japan, the Sandwich and Society
Islands, Chile, and Argentina before returning to England in May
1876 (Figure 4.2). An international team of chemists, physicists, and
marine biologists were commissioned and charged with the task of
describing the composition of seas, the seabeds, and the animals
procured. Haeckel, by then already an established systematist, was
asked to work on cataloguing the radiolarian, medusae,
siphonophores, and sponges. Ten years, 1,803 pages, and 140
plates later, Haeckel completed his Report of the Radiolara, which
detailed systematic relations, morphology, the locality where taken
(latitude, longitude, and the nearest land), the abundance of
creatures, the depth and temperature of the waters, and the nature
of the sea bottom. Haeckel’s Challenger research formed the basis
of his taxonomical system of radiolarian—in large measure still in
use today (Richards 75–77).
Haeckel also initiated approximately twenty solo expeditions, a
number that Richards notes seems “almost superfluous for the sheer
purpose of acquiring new materials and for advancing a career,” as
after 1870 Haeckel had solidified a reputation as a premier
researcher and could have obtained organisms through the work of
other naturalists or assistants. The acquisition of new materials
would always be a justification, but with Haeckel there was usually
more at stake (Richards 213). For scientists like Haeckel, the
“danger” and “hardship” of “exotic travel” potentially served as a
means of sealing the importance of any discoveries made:

The model of great voyages of the past suggests that

any findings or new ideas derived from a journey would
have their significance elevated by the degree of
difficulties suffered during the excursion. The
assumption is easy: that the importance of results
achieved would be commensurate with dangers
chanced. (Richards 214)

And, in fact, as Richards notes, Humboldt and Darwin had made

their intellectual fortunes by “exotic” travel, a context Haeckel was
well aware of; the hazard of great danger and hardship in “alien
travel,” or at least the appearance of it, set the standard for scientific
greatness and paved the path to immortal fame (215). Haeckel’s
ambition and appetite for adventure impelled him to the western
coast of Africa and the Canary Islands in search of “biological riches”
and the land of supreme beauty he had read about as a youth in in
the evocative travel writings of his hero Alexander von Humboldt
(Richards 173). Moreover, Richards has noted that Karl Haeckel,
Ernst’s father, had a keen interest in “geology and foreign vistas”;
similarly, his son devoted himself to the travel literature of Humboldt,
Goethe, and Charles Darwin, “which set the deep root of a lasting
desire for adventure in exotic lands” (Richards 20). Richards’s
observation that young Haeckel’s dreams arose out of reading works
like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe invites not only a recollection of
the historical intermingling of science and travel literature—in other
words, the uneven imperial representational politics authorizing
claims to scientific “discovery”—but also prompts a reopening of the
question of the roles of aesthetics, literature, and visual art in
empirical racial science in particular. Haeckel never set sail toward
any new research horizon without his sketchbooks and canvasses,
and “during his last travels, the implements of the aesthetic life
became even more important than his microscopes, dissecting
blades, and spirits of wine” (Richards 60, 215).
Haeckel attempted to capture with his mind’s eye the archetypal
structure of an organism—and thus he did not purport to faithfully
capture empirical reality. It is not that Haeckel’s studies were without
empirical foundation; his studies of the radiolarian, for instance,
undoubtedly were initiated on empirical ground. Rather, he believed
the conveyance of evolutionary processes required a theory that
exceeded the dictates of an exacting or experimental science
(Richards 313). Following Goethe, he sought essence rather than
limiting his study to the particulars of empirical evidence. In his view,
mathematical induction and methods privileging the terms of
mechanistic causality were not sufficient for the revelation of
essence (Richards 75).
 Haeckel’s commitment to “exotic” and idealized depictions of
forms would play a decisive role in persuading readers of the
evolutionary theory behind Haeckel’s art. Haeckel is canonized as an
artist largely due to his lush drawing of Cnidaria in his Art Forms in
Nature. The seductive appeal of Haeckel’s theory lay mainly in the
splaying of “untamed nature” (Richards 214). Haeckel’s exploitation
of Kantian metaphors linking femininity and sublimity can be gleaned
in his choice to name the “Discomedusae” after the black(ened)
sexed myth of the Medusa, also known for her venomous lethal sting
and looks that could turn a man to stone (Figure P.15).12
Mutu is known to borrow freely from marine biology, zoology, and
botany but in a manner that gathers critical attention and directs it
toward gendered aesthetics that imply facile connections between
female bodies, femininity, and nature. Her collaged figures
conspicuous made-ness, their artificiality is embraced and integral to
their beauty. As Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade put it, her
figures “do not fear technology, because they are made of it” (146).
One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack alludes to Haeckel’s
canonical gelatinous figures in a manner that problematizes colonial
hierarchies of sex/gender, and in so doing, reveals that the iterative
aspects of culture are “mutational, autopoetic, performative” (Figure
P.16).13 One Hundred figures both the enormously weighty aspects
of hierarchies of sex/gender as well as their precarity as a much
larger figure rests upon the genuflection and exploitation as well as
caprice of one much smaller. The two chimerical figures are
sheathed in mottled skin, one light and one dark, and framed by a
sparse grassland and ominous cloud that is either lifting or moving
closer. The central and much larger golden figure has spiraling
leopard-printed horns, hippopotamus heads for hands, and an
exploding foot releasing motorcycle fragments—or perhaps flying
motorcycle shrapnel is what initially caused the rupture. The larger
golden figure’s blasted head seemingly burst open by a hurled
motorcycle and the accompanying bleeding stump are suggestive of
an ongoing conflict. From her perched vantage point, the golden
woman’s oversize discomedusae, or sea anemone–reminiscent skirt,
obscures the darker feminine figure that sustains her—the shadowy
figure adorned with a flower behind her ear, narrowly holding off her
plunging stiletto or perhaps lifting her, exposing the golden figure to
harm’s way.14 In One Hundred, the black(ened)myth of Medusa is
inherited mutationally; her petrifying gaze takes on new gendered
meanings, even suggesting alterations to meaning itself. In other
words, in the process of reinscription—the replication of historical
metaphors—the structures of meaning that license Medusa’s
racialized sexed metaphoricity, informing Haeckel’s “Discomedusae,”
become mutational. However, this mutation is not attributable solely
to “artistic genius” but exceeds subjectivist claims—mutation relying
as it does on the meeting of fortuity and the autopoesis of a system.
Mutation is that radical alteration in the interstice of chance and
design, “a process that is not ‘ours’ because it necessarily involves a
degree of randomness”; in other words, mutation exploits the
unpredictable and the limits of human control (Rutsky 103). Thus,
mutation, given its implied randomness, cannot be narrativized or,
more precisely, can be narrativized only by subordinating its
“unpredictability” to the bias and parallax inherent in human
perspective.15 In the words of R. L. Rutsky, “Mutation, one might say,
serves to figure a notion of change that seems to have taken on an
uncanny life of its own” (103).
If we interpret Mutu’s strategies of ironic appropriation and
pastiche merely as evidence that historical change has occurred, a
subversive sign heralding the arrival of a postmodern critique of
race, we potentially miss the ways that her work announces not so
much a change in “cultural-historical period” (the arrival of the “post”
in its viral variability, post this, post that), but rather, her work
performs “a change in the conceptualization of history” (Rutsky 102,
emphasis added). History, here, is re-conceptualized such that it
defies dominant conceptions in a manner particularly unsettling for
the presumption that history belongs to the (human) subject and that
it “moves towards an end” (Rutsky 102–103). Progressivist and
developmental historical narratives conceptualize “history” as the
“passage from one era to another,” propelled by the achievements
and designs of human self-directed agency; yet, as I maintain,
historical movement is a more-than-human inter(intra)actional
process rather than human-directed sequential action. Humans
participate in history, but we can only know history, and thus
ourselves, partially and obliquely. While the transference of history
encompasses human action, it is an irresolutely ahuman process
that resists the teleological narrative closure ascribed to it.
In Histology, one particular visual phrase both denaturalizes
“nature” and humanist progressivist history simultaneously, the titular
image, Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, a
doubling down of double entendre: a monkey’s face with shellacked,
painted, red lips, the mouth of a vulva agape overlain on a
gynecological medical drawing; a dark breast becoming a chin, a
brain a uterine tumor; the skull sprouting an afro. This is an image
that gathers legibility against a backdrop of publicity linking the icon
of the black female body and sexuality to that of orangutans. During
the eighteenth century, in an attempt to settle the long-standing
question of whether continuity or fissure organized species
hierarchy, the terms of the Chain of Being’s dualistic, divided yet
united, hierarchization are transformed by a transcontinental debate
regarding the plausibility of African females’ sexual congress and
procreation with orangutans.16 However, there are, of course, no
orangutans in Africa. In fact, in many if not most cases, naturalists
never set eyes on either Africans or orangutans but nevertheless
purported to depict them based on ideas from the rather fanciful
teachings of the ancients combined with the untutored observations
of voyagers.
Eighteenth-century representations of monkeys and apes sought
to address a gap in knowledge: the precise operations of sexual
reproduction and by extension the intractable enigma of human
origins. As Elizabeth Liebman observes:

Without demonstrable scientific laws for sex and love,

the unexplained biological status of the monkey revived
the ancient fear of exogamy—the union of unlike
 entities, specifically, mating outside of a recognized
group. In social and biological spheres, and in an
increasingly diverse and mobile population, exogamy
threatened Enlightenment aspirations for collective and
individual perfection. (139)

Under the guise of new empirical knowledge, African and Asian apes
as well as Polynesian and African females were incorporated into the
litany of ancient divinities—satyrs, fauns, sylvan, and faeries—the
familiar roles and devices of ancient fiction and popular tales—
including, or especially those exploring mythic passions and
appetites (Liebman 140).
The Dutch physician and naturalist, Jacob Bontius’s 1631 work
“Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis” introduced the term
“Orang Hutan” into Western languages, where he claimed that the
orangutan “was born of the lust of the women of the (East) Indies
who mate with apes and monkeys to satisfy their detestable desires.”
By the eighteenth century, the question of human species
(dis)continuity rested primarily on fabulations of African female
bodies and appetites, yet I mention Bontius’s 1620 discussion of the
East Indies (Indonesia and Malaysia) to underscore that the
ontologizing vocabularies and scales under construction here were
produced in the context of imperial appropriation not only of
territories and their inhabitants but also of narrative fabulation where
narrative drifts, deletes, and substitutes its objects and characters.17
In the passage from Malay sources to Dutch colonial natural history,
what was once a relatively circumscribed yet dubious seventeenth-
century Dutch imperial phantasy intensifies and transmutes into a
transcontinental debate, a century later, concerning the peculiarities
of the African female’s sex difference, appetites, and reproductive
capacity, whereby the African female functions as the delimiting
measure of human species membership in the context of an
emerging global imaginary.18
While this chapter of comparative anatomy has often been
discussed, what typically gets lost is not only the transnational
context but also the extent to which European, male naturalists
identified with apes and the correlative efforts taken to foreclose
identification with African females, and black people more generally.
This debate concerned not only the degree to which black(ened)
females were properly human but also whether or not the orangutan
was superior to her. In this debate, black(ened) females variously
occupied all positions: human, animal, animal human, human
animal, unknown quantity, cipher.
Beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, according
to naturalists, female apes were distinguished by their “great
modesty.” Jacob Bontius, the first to impute demureness to the
female orangutan in his Historiae naturalis (1658, originally 1620),
wrote that the young female inspired admiration by hiding her “secret
parts” with great modesty from unknown men. Hiding her face with
her hands, she wept copiously, uttered groans, and expressed
sentiments so humanlike that Bontius concluded she lacked nothing
human but speech (Schiebinger 99). Monboddo, Edward Tyson, and
Linnaeus also produced reports of female apes’ modesty. Londa
Schiebinger argues,

In this, naturalists followed newly emerging ideals for

middle-class European women. . . . What is surprising
in the portrayals is that female apes were not depicted
as closer to nature than were the males. Even in the
state of nature, female apes were chaste, modest, soft,
sober, considerate, attentive, and tranquil—qualities
Linnaeus attributed to civilized humans. Portrayals of
male apes, by contrast evoked Linnaeus’s descriptions
of uncivilized “man”: foolish, lascivious, imitative. (99,
105)

In an attempt to naturalize hierarchy, speculations about female

apes great affection and bounds of attachment for their young and
companions were also not uncommon. Toward the end of the
century, the female apes depicted in European natural history (for
instance, see Linnaeus’s 1801 Histoire Naturalle) were figured in
accordance with contemporaneous European standards of female
beauty.
Perhaps the most notable modification was the lifting and rounding
of breasts, given the role of breast shape in the naturalization of
racial hierarchy. Late nineteenth-century anthropologists classified
breasts by their perceived beauty in the same way that they
measured skulls for intelligence. The ideal breast was the compact
“hemispherical” type, found, it was said, only among whites and
Asians. In contrast, female African women were purported to have
flabby, pendulous breasts similar to the udders of goats (Schiebinger
64). Pendulous breasts were long perceived as a distinctive marker
of the African female, and as signifiers of her savagery and
cannibalism. Early depictions of apes superimposed this feature on
female apes thus racializing them in the same bestializing, sexuated
terms that they initially imputed to African females (Schiebinger 91,
161). It was not until the end of the eighteenth century, in
accordance with Europeans’ increasing identification with apes or
identification of elite European women with female apes, that apes’
breasts were given a demurely feminine shape.
While naturalists imputed to female apes the narrow-gendered
prescriptions and aesthetic qualities they expected of middle-class
European women, they continued to depict African females in
grotesque and prurient terms. In the eighteenth century, in studies of
female anatomy, what was invariably at issue was some aspect of
their sexuality, the peculiarities of their breasts, genitalia,
menstruation, parturition, or suckling. Thus, it is not surprising that
studies of female anatomy designed to reveal the exact boundary
between humans and apes interrogated aspects of their sexuality
(Schiebinger 89). As Londa Schiebinger concludes, “for eighteenth–
century male naturalists, that which distinguished female humans
from animals was not reason, speech, or the ability to create culture,
but rather distinctive forms of sexual anatomy” (94). Moreover, as
Liebman argues:
 The peculiar new ape resembled the human, and by
projection it bore the mien of the polymorphous and
irrational gods of antiquity who sojourned on earth,
frequently to couple with mortals. Thus early life
scientists and social theorists were confronted with the
task of rescuing the monkey from the realm of
mythology. (140)

In this chapter and the earlier one on Hopkinson and “world,” while I
direct attention to the role of mythology in domination, the aim here
is not principally that of rescuing black womanhood from the function
of myth; rather the primary aim is to investigate the potential
liberatory use of nonrepresentationalist inquiries into ontology.
Histology’s monkey situates the history of the body in the body of
history wherein one’s taxonomic carcerality, as in the examples of
Linné’s and Haeckel’s respective systems, is determinant of an ill-
fated singularity in the order of matter itself that, I will show, precisely
emerges via the agentic capacities and efficacies of bodily process.
In the next section of this chapter, I want to tarry with the question of
measurement. If as Karen Barad suggests, measurement is a mode
of knowing that is also a means of doing/making or worlding, then I
want to consider how the apparatus of measurement in parsing and
ontologizing distinction introduces its cause. Barad clarifies,
“Measurements are agential practices, which are not simply
revelatory but performative: they help constitute and are a
constitutive part of what is being measured” (Barad, Nothingness 6).
In other words, the means and modes of measuring are inseparable
from the iterative material-discursive phenomena they claim to
identify. Measurement and mattering, metric and object, are
inextricable and co-constitutive, or to use Barad’s term, “intra-active
within phenomena,” not interactions: “Measurements are world-
making: matter and meaning do not pre-exist, but rather are co-
constituted via measurement intra-actions” (Nothingness 6).
Measurement is agential and constitutive with what is measured
rather than disinterested; thus, it matters how some thing is
measured. Take the case of the famous wave/particle experiment:
when electrons (or light) are measured using one kind of apparatus,
they are waves; if they are measured in a complementary way, they
are particles. As Barad explains, “What we’re talking about here is
not simply some object reacting differently to different probings but
being differently. What is at issue is the very nature of nature”
(Nothingness 6). Regarding bodily differentiation, what this suggests
is that there is no preexisting “black female body” with determinate
boundaries and properties that precede measurement.19
Like a collage, the orgasmic body “is always making itself as it is
being unmade” in intra-action with (sociogenic evolutionary) history’s
discursive-material means of measurement and cutting a figure
(Martin, “Fracture” 50). Mutu’s collages and the technical skill
required to make these are certainly disruptive of narrative genres, in
particular those foundational to evolutionary theories of race, but this
critique, as important as it is, nevertheless overlays a more
fundamental structural critique not just of a particular set of
representations but of an entire mode of representation that
underwrites racial representation(alism). Mutu’s use of collage to
underscore the irresolute borders of assembly and disassembly that
history performs suggests that any representation that defines itself
in the terms of a pregiven developmental ontology can only do so by
effacing the processual conditions, and indeed conditional contexts,
that produce its peculiar mode of representation. The open-ended
processual nature of history itself, its contingency and continual
change, can only mutate the linear narrativity of thinkers like
Haeckel. “Implying a shift in the notion of change itself—in how
cultural change comes about,” Mutu’s collages, their performance of
the contingent, recombinant, and the aleatoric dimensions of history
thereby poses a challenge to the very nature of historical genre and
its privileged terms: linear teleology and stagist development (Rutsky
102).
The organismic body’s directedness, not unlike that of history
itself, is marked by stable replication as well as chance and the
aleatory; thus, neither history nor the organism’s effects can be
known in advance. What I want to consider in what follows is how
measurement, including the logics of taxonomy and typology as well
as economies of desire and the affect(ivity) of raciality that
accompany them, are sociogenically determinant of the materiality of
sexual difference and reproduction. In other words, I want to
consider how the logics of taxonomy and typology, the singularity of
black(female)ness previously identified in the history of evolutionary
thought, is potentially intra-actional with the matter we call “the black
female body” and the incomparable and confounding health
indicators entangled with this material metaphor.
The speculum is a rather ignoble technology. Its weaponization
lies in how the methodical parting of female lips established racially
ontologizing divisions of sex and gender in gynecology. This
instrument proliferates across the twelve serialized frames that
comprise Histology—matted and sharply separated into black and
white. Yet, emblems of white femininity—blue eyes, ruby lips—
superimposed on images of black women suggest the discursive-
material entanglement of black and white, divided yet united, at the
registers of gender and sex. Dr. Marion Sims, who many consider
“The Father of American Gynecology,” bought and raised female
slaves for the express purpose of using them for experimentation
(Washington 55). Slave quarters and backyard shacks were the
setting for his reproductive experiments pertaining to vesicovaginal
fistula, cesareans, bladder stones, and ovariotomy, for example. The
pervasiveness of such practices persuaded historian of medicine
Harriet Washington to conclude that “forced medical experimentation
was the scientific personification of black enslavement in the U.S.”
(54).20
It was commonly professed, by men of letters and the
uncredentialed, that African females did not feel pain or anxiety in
the way white women do. In “Some Could Suckle over Their
Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of
Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” Jennifer Morgan argues that the
European imaginary equated African females’ purported fecundity
and propensity for easy birth and breastfeeding with their projected
astonishing capacity for manual labor; painless, meaningless, and
mechanical childbirth in their estimation was the measure of black
female gender and of blackness, more generally (186). African
womanhood as a discursive formation materialized in the context of
England’s need for productivity; in response to this need, utilitarian
feeding and mechanistic childbirth would ultimately become located
in the English economy (187). By the time Sims appears on the
scene in the nineteenth century, these tropes of “the black female
body” were oft repeated.
An admission of suffering in black(ened) people was effectively
bypassed by theories such as these to the extent that commonplace
exaggerations of black females’ purported capacities for endurance
offered assurance that black pain was not really pain. Regarding
forced gynecological experiments on enslaved women in particular,
Dr. James Johnson, editor of the London Medical and Chirurgical
Review, comments on the “wondrous” capacity of the “Negro” to
bear what would be insurmountable pain in whites: “When we come
to reflect that all the women operated upon in Kentucky, except one,
were Negresses and that these people will bear anything with nearly
if not quite as much impunity as dogs and rabbits, our wonder is
lessened” (qtd. in Washington 58). What has typically gone
unremarked is that René Descartes’s ticking-clock-animal-automata
thesis, which held that animals felt pain but that pain was merely a
mechanical response to stimulation, was historically coincident with
theories about African women and childbirth discussed by Jennifer
Morgan. Descartes’s bête machine theory and the theory that black
people were impervious to pain recall and reinforce each other
(Discourse on Method).
Contemporary research on race and pain reports quite different
findings. In the first study to examine the link between perceived
discrimination and pain, researchers concluded that for whites, one’s
particular history of physical ailment was the chief predictor of pain,
and perceived discrimination was found to be unrelated to report of
pain. For black people, it was the opposite: perceived discrimination
was actually a better predictor of pain than physical health variables,
suggesting that the experience of racism itself modulates how one
experiences pain.21 These results confirmed what others have long
suggested—the domain of experienced pain is the somaticization of
an intra-actional field that includes biological, psychological, and
cultural actants (Turk and Monarch 6–8).
As Washington notes, in the context of forced experimentation, the
mandate was profit rather than cure; profit came in the form of
restoring the slave’s body as vital property, notoriety, or the
recovered health and life of whites that directly benefited from these
experiments while not being subject to them. The semio-material
profiteers of such experiments would justify their practice largely
based on the notion that black people’s purported low intelligence
and hypersexuality was evidence of their animality. But as Harriet
Washington notes, doctors themselves mandated the very
immodesty that purportedly defined the black female sex. During the
Victorian period, layers of dress symbolized sexual chastity. While
doctors maintained white femininity’s modesty by covering white
women during gynecological surgeries, averting their eyes from even
modestly dressed women (relying on their sense of touch beneath
voluminous Victorian skirts), it was common to ask black(ened)
women to undress completely in front of multiple male doctors.
Beliefs about black women’s sexuality provided doctors the
opportunity to explore new forms of looking at women’s disrobed
bodies and to peer inside the female body (Washington 64).
Histology’s layers of women’s bodies are coated by the overlay of
sexologists’ causal theories of queer erotics on sexual practice,
which they typically attributed to purported genital irregularity. As
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman asserts,

Sexologists and medical scientists alleged that

supposed genital irregularities (e.g., enlarged labia or
an elongated clitoris) that predisposed white lesbians
and prostitutes to sexual deviance were standard
features of black women’s sexual organs. . . . It is
important to note here that black women’s sexuality
 symbolized in nineteenth-century scientific discourses
only the excesses of white women’s sexuality, whereas
it figured black women’s and men’s sexuality as a
whole. (14, 11)

“The criminalization of lesbianism and prostitution,” Abdur-Rahman

maintains, “was effected in part through sexologists’ claim of their
bodily and behavioral kinship with black women, the archetypes of
sexual deviance” (14, 11).
Histology’s superimpositions of genitals on faces also recalls a
history Rahman alerts us to: the conflation of female genitalia with
the faces of women. The face, or rather the stereotypic caricature of
black women’s faces, has been held to index the nature of the
anatomies of women (Abdur-Rahman 13). Within such logics, “Black
women are wholly genitalized, visualized . . . as manifestly sexual
and debased” (Abdur-Rahman 13). To facialize the medical text, to
build a face around the original text’s illustration of a vagina, as in
Primary Syphilitic Ulcers of the Cervix and Uterine Catarrh, is also
possibly to, as Alessandra Raengo describes, resituate “the vagina
so that it occupies the position of the Third Eye” (77), returning the
gaze with what Chelsea Mikael Frazier brilliantly characterizes as a
“side-eye” (Figure P.5, P.11).22 Crucially, one of the questions at
stake in this work is how one knows one is looking at a female face
and, relatedly, what role race plays in this determination. Raengo
continues, “As much as colonial discourse constructs the native
woman synecdochically as a vagina, Mutu empowers that bodily
opening with an inquisitive, challenging, and knowing look” (77).
Histology is not simply, or exclusively, an interrogation of how black
female forms are measured but more pointedly, Histology
underscores how sex difference, which is always raced, more
generally, gathers legibility and materializes in the entangled
relational field of racial domination.
Whereas a naturalism of sex and sexuality arose with the incipient
racialized comparison of breasts and appetites, a century and a half
later a maturing science of sex emerged out of the experiments on
the captive population by J. Marion Sims and his contemporaries in
the nineteenth century. Histology calls to mind this history:
speculums and the partition of legs expose vulvas and cavernous
cavities. The brain is alternately overlain with a series of evocative
and interrelated images: an archeologist and his collection of human
skulls recall the spectacle of craniometry—an erupting volcanic salvo
suggests the culmination of a prurience that masks itself as
disinterested authority (Figure P.8, P.13). Behind the eyes is a
fashion model, an emblem of Eurocentric standards of beauty
(Figure P.6). And with this cameo, Du Bois’s double-consciousness
takes form not only on the register of the ethereal psyche but of a
tumorous doubling of an organ at war with an other that, as Fanon
noted, is nevertheless the self. The “African female’s” putative lack of
legible feminine gender, the disfiguring withholding of the symbolics
of sentient personhood afforded normatively gendered humanity, is
lived as a multiplication of the organ—a tumorous breast (Figure
P.9). In contrast to Haeckel, Mutu evokes images of nature in order
to denaturalize the subject of sex-gender and challenge the
alienation from the body invited when many of the conditions cited in
Histology are noted for their “masculinizing effects.” An inverted
fennec fox head is recast as a moustache, turning the sexually
patronizing moniker “foxy lady” upside down (Figure P.12). In
Histology, the appearance of morphological incongruity is not an
accomplice to ableism but an indictment of the disfiguring and
debilitating effects of power as well as a questioning of the aesthetic
devaluation of abject forms.
The motif of hyperbolic mouths alludes to the meeting of aperture
and the pleasure of stereotype, highlighting that mechanistic,
technological forms are just as integral to the maintenance of a
racialized, gendered order as media traditionally framed as
subjective (such as painting, drawing, and sculpture) rather than
objective—objectif being the French word for lens. In the context of
the West, mouths and tongues perform a kind of double-speak in the
field of signification. On the one hand, they provide speech,
understood to deliver indisputable evidence of Man’s justifiable
authority—language, an achievement thought to offer testimony to a
“natural” hierarchy among species and races (or races as species),
whereby “proper” speech purports to guarantee mastery and
justifiable authority over “nature.” On the other hand, mouths are
also irresolute figures of porosity, vulnerability, pleasure, and
contamination that evoke racialized, gendered specters with respect
to sexuality—“the feminine position,” the locus of the erotic and
devouring womb—as Sigmund Freud infamously put it, “the dark
continent of female sexuality.”
With her characteristic wit and satirical humor, Mutu explores the
link between violence and ecstasy: extracted from pornographic
magazines, such as Black Tail, oversized pulpy painted red lips with
outstretched tongues and piercings are grafted onto disassembled
forms, suggesting that the privileged significatory production of
language, its assumed teleological and intersubjective powers, can
all too easily be annulled by economies of pleasure that presuppose
black women’s animality and the animality of sex. Perhaps this is to
be expected, given that the establishment of credentialed speech
and the assurance it offers, has been predicated on an antiblack
weaponization of sexuality in and beyond the field of the symbolic: in
the discourse of Man, black womanhood is understood in terms of a
bestializing, serialized negation, whereby seriality’s characteristic
deferral operates to negate terms in successive order of their
appearance—(black) race, (black) gender, (black) sexuality, (black)
sex, (black) maternity—when one term appears another recedes.
Black women’s sexuating vulnerability to weaponized language
coupled with the permeability and fragility of the body led feminist
critic Hortense Spillers to exclaim, with similar wit, “Sticks and bricks
might break our bones but words will most certainly kill us” (Black,
White, and in Color 209). That Mutu named each cameo after
disease types draws our attention to the problematic nature of
naming in medical science, insisting that technomedicine’s tools are
constitutive with the symptoms that serve as points of access
(Stanford 31). Mutating breasts form a tumorous mass, the breasts’
maternal function and pleasures provided for the flesh give way
under the weight of the layers of accumulated meaning ascribed to
black women’s breasts in an antiblack world (Figure P.9).
 Battles in the Flesh
[T]hose of us who live our battles in the flesh must know ourselves as our
strongest weapon in the most gallant struggle of our lives.
—Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

In The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde also provides an analytic

treatment of the interrelation of language and debility, including her
own, which took the form of breast cancer and the experience of
mastectomy before her death in 1992. Lorde critically reframed her
experience from that of being sick (cancer) to that of becoming sick
(carcinogenesis) in order to explore the politics of health. By shifting
the frame from cancer to carcinogenesis, Lorde announced her
rejection of biomedical conceptions of cancer viewed either as
individualized disease or as ultimately attributable to an immutable
division in raced and gendered bodies. Alternatively, Lorde’s
framework emphasized that the process of carcinogenesis is a
political matter and a matter of politics.23 I have argued that Mutu’s
work de-essentializes “the body” as the “cause” of disease in order
to draw attention to the biological, psychological, environmental, and
cultural interactions that perturb organ systems and disrupt
physiological function, producing disease as palimpsest. Similarly,
Lorde describes breast cancer as a “preventable” death, one that is
bound up with patterns and networks that encompass human and
nonhuman actants—food, natural environment, psychic structures,
and the fields of pleasure, desire, language, and aesthetics.
For Lorde, breast cancer is not simply a matter of malignant and
recalcitrant cells; it is that, but it is also a physical index of patterned
social relations that pollute physical, psychological, environmental,
and social worlds. As Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman contends, Lorde’s
radicalization of breast cancer takes “bodies and the environment
into account. Cancer is not political because either subject—bodies
or environment—is inherently political, but rather because of the
silence and secrecy surrounding the overlapping intersections of
these subjects” (134).24 Regarding her decision to not wear a
prosthetic breast and re-aestheticize her mastectomy scars (rather
than see them as something private, shameful, and dis-aesthetic),
she sees them as “an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in
the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution,
McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still
going on” (60). Arguing “a clear distinction must be made” between
the affirmation of the self and “the superficial farce of looking on the
bright side of things,” Lorde states:

The happiest person in this country cannot help

breathing in smokers’ cigarette fumes, auto exhaust,
and airborne chemical dust, nor avoid drinking the
water, and eating the food. The idea that happiness
can insulate us against the results of our environmental
madness is a rumor circulated by our enemies to
destroy us. (77)

By directing the reader’s attention to an assemblage of agencies that

produce disease effects, Lorde’s and Mutu’s works render the
causality and concept of disease problematic and productively
irresolute. In Histology, the interior–exterior binary nearly collapses
as Mutu’s figures are turned inside out. The body is diffuse
im/materiality, a bursting star; each particle interacts with external
actants and forces.
In the face of the pressing reality of mortality and physical pain,
Lorde argued that one must consciously—and critically—incorporate
the reality of pain, abjection, and mortality into one’s consciousness.
From there, mortality and pain can be a source of strength,
propelling one to fight for the transformation of the pattern but only if
one allows “mortality” and “difference” to alter how one lives. To
avoid this confrontation with one’s mortality and abjection is to
undercut one’s strength by remaining attached to a phantasy that
one does not have to “fight” in a world patterned by the differential
manufacture of death (Lorde 76). For Lorde, such avoidance may
even thwart the potential for livable possibilities to emerge.
That Lorde framed her “fight” by laying claim to the symbolics of
war has been a source of controversy among feminists, some of
whom claim that Lorde’s “metaphorics” reinforce the dominant
culture’s tendency to frame war as justifiable and inevitable due to a
reductive and ideologically driven biologism (Khalid 701, 710; Jain
521). Moreover, they suggest, Lorde’s invocation of war relies upon
and extend the “masculinist” cultural postures, or “militarized
masculinity,” she claims to abhor.25 What these feminist critics miss
is not only that it is possible to reconfigure established metaphorics,
including those that militarize disease, but also that such a
potentiality is a matter of survival as language is a crucial terrain
upon which war is fought.26 Lorde’s metaphorics acknowledge a
recent observation of Jasbir Puar, the debilitation of bodies is, in
part, how populations come to be populations as such in the first
place: “[t]he body that is seen as consigned to death is the body that
is already debilitated in biopolitical terms” (Right to Maim 69, 86). In
an antiblack world, the relations of force that cohere the symbolic
order and its sexuating racial hierarchies are mutually imbricated in
the biological domains of racial domination.
As Dorothy Roberts has noted, it is now well established that
“dividing people into races has biological effects,” a fact that is not a
matter of immutable biological difference but of systemic societal
violence enacted on the scale of a population (Fatal Invention, 5). It
is also well documented that in comparison to other US racial
populations, black people have the highest rates of morbidity and
mortality for almost all diseases; the highest disability rates; the
shortest life expectancies; the least access to health care; and
startlingly low rates of use of up-to-date technology in their
treatments.27 Moreover, even as the overall health of the US
population has improved, these racialized inequities in health and
mortality have increasingly widened (Williams, “Race,
Socioeconomic Status, and Health” 176). With respect to race and
reproductive health in particular, black(ened) females have the
highest rates of preterm birth, infant mortality, low birthrate, and
reproductive cancers.
In her now classic essay, Hortense Spillers articulates a distinction
between “flesh” and “body” as foundational to respective modes of
captive and liberated subject-positions:

[B]efore the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree

of social conceptualization that does not escape
concealment under the brush of discourse or the
reflexes of iconography. Even though the European
hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out
of West African communities in concert with the African
“middleman,” we regard this human and social
irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the
person of African females and males registered the
wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary
narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-
apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or
“escaped” overboard. (“Mama’s” 206)

“Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh’” Spillers writes. Here, the before
has spatial as well as temporal significance, as before recalls that
the master class gains a sense of proprietary embodiment and
sovereign “I” retroactively, whereby the ekphrastic scenes of
enfleshment she describes act as a mirror stage such that the other
is spatially before the lash and her ensuing corporeal fragmentation
hypostatizes (by that I mean “converges” literally and figuratively) in
the abstractions made of flesh.
But what happens when recognition of a whole self-possessed
body does not take hold and the flesh as dispossession becomes the
sine qua non of existence? Or to put it more pointedly, what if the
very notion of a sovereign, integral, self-possessed body is intrinsic
to the production of the slave’s existence as its privileged obverse?
Spillers’s “before” is often interpreted as affirming the notion that the
biological matter of the flesh can and does exist prior to cultural
inscription, but this is precisely what I am arguing against. I argue
that the conception and materialization of the organismic body itself
is already sociogenically entangled with culture, and indeed,
informed by culture—culture itself being determinant of matter and
evolutionarily significant. In probing the relation between epigenetic
“marks” and Spillers’s transfer of marks, epigenetic marks might be
akin to what Kimberly Juanita Brown calls “afterimage,” “the puncture
of the past materializing in the present” and “the history of corporeal
imperialism” manifesting as intergenerational debility and
reproductive disease (Brown, Repeating 18). For Lorde, like Mutu,
black female bodies are disfigured, seared, lacerated, and
dispossessed not only by the historical uses of the lash but also by
the afterlife of slavery’s ongoing semio-affective-psychic
deployments of systemic antiblackness, which as I will show precede
and intrude upon the event of conception. Their portraits of cancer
suggest that racialized disease frequencies and inequitable
reproductive outcomes are best understood as material
accompaniment to the color line’s dichotomization of “body” and
“flesh” (Spillers, “Mama’s” 206).
Moreover, and this is key, the matter of war for Lorde is not in any
simple terms metaphorical. Lorde replaces the popular biomedical
concept of “war” as symbolic analogy with an analysis of
antiblackness as systematized war, one that takes the form of a bio-
psycho-eco-cultural feedback loop, whereby matter and symbol are
contiguous and mutually productive. To presume that Lorde is merely
drawing an analogy between a culture’s antiblack, gendered violence
and “war” is to miss how “war” is being redefined according to the
lived sexuating conditions of Lorde’s black womanhood. Lorde’s
attempts at resignification must contend with racialized, gendered
dialectics of discursivity—the threat and even imminence of
foreclosure and appropriation—in the context of a language
structured by black women’s lack of discursive power:

We were never meant to speak together at all . . .

When language becomes most similar, it becomes
 most dangerous, for then differences pass
unremarked. . . . Because we share a common
language which is not of our own making and which
does not reflect our deeper knowledge as women, our
words frequently sound the same. But it is an error to
believe that we mean the same experience, the same
commitment, the same future, unless we agree to
examine the history and particular passions that lie
beneath each other’s words. (Burst 70)

While it is true that in working inside the existing rhetoric of “war,”

Lorde risks concealing that the predicament she seeks to scrutinize
is powered by what Frank Wilderson terms “gratuitous violence”
rather than tactical deliberation.28 However, Lorde’s expansive
redefinition of war neither licenses prior biopolitical conceptions nor
obscures the violence of war; rather, the term’s temporary loss of
definitiveness exists for the express purpose of a critical reframing—
exposing and clarifying the antiblack relations of power that attend
the dominant conceptualization’s prematurely narrowed scope.
Moreover, I argue that the war Lorde describes conditions prior
conceptions of war, both those precipitated by formal declarations
and those biomedical wars inspired by them—in particular the “war
on cancer” with its promise of biotechnological “intervention”—as the
antiblack mereological conversion of corporeal existence into flesh
provides the epistemological and economic conditions of possibility
for globality and its attendant hierarchization of empiricist
knowledge.29 Rather than uncritically reiterate genocidal, biopolitical
logic, Lorde is identifying a wider field of relations that are only now
coming to be recognized as biopolitical. By doing so, Lorde raises
and opens up the question of “war,” its scope and meaning, to
renewed investigation.30
In my view, Lorde’s combative language is neither masculinist nor
at odds with her transformative vision of societal reorganization. As
Lorde suggests, the violence that attends the disproportionate rates
of breast cancer incidence, morbidity, and mortality among black
women is, in fact, militarized and targeted: the breast cancer survival
differences between black and white women are among the most
striking and consistent of racial “health inequities.”31 A growing
bioscientific literature now suggests that racial discrimination raises
both the risk of the development of breast cancer and a higher
incidence among black women.32 In other words, antiblackness is
determinant at the stage of the disease’s initiation, one’s
susceptibility to the disease, and in its prevalence within a
population, how likely are you to get it; if that were not enough,
antiblack racism is also determinant of how long you will live once
you have it and whether you will ultimately die from it.33 This
destructive power on the part of antiblack racism has principally
been attributed to its distinctiveness as a stressor. It is not that other
forms of stress are not harmful; rather, antiblack racism appears to
have an incomparably debilitating impact on psychological, cognitive,
and allostatic systems, introducing disequilibrium in the integration
and regulation of endocrine, immune, cardiovascular, and metabolic
functioning.34 In terms of breast cancer specifically, it has been
hypothesized that chronic stress from racism introduces dangerous
amounts of inflammation into the body, increasing black women’s
“allostatic load” or the “wear and tear” on the body that occurs when
exposed to a stressor.35 As Quach explains, chronic and severe
social stress prompts the stress-response system, activating
adaptive physiological mechanisms, which over time degrade the
body’s ability to properly regulate systems. The overcirculation of
stress hormones, among other outcomes, is linked to an uninhibited
inflammatory response, and chronic inflammation has been
associated with breast cancer recurrence and mortality (Quach et al.
1027).36
Moreover, racialized inequities in mortality across a spectrum of
cancers, including but not exclusive to breast cancer, are growing
despite rapid advancement in detection and treatment. An
identifiable pattern has emerged—perhaps for some a
counterintuitive one—that as cancers become more amenable to
medical intervention, racial survival inequities widen (Tehranifar et al.
2701). While overall breast cancer mortality has declined with
improvements in screening and treatment, black–white patient
inequities in breast cancer mortality rates have instead increased
since 1980—the year The Cancer Journals was published (Odierna
et al. 669). In 1980, breast cancer mortality rates were reportedly
similar across the color line, but whereas white women experienced
a decrease in breast cancer mortality rates between 1980 and 2007,
black women did not (Odierna et al. 669)—a reality arguably
presaged in Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Burst of Light.
Moreover, studies have begun to suggest that the growing
availability of gene-expression profiling and other forms of
personalized medicine will likely not benefit all population groups
equally; the interrelationship between technological development
and racialized somatic processes serves to heighten racial inequities
in treatment response, morbidity, and survival. Tumors that develop
in breast systems are variegated and can have fundamental
differences in their biological features. Given the variegation and
corresponding distinctive molecular features of cancers occurring in
breast systems, some clinicians speculate that molecularly dissimilar
cancers originate from separate cell types and should be treated as
separate diseases (Odierna et al. 670). While any of these
genetically differentiated tumors can and do exist in all population
groups, it appears that antiblack racism increases the probability that
black(ened) females will develop tumors that are harder to treat,
result in shorter survival time, and increase chances of recurrence
and mortality. The development of gene-expression profiling
technologies, which include the tests currently available, has
privileged molecular presentations of the disease that are correlated
with whiteness and increased odds, or more precisely, forms not
correlated with blackness and its depreciated odds (including the
particularly fatal “triple negative” breast tumors which are
nonresponsive to current hormonal therapies).
Personalized medicine promises “targeted” diagnostic and
prognostic tests, but in practice, the development and diffusion
(design, testing, and availability) of these technologies has not
remedied racial health inequities; instead, they have only created
new pathways for inequity because such tests are developed,
marketed, and consumed in accordance with existing social
inequalities, in particular race (Odierna et al. 669, 670, 672). Thus,
biotechnological intervention “targets” black and white women in
inverse relation to racial inequities in morbidity and mortality, not as
individuals but, in the words of Roberts, as hierarchically racialized
“populations.” While these technologies are presumed to be
purchasable by any individual of means, the design and
development of the technology itself is preceded by, and becomes
an agent in, the perpetuation of a racially exclusionary economy of
life. In other words, while it places a price tag on white life, it
prefigures and preauthorizes black(ened) female debility and
premature death, making black(ened) life untenable despite the
interest of profit.37 In sum, in a racialized system, to delay or avoid
death from disease requires something in excess of technological
innovation and even equitable access to medical care; it requires
symbolic capital such that in the economy of life, it would appear that
life is principally purchased by means of bio-ontological currency.
As Lorde suggests, if black women were to opt out of this battle,
they unwittingly leave themselves unarmed and open to a militarism
that is there whether they recognize it or not and whether they self-
consciously engage in battle or not. To label this experience of
embattlement “masculinist” erases the critical reconceptualizations of
gender that black women and/or trans people and/or queer men
have adopted in order to resist the very real forms of occupation and
brutality they experience—a reimagining of feminine gender that
does not place militancy and femininity at odds. The work of feminist
and queer criticism is to reveal the limitations of rigid gendered
semiotics, not reinforce them by presuming we know what forms the
properly feminine or masculine can take outside of the racialized
contexts that introduce complexity and variance into gendered
experience and symbolics. To presume preemptively that
“militarized” expressions of one’s experience and efficacy are
masculinist potentially reinforces the very patterns and networks that
Lorde asks us to confront and combat. And there is a significant
literature suggesting that black people’s unconscious, and therefore
impersonal, identification with antiblack attitudes and affects bears
directly on black(ened) people’s physical health.
In short, the establishment and maintenance of pro-black attitudes
among black people, even where there are repeated experiences of
racism, may help to mitigate (but not fully avoid) the physiological
and psychologically debilitating effects of antiblackness.38 For these
very reasons, Lorde’s resignification of war with its attentiveness to
semiotics, affect, aesthetics, and desire was that much more incisive
and prescient. In Mutu’s Histology, a skull is nestled between two
pairs of black women’s splayed legs—cross bones (Figure P.13).
The skull, tumorous overtakes the trunk of the body and head. The
body visually restates the metaphor of openwork employed here.
Inside the lattice where a head would be, the white male scientist
surrounded by his collection of skulls. The image recalls that black
female flesh’s death and debility historically and contemporarily
arranges and capacitates Man and powers empirical science—
Henrietta, Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, Saarjite . . .
 Coda

Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower

Lorde’s and Mutu’s contention that racial domination has a direct

impact on bodily states and somatic processes challenges prevailing
biocentric theories in the life sciences that have historically
suggested that social and environmental (f)actors were distal to
manifestations of disease. However, to underscore the linguistic
power of racist culture is not to discount the agencies or efficacies
inherent to the organismic body; Lorde and Mutu reveal that
biology’s agency is not prior to or independent of the biopolitical
order but embedded in biopolitical systems that not only inscribe the
surface of bodies but also penetrate the skin. Rather than deny the
agentic capaciousness of matter, in this view, the very agency of the
body produces the conditions of possibility for the racially disparate
gutting of bodies by reproductive tumors and cancerous cells. This
sociogenic production of antiblackness, which I will describe as
necropolitical, extending Achille Mbembe’s original formulation,
anticipates and radicalizes emergent theories in the burgeoning
biomedical field of epigenetics (Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). I argue
that epigenetics’ claim that the body is emergent, mutable and
protean potentially can be interpellated by racism such that black
maternity is further tasked with the responsibility to observe cultural
norms held to reproduce norms of reproductive health and bodily
outcomes that are themselves antagonistic to blackness. It suggests
that prior hierarchical biologized conceptions of race could be recast
in epigenetic terms. Epigenetic race like “biological race” potentially
extends and dissimulates forms of governmentality that need race
and maintain antiblackness.
With biological determinism now on the decline in the life sciences,
epigenetics is currently unsettling genetic dogmatism with the
contention that genes never act alone but always “in concert” with
social and environmental partners. Reviving mid-twentieth- century
embryologist Conrad Waddington’s model of the “epigenotype,”
epigenetics emphasizes that biology is socially meaningful and the
social is biologically meaningful (Waddington 10). According to
epigeneticists, environment and social processes have the ability to
modulate gene expression without changing the underlying structure
of DNA—on both the scale of mitosis (cellular reproduction) and
meiosis (sexual reproduction).1 We not only inherit genes from our
parents, we also inherit a system that regulates their expression,
revealing or concealing our genetic potential. This system is called
an epigenome, and it is commonly likened to volume controls for our
genes (Roberts, Fatal Invention 142). The controls, called marks,
can turn on or off, to quiet or amplify genetic potential. Therefore, our
genetic potential is not determined by any preset or fixed program
but is instead modulated by an epigenome which is highly
responsive to social and environmental prompts. Moreover, our
genes possess potential, including pathogenic potential, that may
very well go unexpressed depending upon our social and
environmental experiences; the reverse is also true, as social and
environmental toxins may initiate disease processes that could have
otherwise gone unexpressed. That we inherit an epigenome and its
structure of marks suggests that we are affected by the social and
environmental experiences of our recent ancestors; while these
marks are durable, they are also reversible precisely because they
rely upon social and environmental cues.
Genetic reductionism, or the idea that genes dictate the form and
function of organisms (captured in the simplistic notion that “DNA
makes RNA makes protein”), lost esteem with the conclusion of the
Human Genome Project, which not only demonstrated that humans
have fewer genes than predicted—some twenty thousand rather
than the hundred thousand expected—but also revealed that less
than 3 percent of those genes code for protein (Barnes and Dupré
65). Shaking the confidence of stalwart genetic determinists and
raising questions about what other functions the genome might
perform, the Human Genome Project’s findings catalyzed desire for
a more complex model, making way for our moment’s “interactionist
consensus” (Kitcher 411).
While epigenetics unsettles long-held ideas in genetics, in
particular genetic reductionism and determinism, it thankfully does
so “without the immediate resettling of doxa—the primacy of the
gene as causal foundation of life phenomena and the vehicle of
heredity” has by and large been eclipsed by theories of “causal
cascades” and “chains of causation” (Landecker and Panofsky 342,
343, emphasis added). This more complex theorization of “cause”
halts nature-nurture debates that “pose genes and environment as
separate and opposed causes” (Landecker and Panofsky 349).
Epigenetically relevant environmental (f)actors are both internal and
external to the organism (Meaney 50). As Landecker and Panofsky
note, “This broadens the scope of “environment” to a net of
interconnected molecules and processes to which the boundary of
the skin is of little significance” (339). Nonteleological and dynamic,
epigenetic models allow not only for stability but also
nondeterminacy and even unpredictability with respect to gene
expression.
The interactant supersedes genetic metaphors such as “the
blueprint” and “the book of life” along with the false certainty they
imply—the epigenetic references complex systems of bio-psycho-
cultural-environmental interactivity and a corresponding range of
potential genetic outcomes therein. Epigeneticists depart from
approaches that seek to establish a 1:1 relationship between DNA
and phenotype, proposing that we depose the “iconic double helix” in
exchange for a flexible system of interactants where the body is
active in its own iterative developmental unfolding. Social and
environmental exposures incite hormonal response, which then
initiate cellular processes that affect the structure and function of the
body, which then responds anew to the environment in a dynamic
and ongoing interactive relationship between the body and
environmental agencies (Guthman and Mansfield, “Implications”
497). Genetic logic seeks the sequence variation that underlies
different physical and behavioral outcomes; in contrast, epigenetic
logic asks how different outcomes arise from essentially similar
genetics (Landecker and Panofsky 336).2 In short, epigenetics
concerns how environments and social structures “come into the
body” and attends to how the interactive process of penetration and
internalization modulates the genome, rather than positing genetic
variation as the “underlying” cause of biological difference or racial
health inequities (Landecker and Panofsky 348).3
Epigenetics’ proponents suggest that the field’s arrival spells the
end of biocentric conceptions of race, even as paradoxically the
epigenome gains its purchase against the backdrop of the
biopolitical cult of the gene: the double-helix acquired much of its
intransigent iconicity as a result of the desire for a sturdy theory of
biological race. The prominence of reductions and faulty
expectations such as “Genes as biological atoms, and genes as
carriers of information,” created anticipation (and funding) for the
Human Genome Project, exposing, as much as they relied on, the
interpellative power of the desire for an empiricist and, indeed,
molecular (im)materialization of race (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger
217). If we consider that the epigenetic study of “racial health
disparities” has been key to elevating the status of, and ensuring
confidence in, the field’s potential to effectively research and create
new biomedical solutions to social-induced racial inequities in health,
then we must critically consider the field’s insights as well as its
biopolitical, and even necropolitical, implications and consequences.
Like the Human Genome Project, the field’s insights may very well
be bound up with its biopolitical objectives.4
Drawing from developmental biology theories, which emphasize
the importance of fetal and early childhood development for the
lifetime health of a person, epigenetics maintains that social and
environmental impacts experienced by the maternal parent have
consequences for fetal development and may even contribute to
adult health outcomes: epigenetic marks and gestational processes
have consequences for biological processes and responses across
the life cycle (Barker 27). For instance, early life and prenatal
undernutrition have long been thought to help explain racialized
patterns of adult cardiovascular disease risk, wherein low birth
weight is a crucial indicator of the potential for adult cardiovascular
disease as well as preceding conditions like hypertension and
diabetes (Kuzawa and Sweet 4). Studies aver that a fetus faced with
undernutrition might make adjustments to rate of growth, reduce
nutritional requirements, and even modify the structure and function
of organs and other systems involved with metabolism and
physiology; such fetal modifications are believed to have effects that
linger on into adulthood, influencing the development of chronic
disease (Kuzawa and Sweet 4).
While there is little doubt that black women globally, in particular
impoverished black women, commonly experience a redundancy of
exposure to harm from the environment and undernutrition, many
now believe that—as is the case with breast cancer recurrence and
mortality—psychosocial stress stemming from systemic racism is the
most representative factor in the determination of black women’s
reproductive health outcomes. This phenomenon is sometimes
referred to as “weathering” (Geronimus 207). In In the Wake: On
Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe takes inspiration from
Morrison’s Beloved in defining her concept of weathering in
ecological terms: “The weather is the totality of our environments;
the weather is total climate; and that climate is antiblack . . . it is the
atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies”
(Sharpe 104, 106). The weather is particularly pernicious with
respect to low birth weight and infant mortality—black infants’
mortality rates are almost three times that of white infants (National
Center for Health Statistics 114). Regarding low birth weight,
Kuzawa and Sweet note, “The most important predictors of
compromised birth outcomes include factors such as self-perceived
discrimination, racism, and chronic stress” (10; see also Giscombe
and Lobel 669, and Mustillo et al. 2128). Given the intransigence of
structural racism, it is likely that low-birth-weight children could very
well experience similar psychosocial stressors in adulthood as their
mothers, predisposing them to have low-birth-weight children as
well. As a consequence, certain biological or metabolic states
theoretically have the potential of cycling intergenerationally across
matrilineal generations (Kuzawa and Sweet 9).5 While epigenetics
implies that stressors not experienced firsthand can have biological
consequences for successive generations, if these stressors were to
disappear entirely, blackness’ deathly prefiguration could still intrude
upon and overtake forces of life for generations; as such, the
somaticization of antiblackness, its physics, carries the potential to
unmoor the time and spatial constraints of “historically situated”
modalities of racial terror.6
In Achille Mbembe’s formulation, necropower is power over death,
acts of killing that exceed state regulatory capacities: the onward
march of war in the absence of a formal declaration or army. Might
the forms of deadly power I have described be necropolitical? Might
Mutu and Lorde be pointing us to a mode of war that Sharpe
describes as “total climate” (Sharpe 104)? With the history of
Western colonialism as a starting point, in “Necropolitics,” Mbembe
calls into question the normative theory of democracy by troubling its
privileged term—politics. Mbembe goes on to redefine “politics” as
an idiom of war before announcing that war is the primary driver of
Western sovereignty. Mbembe casts doubt on the presumed
sufficiency of Foucault’s theory of biopower—that domain of life
intruded upon and held hostage by state power—by ultimately
arguing that the regulation of death rather than life is the essential
objective of Western sovereignty, an objective that collapses
distinction between means and ends (Mbembe, “Necropolitics” 12).
In light of Mbembe’s reconsideration of Western sovereignty’s telos
as that of death rather than life, it follows that biopower would be
deposed in an effort to provide a closer examination of the contours
of necropower—its technologies and mechanisms. As Mbembe sets
forth, necropower’s “concern is those figures of sovereignty whose
central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized
instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction
of human bodies and populations” (14).
My interest in extending Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics
here concerns how necropower’s antiblack “relations of enmity,”
which are in fact a nonrelational form of relationality, not only
instrumentalize human existence but also weaponize the biological
field such that the black(ened) body, the very materiality of the
organism, yields and redirects its energies to the destruction of black
vitality (16). Biopolitics defines itself “in relation to a biological field”
which it “takes control of and vests itself in” so that it might regulate
the life of those who matter and dispose of those that prefiguratively
do not through war and genocide (17). Conversely, the necropower I
describe “displays no weapons” because war as described here is
im/materialized, concealed in the bodily processes of the nullified as
a kind of suicidal telos or self-detonation and even internecine in
utero toxicity (36). This idiom of war in its nonspectacularity and
nontheatricality thwarts biopolitics’ gendered calculus of those
wounded, fallen, and vanquished by war. While civil society largely
disavows the existence of this war, it nevertheless insistently
appears in the “scopic regimes” of medicine’s diagnostic
technologies and algorithms, where we might argue that the HeLa
cell is a kind of cipher.7
While I share Mbembe’s contention that humanity is embedded in
the technological and coevolves with technicity, my reformulation of
necropolitics necessarily departs from Mbembe’s conceptualization
of the relationship between space and technology as it pertains to
the embodiment of race, in particular his spatialized theory of
prosthesis. As in Foucault’s original formulation, Mbembe describes
a social power that merely objectifies a presumably inert body, such
that the body like the environment is mere setting (Guthman and
Mansfield 489). Moreover, in “Necropolitics,” the technological
object, or weapon, is thought to reside in a space exterior to the
body. Upon the usurpation of the weaponized object, it becomes an
extension of your self-conscious will—a tool that extends the reach
and capabilities of a self-possessed body, aiding in the navigation of
worlds and manipulation of matter.8
In the contrasting framework elaborated here, the black(ened)
maternal body’s endocrine system, organ systems,
neuropsychological pathways, and cellular functioning are essential
agencies in antiblack necropower, such that the distinction between
the body and war’s weaponry no longer rests on a solid boundary
between human subjectivity and external environment, nor that of
subject and object. Here, acts of war are not exclusively directed by
intentional human action, and the harnessing of war’s weaponry
exceeds the subjectivist domain. While I share Mbembe’s concern
regarding the manner with which colonial racialization produces and
is produced by the spatialization of populations into “cells,” my
emphasis is different. I want to query how social processes—the
prison “cell,” the political party “cell,” and the military “cell”—interact
with somatic cellular processes, producing alterations to the
immediate cellular environment and cellular functioning in a manner
that we might also describe as necropolitical. Privileging the colonial
modality, Mbembe’s spatial reading describes a necropower that
compartmentalizes life and death into geographic zones “epitomized
by barracks and police stations,” but in what I describe necropower’s
“boundaries” and “internal frontiers” are not so much spatialized but
corporealized and are therefore nomadic, traveling with black(ened)
subjects even when they are able to transgress geopolitical-
spatialized borders (Mbembe, “Necropolitics” 26).
This nomadism on the part of antiblack violence, both in its
corporealization (traveling with black subjects) and in its ubiquity and
opportunism (waiting for a black subject to arrive), has required
researchers working in the areas of “racial health disparities” to
reconsider their baseline suppositions about the relationship
between socioeconomic status and health. It has become
increasingly difficult to justify continued investment in the belief that
the assumption of increased economic mobility can provide the
sufficient conditions necessary to rectify disparate reproductive
health inequities for black women; rather, trends in the findings cast
doubt on the appeal of regulatory authority and policies aimed
primarily at black attainment of upward mobility in the form of
increased educational access and class ascendancy.9
One particular statistic has captured the attention of the media
likely due to the way it shatters the commonly held belief that class
mobility and educational access can provide shelter from the
pernicious effects of antiblackness: black women with graduate
degrees have been reported to have higher infant mortality rates
than white women who did not finish high school; in fact, the health
inequity between black and white women is higher among women
who are more educated and therefore presumably more
advantaged.10 Some have interpreted this divergence with general
findings as providing proof of genetic racial difference (Cooper et al.
1166). As Clarence Gravlee notes, such a view rests on two
reductive and mutually constitutive equations: “race” equals “genes”
and “biology” equals “genes” (Gravlee 49).11 Such genetic
deterministic thinking forestalls reflection on what should otherwise
be obvious; as Dorothy Roberts notes, “It would seem strange for a
large group of people as genetically diverse as African Americans to
have such a concentrated genetic susceptibility to so many common
complex diseases . . . A more plausible hypothesis, given the
persistence of unequal health outcomes along the social matrix of
race, is that they are caused by social factors” (“Fatal Invention”
116–117). Moreover, what racially deterministic reasoning forecloses
is the possibility that upward mobility does not provide sufficient
shelter from the health burdens of systemic racism for black
women.12 On the contrary, systemic racism, I contend, exceeds the
health safeguards class mobility would presumably provide and
regulation purports to protect—introducing irony into our conception
of upward mobility.13
Systematic research into racial health inequities, only really begun
in the 1990s, has challenged some of the initial guiding assumptions
informing not only genetic approaches to race but also constructivist
approaches. As I will argue, this recent research has actually
exposed what they share in common. Both perspectives adhere to a
teleological approach to the theorization of race and attribute a
problematic materiality to race, suggesting that race resides in
bodies, rather than in the (im)material effects of interactional
systems.
 It appears that most researchers prematurely assumed that racial
health inequities are primarily attributable to economic class
discrimination (black people’s disproportionate representation in
economically disadvantaged classes) and access-related factors
thereto such as insurance status, income, education, access to
medical care, residential segregation, and neighborhood-level
poverty.14 Similarly, even when researchers thought racial health
inequities were likely attributable to an aggregate of socioeconomic
variables, and not simply reducible to class discrimination, they also
imported a bias by erroneously presuming that these amalgamated
factors would take a linear and additive structure in the lives of black
people (Kaplan and Kell 1993). This interpretation shares with the
class reductive approach the assumption of an overly simplistic,
gradational structure of privilege, and thus wellness, in the lives of
black people by too readily equating the relative achievement of
income, education, and/or occupational prestige among some black
people with the assured embodiment of privilege.
While studies typically attempt to test their presumptions by
establishing socioeconomic “controls” as a matter of course, quite
often they confront the twinned aspects of an impasse: the
impossibility of establishing “control” in the arena of experience and
blackness’ irreducibility and opacity—in other words, its resistance to
representation. Moreover, as Calvin notes, even when indices of
socioeconomic status are thought to “explain” differences, “findings
suggest that there may be a very different experience of SES
[socioeconomic status] among ethnic groups . . . the processes by
which these differences occur are not uniform among or within ethnic
groups” (Calvin et al. 319). Researchers presumed that black lives
would mirror those of whites—once socioeconomic adjustments
were taken into account, of course—whereby wellness would
typically stand in positive linear relation to upward mobility; however,
often what they found instead was more indicative of an inverse
correlational matrix—confounding initial expectations.15, 16 Precisely
because both approaches underestimated the extent to which
antiblackness is an “antecedent and determinant” of socioeconomic
scales as well as an integral component of the “causal pathway” for
health among groups—irrespective of racial identity—they missed
that (anti)blackness structures the racially differential operations of
socioeconomic status and therefore cannot be reducible to
socioeconomics.17 In other words, their presuppositions obscured
the fact that antiblackness is ecological or total climate.
Moreover, as David R. Williams et al. note:

[T]he conceptualization and measurement of SES is

limited. SES is too often used in a static, routine and
atheoretical manner . . . [The] persistence of racial
differences after adjustment for SES emphasizes that
race is more than SES and that additional research
attention is required to understand the ways in which
unique experiences linked to race, such as non-
economic forms of discrimination[,] can adversely
affect health. (“Racial Differences” 337)18

It is not that socioeconomics is unimportant or irrelevant to racial

health outcomes; it is undeniable that SES bears directly on health,
but it would appear that in the lives of black people SES impacts
health in ways that are often surprising, contravening rather than
reinforcing presumed causal or correlational links between
socioeconomics and health.
As racial health inequities research studies have begun to suggest
that blackness is far from a metonym for socioeconomic status
(whether a single factor or compounded factors), the shift in attention
from poverty to racism not only underscores the distinctive health
burdens posed by racism, it also raises a related question with
regard to how one might account for or “measure” racism.
Specifically, it calls into question whether any standardized measure
of “discrimination” or “perceived discrimination” could be sensitive
enough to capture “the same construct for [all] women” given
divergence and relational hierarchy in how the societal structure
mediates the relation between racially divergent paradigmatic
constructions of “woman” and subjective experiences of
“womanhood” (T. Lewis et al. 363).19
If a metric, by definition, attempts to delimit and monopolize the
terms of a phenomenon’s intelligibility and even provides the terms
through which we might conceive of a problem such as
“discrimination,” this also means that our metrics simultaneously
suggest parameters for our solutions and, in the case of regulatory
science, may even be a determinant of the terms of social policy. If
measurement is the sine qua non of regulatory science and is
contiguous with state policy, what metric is adequate to measure the
ubiquity and chronicity of antiblackness?
The point I am trying to make is that antiblackness is an ecology of
violence—pervasive and chronic. Although antiblackness relationally
distributes differential material effects across the color line, in the
making of the color line, the experience of “race” confounds
comparative study rather than provides a comparable standard of
measure.20 To put a finer point on it, the matter of black womanhood,
as universality’s nullified referent, stands in nonanalogous relation to
normative womanhood on both the registers of experience
(embodiment) and paradigm (structural relation); consequently, and
as should be unsurprising by now, the white woman standard reveals
its fraudulence as universality. For black women, socioeconomic
upward mobility, when attainable, is nevertheless enfolded by racial
immobility—a stasis at the heart of their mobility that often takes the
form of a downward telos, a negative correlation in the context of
(reproductive) health.21 This constituent contradiction, stasis in
mobility, stems from the targeting of a population in their blackness.
That this declivity travels with black people, like a second skin,
distinguishes it from economic discrimination and targeting of the
poor in their poverty.
What this suggests is that the very tools of regulatory science
have exposed a crisis at their center. Fields such as public health,
epidemiology, and epigenetics are now confronted with both the
limits of their tools’ explanatory powers and the stakes of their
function in the ongoing maintenance of the regulatory apparatus,
especially with regard to the state’s sleight of hand: socioeconomic
access and reform. These fields have discovered and documented
the conditions of their ongoing crisis and revealed the potential, and
even necessity, for regulatory science to fundamentally question its
partnership with the state, in other words, for science to extricate
itself from the regulatory apparatus. If the “interactional consensus”
surfaces in popular media via depictions of black female sex/uality
and reproduction as peculiarity, it behooves us to ask to what extent
this mediatization is other than pornotroping: yet another occasion to
terroristically marvel at and/or spectacularize black female sex/uality
and reproduction for public consumption. This crisis of purpose must
be confronted if the “interactional consensus” is to be other than the
subjection of Man’s limit case to further antiblack experimentation
and genealogical isolation at the hands of self-appointed experts or a
prelude to black maternity’s censure and punishment. To put it
another way, if these fields are the research arm of policy, what
policies do the findings discussed above suggest? What policy
initiatives are sufficient to intercede on behalf of black life?
Two key concerns, in particular, have been raised regarding the
future of epigenetic research: One, it is troubling that researchers
continue to essentially ignore paternal pathways to reproductive
health.22 Two, studies that attend to sex difference tend to bypass
“gender,” namely how gender dynamically and nonteleologically
interacts with the sex.23 However, if epigenetic developmental
theories, with their emphasis on fetal health and intergenerational
transmission, continue to precipitately gain acceptance, then
epigenetics’ contention that certain ages and/or developmental
stages are particularly sensitive to environmental and social
influence raises the disquieting specter of biopolitical reproductive
regulation. It is not hard to imagine that purported concern for the
development of fetal biological systems will likely increase as the
content of epigenetic research enters public consciousness. Might
such concerns for the fetus eclipse the contextual conditions of black
women’s maternity? Will the public travel the well-worn path of black
maternal abjection, negation, and criminalization?24 One might recall
the criminalization of crack-addicted mothers in the 1990s. The view
of undeserving black motherhood provided the rationale for
restricting fertility and unrestricting carcerality. As noted by Dorothy
Roberts, the mediatized image of “diabolical pregnant crack addicts
and irreparably damaged crack babies” was based on spurious data.
Despite the medical, developmental, and behavioral problems
reported to be caused by maternal crack use, recent studies have
shown the methodological flaws of initial studies, which tended to not
only exaggerate findings but also ignore other causal pathways that
might better explain findings and were better supported by evidence
(Roberts, “Unshackling” 951).
If in an epigenetic framework race is seen as an emergent quality
of the body rather than an essential one, then an epigenetic
understanding of biology as mutable and protean “can intensify race
by relying on-and ascribing responsibility for upholding—racialized
norms of behavior and bodily outcomes” which are presumed to be
healthy and “normal” (Mansfield 353). Despite the views of those
who maintain that epigenetics boosts a social constructivist
conception of race and heralds salubrious futures, Becky Mansfield
questions if epigenetics’ linkage of “social regulation to gene
regulation” portends not the end of biological constructions of “race”
but rather recasts the biopolitical operations of biologized race in
epigenetic terms:

Biology may be mutable—life epigenetic—but because

of this it becomes not just the individual opportunity but
individual responsibility to manage that. The ability to
choose is taken for granted. In this liberal project, the
problem is non-white women, who do not properly
protect themselves and their offspring. If they fail in
their choices—fail as liberal subjects—they cause harm
to themselves and their children . . . It is because
biology is not given but made that race becomes more
important. In a world in which biological outcomes are
 made (they are our own responsibility), then
differences in outcomes show that we are in fact
different, and it is that difference that constitutes race.
(369)25

Mansfield’s insightful query is a pressing one considering that

biopolitical regulatory power and disciplinary power go hand-in-hand;
discipline and regulation are interdependent and mutually reinforcing
forms of governmentality.
The discovery of the broad mutability of the body and its
intergenerational pathways has the potential to subvert the gains
made by the scientific nullification of genetic conceptions of race,
especially if epigenetics is understood in biologically reductive terms
and in an uncritical relation to antiblack misogynist depictions of
black women’s maternity. If antiblack racism’s biochemical and
neurophysical pathways predispose both mother and fetus to bio-
neuro-social imposition in a manner primarily impervious to
consciousness; this inescapable somatic vulnerability for both fetus
and mother might nonetheless be subject to censure by a biopolitical
state power that continues to invest in structures that conscript
potentials and impose harm. Cloaked by the pretense that black
women are able to consciously “choose” otherwise, the censure and
even criminalization of black motherhood, in the nightmare scenario I
describe, would only serve to renew commitment to the perpetuation
of biological racism.
Such a perilous existential horizon requires a response that both
exposes biopolitical regulation’s inadequacy with respect to the
inequitable burden antiblackness places on developmental
processes (fetal and otherwise) and challenges regulation’s
emphasis on “personal responsibility.” Such notions extend and
dissimulate structures of power that need racism in order to maintain
their regulatory authority. Rather than take Western sovereignty’s
self-representation for granted, we must foreground the practice of
sovereignty, and when examining sovereignty in action, sovereignty’s
normative claims of regulatory “protection” must be reconsidered. As
Mansfield succinctly notes:

Individualized optimization is not a post-racial promise,

but rather a gendered and racialized demand. . . . Nor
does this sort of individual optimization require that we
choose between inclusion or exclusion (as liberal
subjects, part of the population to be protected) or
exclusion (as exception, that part of life dangerous to
itself and so sacrificed). Here we see that—through
race—we have both, intimately tied, and in the same
body (individual and collective). Not only in the name of
protecting “others,” but in the name of protecting
themselves, racialized subjects are assumed to be full
liberal subjects capable of securing the population
through their behavior, and are shown to be incapable
of such: to be a threat . . . as the one who is given the
chance to be the liberal subject and fails, and as
biologically different, producing offspring who bear the
biophysical signs of her failures. (369)

Subversion of genetic race, like regulatory intervention, is only

meaningful to the extent that the system of racism is made
inoperable. The subversion and reintroduction of racialized codes of
bodily difference has been central to biopolitics; thus, we need not
only the subversion of racialized codes but also the mutation of
ordering logics and their structures of signification to forestall the
reintroduction and dissimulation of racialized logics. In other words,
our disruptions must exceed subversion, specifically by dismantling
racism’s sociogenic autopoetic structures, or self-perpetuating
systems, if we are to make antiblackness inoperable.
A framework critical of the meeting of epigenetics, biopower, and
necropower might proceed via an inquisitive practice of description
that neither presumes we already have an adequate epistemological
model for comprehending the nature and stakes of the kind of force I
describe nor presupposes that a sufficient political framework for
intervention already exists. One might ask: What are the methods
and delineations of a violence that has the capability to impinge on
black women’s bodily agentic capacity and appropriate the mutability
of bodies, such that the body submits—materializing social rather
than genetic categories? Do we know how to conceive of a socially
constructed principle, specifically “racial blackness,” that despite its
fraudulent foundation is nevertheless able to “drive developmental
processes?” (Kuzawa and Sweet 11). How might an abstraction—
race—become a biological pattern? If each introduction of regulation
or policy holds the potential to expand disciplinary power, how might
we disarticulate state authority rather than re-inscribe it?
Moreover, how might one practically propose regulatory
“protection” from the “nebulous concept” of “stress”? What language
of “equal protection” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
could one avail themselves of that does not prefigure racial
blackness and preauthorize antiblack violence? If one were to
nevertheless seek regulatory “protection”—cessation and redress,
for instance—then one would necessarily vest authority in the
regulatory apparatus and thereby risk reinforcing its legitimacy. If
Mbembe is correct and racial injury is Western sovereignty’s
condition of possibility and ongoing effect—even its sign of
legitimation—then the severe limits of this strategy are obvious, even
if disappointing for some. In light of this predicament, what are the
consequences of pursuing something that falls short of systemic
social and environmental transformation? Is it any wonder that the
landmark essay of David R. Williams et al., “Racial Differences in
Physical and Mental Health: Socio-economic Status, Stress, and
Discrimination” concludes with the assertion that ending these
inequities will “require changes in the fundamental social systems in
society”? Taking heed, at the very least, would require the pursuit of
ever-increasing complexity in our understanding of the problem
systemic antiblackness poses for the form and function of life
systems, their nature, and their varied temporalities and scales
(349). In other words, it would require a sociogenic confrontation with
the ontological plasticity and even formlessness imposed on black
people.
While “[e]pigenetic changes are defined as alterations in gene
expression that are self-perpetuating in the absence of the original
signal that caused them,” this does not imply narrative closure or a
predetermined end (Dulac 728).26 As Kuzawa and Sweet note, it
would be a mistake to view epigenetics as simply

replacing genetic race with an essentialized concept of

epigenetic race; instead, it shows how social
environments, defined along lines of constructed and
socially imposed racial identities, can drive
developmental processes, thereby becoming embodied
as biological patterns that influence health and
disease. (11)27

Thus, while the social consequences of racism can have durable

effects on biology and health, as Kuzawa and Sweet note, “durable”
need not equate with “permanent” (11). Even as we note the
potential dissimulative dangers of epigenetic insight, biological
systems are much more flexible than racial social structures have
proven to be. Studies demonstrate the continued flexibility of
biological systems into later stages of development and hold open
the possibility that strategies can be introduced to limit disease risk
and even reverse epigenetic influences prior to birth (Kuzawa and
Sweet 11).28
I began this coda by discussing an error in the predictive
capacities of empiricist (social) science; such an error, I argue, stems
from an incomplete break in logic governing the conversion of a
genetic theory of race to a social constructivist conception. In the
transition from genetic code to social construction, “race” was still
imagined as a variable rather than a system of terrifying yet
contingent inter(intra)actions: to the extent that blackness is an
identity, that identity is not complete in itself—it points to an evolving
multiscalar field of inter(intra)acting systems (human and
nonhuman), not a discrete entity or compound.29 While the structure
of blackness may assume a significant measure of coherence as
systemic antiblackness has certainly enjoyed a remarkably stable
telos of redundant and premature death, nevertheless it is a telos
that in its very iterative structure defers ontological finality.
Antiblackness—if it is a system rather than a ground—will have to
confront that which exceeds its structure of stable replication and
confounds its adaptive operations, which are the very conditions that
generate mutational possibility.
Becoming Human was underwritten by the belief that if history is
processual and contingent, then art holds the potential of keeping
possibility open or serving as a form of redress. In other words, art
can be a remedy and may be a means of setting right a wrong. The
expressive works in this book, like those of Mutu and Lorde, perform
this intervention by defying the rules of given literary and visual
artistic genres and traditions, performing innovative philosophizing
and contrary aesthetics using what Saidiya Hartman has once called
“the visceral materials of history.”30 These novels and visual works
“break forms, breaking them open so other kinds of stories are
yielded” and other philosophies of being can be felt and known
(Hartman).
 Acknowledgments

I owe immeasurable gratitude to my teachers: Ms. Turpeau, Tommie

Shelby, Paulette Pierce, Saidiya Hartman, Abdul JanMohamed, Kaja
Silverman, Samera Esmeir, Kristen Whissel, Paola Bacchetta, and
Nelson Maldonado-Torres. I have benefited tremendously from
learning from you. Thank you!
I would also like to thank the following people for their words of
encouragement and support over the years: Carla Trujillo, Katherine
McKittrick, Alex Weheliye, Rinaldo Walcott, Roshanak Kheshti,
Christina Sharpe, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Jared Sexton, Kyla
Wazana Tompkins, Dinesh Wadiwel, Frank Wilderson III, Stephanie
Batiste, George Lipsitz, Julie Carlson, Jeffrey Stewart, Axelle Karera,
Cedric Robinson, Courtney Baker, Christina León, Dana Luciano,
Rebecca Wanzo, Robin Hayes, Simone Browne, Janine Jones,
Jayna Brown, Jasbir Puar, Mel Chen, Marlon Bailey, Calvin Warren,
Xavier Livermore, María del Rosario Acosta López, Keguro
Macharia, Sora Han, Charis Thompson, Kyla Schuller, Mireille Miller-
Young, Brandi Catanese, Darieck Scott, Donna Jones, Neel Ahuja,
Aimee Bahng, Anne Pollock, Harlan Weaver, Banu Subramaniam,
Susan Squier, Alvin Henry, Irina Aristarkhova, Kim TallBear, Ruha
Benjamin, David Marriott, Kelli Moore, Sheri Davis-Faulkner, Treston
Faulkner, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Dionne Brand, Kara Keeling, Jules
Gill-Peterson, Greta LaFleur, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Cary Wolfe,
John Deckert, Samantha Frost, Claire Jean Kim, Timothy Morton,
Vanessa Agard-Jones, Rizvana Bradley, Patrice D’Agostino, and
Moya Bailey. I cannot thank you enough for your generosity,
guidance, and professional advice.
Much gratitude to the English Department at the University of
Southern California for inviting me to join the department and guiding
me toward success, especially David St. John, Karen Tongson, Elda
María Román, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, David Román, Alice
Gambrell, Meg Russett, Dana Johnson, Ashley Cohen, Devin
Griffiths, Robin Coste Lewis, Viet Nguyen, Maggie Nelson, John
Rowe, Hilary Schor, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Lemon, Christopher
Freeman, Joseph Boone, Daniel Tiffany, Thomas Gustafson,
Lawrence Green, and William Handley. I am also grateful for the
opportunity to get to know and build community with people at USC
beyond my home department, in particular Natalie Belisle, Ronald
Mendoza-de Jesús, Neetu Khanna, Veli N. Yashin, Elaine Gan, Erin
Graff Zivin, Nayan Shah, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Chris Finley, Edwin
Hill, Sarah Kessler, and Reighan Gillam. I appreciate former
colleagues at George Mason University, especially Noura Erakat,
Keith Clark, Stefan Wheelock, Craig Willse, Paul Smith, and Steve
Holmes, for their generosity and support.
I want to thank the following people for their camaraderie and
friendship: Kai Green, Siobhan Brooks, Kwame Holmes, and Eva
Hayward. I thank the members of the Sexual Politics, Sexual Poetics
collective for laughter and fellowship: Amber Musser, Jordan Stein,
Ramzi Fawaz, Damon Young, Roy Pérez, Kadji Amin, Jennifer Row,
Uri McMillan, Katherine Brewer Ball, and Shanté Paradigm Smalls. I
want to especially thank Shanté Paradigm Smalls for being the best
possible friend I could ask for and for being everything that’s right in
this profession.
I have had the privilege of being in queer and trans community
with people who have modeled modes of worlding, critical thinking,
ethics, care, and love beyond the violence and indifference of the
present: Tisa Bryant, Amina Cruz, Tchaiko Omawale, Janaya Khan,
Gabrielle Civil, Rebecca Ruiz-Lichter, Ill Nippashi, Wild Tigers
Kendrick, Macio Kendrick, Amir Rabiyah, María Cherry Rangel, Leah
Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kenyon Farrow, Quo Judkins,
Marques Redd, Adee Roberson, Irina Contreras, Jyvonne Haskin,
Elokin Orton-Cheung, Ryan Sinclaire Davis, Urooj Arshad, Taising
Chen, Sam Feder, Myra Boone, Tiffany Mott, Almas Haider, Sadie
Crabtree, Ebony Dumas, Miriam Zoila Pérez, Ki Mack, Kat McKyle,
Abby, and Lynnée Denise. Your friendship has sustained me.
Although the ebb and flow of life as well as the realities of
gentrification and neoliberalism have, at times, made our
connections tenuous and transient, know that I cherish your
friendship. I am the history of my relations, and I thank you for your
loving praxis.
Working with NYU Press has been simply wonderful. I thank them
for believing in this project and for their steadfast commitment to
bringing it to fruition. Many thanks to my editor, Eric Zinner, his
assistant Dolma Ombadykow, and the Sexual Cultures series
editors, Tavia Nyong’o, Ann Pellegrini, and Joshua Chambers-
Letson. My thanks to Wangechi Mutu and Vielmetter for permission
to reproduce Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors
and One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. Thanks also to
Nandipha Mntambo and Stevenson for permission to reproduce
Europa on the cover. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of this
manuscript. I appreciate your care and thoughtful reflection.
This book could not have been completed without the support of
the following fellowships: The Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Year
Fellowship at Notre Dame, the Department of Black Studies
Dissertation Fellowship at UC Santa Barbara, and the Carter G.
Woodson Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Virginia.
My thanks to LaMonda Horton-Stallings for her comments on
chapter 4 and Karla Holloway on chapter 3 while I was a Woodson
postdoctoral fellow.
Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were developed in earlier essays:
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity
in the (Neo) Slave Narrative.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and
Social Sciences, 25.1–2, 2016, pp. 95–136; and Jackson, Zakiyyah.
“Sense of Things.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2.2,
2016, https://catalystjournal.org.
Notes
 On Becoming Human: An Introduction

For more on Césaire’s concept of thingification, see Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.

The idea that the enslaved’s humanity was plasticized, at the register of ontology, initially
arose out of the following series of phrases “the chameleon capacities of racism, the various
registers of domination, exploitation and subjection traversed by racism, the plasticity of
race as an instrument of power, and the divergent and sundry complex of meaning
condensed through the vehicle of race” in Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (119). I was
struck by the term “plasticity,” and in my dissertation, “Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality,
and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity,” I created a theory of the slave’s plasticity in
light of Hartman’s critique that slavery operated most commonly, in practice, if not word,
through the recognition of humanity rather than by means of the denial of humanity. The
theory I developed there was deepened in an article of mine titled “Losing Manhood:
Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo) Slave Narrative.” Within the structure of much thought
on race there is an implicit assumption that the recognition of “human being” will protect one
from (or acts as an insurance policy against) ontological violence. See Jackson, Beyond the
Limit and Jackson, “Losing Manhood.” My thanks to Patrice Douglass for the phrase
“everything and nothing” as a descriptor of the plasticity I describe (P. Douglass 116).
See also Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and Gates’s reflection on the literary
genealogical conditions that facilitated Wright to “broadly characterize Negro writing as an
effort to demonstrate the writer’s full humanity and equality with white human beings”
(Gates 129). Gates, The Signifying Monkey. For an argument about how literature functions
as a tool for liberal multiculturalism’s discipline and regulation of difference see Melamed,
Represent and Destroy.
While this area of the philosophy of race is certainly edifying and formative for my thinking,
there is a striking lack of attention to the role of sexual difference even despite its central
role in the historical discourse of reason. On Kant and reason see Eze, On Reason and
Mikkelsen, Kant and the Concept of Race for a learned review of recent scholarship on the
topic and translations of the primary sources. On Hegel and reason see Park, Africa, Asia,
and the History of Philosophy; Valls, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy; Smith,
Irrationality; Mbembe, On the Postcolony.
For the phrase “afterlife of slavery,” see Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother. For a recent
and innovative work that thinks the terrible longue durée of slavery beautifully see Christina
Sharpe’s In the Wake.
See Sharpe, In the Wake; Scott, Extravagant Abjection; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black;
Jackson, “Waking Nightmares—On David Marriott.”
See Butler, Bodies that Matter; Gender Trouble; Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body;
Sex/Gender.
While our notions of plasticity are distinct and take different approaches to the question of
the racialization of sex/gender, what I do strongly agree with is Schuller’s problematization
of binary sex and the assertion: “What we need is theories that account for the
coconstitution of material and cultural processes over time.” Schuller, The Biopolitics of
Feeling 27. This book is my contribution to these shared projects. To observe how my
concept of plasticity has developed, see the second note of this chapter and Jackson,
“Losing Manhood.” In addition to Schuller, “plasticity” has been conceptualized by a range of
 thinkers including Hegel and most notably Catherine Malabou. I take up these alternative
usages in chapter 1.
See also Jules Gill-Peterson’s important new book which also explores the possibilities of
plasticity as a mode of optimization vis-à-vis normativizing clinical discourses of sex/gender
and trans* subjectivity; Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child.
0 For considerations of this point as it concerns the early modern Americas, see for instance:
Morgan, Laboring Women; Sublette and Sublette, American Slave Coast. Regarding the
nineteenth century, a few key but divergent approaches to slavery’s paradoxes of sex
difference and gender: Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power”; Abdur-Rahman,
Against the Closet; Somerville, Queering the Color Line.
1 For an introduction to this line of inquiry see: Henry, Caliban’s Reason; Bogues, Black
Heretics; Mannoni, “Prospero and Caliban.” For a consideration of the antiblackness of the
sex-gender matrix and its implications for the Caliban figure, see also: Wynter, “Beyond
Miranda’s Meanings.”
2 See Henry and Wynter on the historical context of European expedition and voyage to the
New World: Henry, Caliban’s Reason; Wynter, “1492.”
3 See Wynter for an important work that initiated my thinking on this topic. Wynter, “Beyond
Miranda’s Meanings.”
4 See Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? and Animal Rites and Derrida, “Eating Well.”
5 For critical work in this area, read: Wolfe, Animal Rites. Derrida, The Animal That
Therefore I Am; Seshadri, HumAnimal.
6 See TRAFFIC, “What’s Driving the Wildlife Trade?” and Vince, “Organised Gangs Target
Wildlife Trade.”
7 Recent scholarship is beginning to trouble this tendency, see for instance: Chen,
Animacies; Ahuja, Bioinsecurities; Kim, “Dangerous Crossings”.
8 See: Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Gordon, Existentia Africana; Hartman, Scenes of
Subjection; Spillers, Black, White, and in Color; Wilderson, Red, White & Black; McKittrick,
Sylvia Wynter; Moten, In the Break; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Sharpe, In the
Wake; Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race; Mbembe, On the Postcolony;
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.”
9 By Wynter, see “1492,” “Is ‘Development’ a Purely Empirical Concept . . . ,” and “Unsettling
the Coloniality.”
0 The phrase “genre of the human” was developed by Sylvia Wynter in order to provincialize
Enlightenment-based humanism, despite its claims to “universality.”
1 For more on how this debate has been discussed from either a philosophical or historical
perspective, see: Jordan, White Over Black; Goldberg, Racist Culture; Gordon, Fanon and
the Crisis of European Man; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Eze, Race and Enlightenment;
Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. Enlightenment thinkers were not univocal in their views on
imperialism. Arguably, there are many Enlightenments rather than a singular imperial
modernity. For texts that highlight anti-imperial tendency within Enlightenment see Muthu,
Enlightenment Against Empire and Pitts, A Turn to Empire.
2 For an excellent introduction to Aristotelian theories of human animality, see MacIntyre,
Dependent Rational Animals.
3 See Linne, The System of Nature; Buffon et al., A Natural History, General and Particular.
4 See Wynter, “1492” 7.
5 I argue that this is the case even in Aristotle’s conception of dependent and rational
animals, as Aristotle developed his theory of human animality in the context, and as a
justification, of his society’s practice of slavery.
6 Hegel critiques African rationality for its “arbitrary” nature, but this is because he conflated
his conception of rationality with Reason.
7 See Dyer, White; Hollander, Moving Pictures.
8 See Hill, “Iconic Autopsy.” I am thankful for John Peffer’s excellent Art and the End of
Apartheid for bringing my attention to Legae’s Chicken Series. My engagement with this
work draws considerably from Peffer’s astute contextualization of Legae’s art practice. See
Peffer’s “Becoming-Animal” for his argument that there is common ground in “Christian and
African narratives of regeneration and birth” (Peffer 72).
9 For recent scholarship that explores these aspects of Sylvia Wynter’s theory of sociogeny,
see Ambroise, “On Sylvia Wynter’s Darwinian Heresy;” McKittrick, O’Shaughnessy, and
Witaszek, “Rhythm.” I extend Wynter’s theory by considering bios’s implications and
efficacies beyond the neurological.
0 I would like to thank one of my anonymous readers for this observation.
1 See Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto; Frost, Biocultural Creatures; Alaimo,
Bodily Natures; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
2 Linnaeus, Systema Naturae; Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie and Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte.
 Chapter 1. Losing Manhood

An earlier version of this chapter was published in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social
Sciences and has been revised and extended here. Jackson, “Losing Manhood.”
My use of the term “conscription” in this chapter is inspired by David Scott’s thought-
provoking Conscripts of Modernity.
See Orlando Patterson’s description of the “constituent elements of slavery”: violent
domination, dishonor, natal alienation, and chattel status. Patterson, Slavery and Social
Death.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. In the course of her study, Hartman demonstrates the
manner with which the purported peculiar properties of humanity became the pathways for
the intensification of domination. This project extends Hartman’s pathbreaking intervention.
On the pitfalls of the concept of “dehumanization” in particular, see Samera Esmeir’s “On
Making Dehumanization Possible.”
I have adopted “being/knowing/feeling” from Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse.”
The neo-slave narrative is commonly defined as a modern or contemporary fictional work
that draws on antebellum slave narratives, postbellum slave narratives, abolitionist fiction,
and the sentimental novel in order to fictionally recreate a narrative of New World slavery’s
past and/or consider the continuities and implications of history for the present. See this
foundational text for a representative approach to the genre: Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives.
For instance, René Descartes (Discourse on Method) and Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the
State of Virginia).
For a fuller discussion of the historical context and development of the Chain of Being, see
Archibald, Aristotle’s Ladder, Darwin’s Tree.
For a great book that explores this topic historically, see Salisbury. She argues that during
the Middle Ages a culture that once considered humans as absolutely distinct from animals
began to adopt the view that the animal was within, and one’s humanity was measured by
behavior not species membership. This corresponded with the humanization of animals.
Humans began to identify with animals, especially in literature, but the anxiety caused by
shifting borders led to the animalization of Jews and other marginalized populations.
Salisbury, The Beast Within.
0 Hereafter cited as WH.
1 Cary Wolfe coined the phrase “discourse of species” in order to critically intervene in the
semio-material twinned and oppositional constructions of “human” and “animal.” Wolfe,
Animal Rites.
2 For an excellent discussion of the raciality as geopolitics, see Ferreira da Silva, Toward a
Global Idea of Race.
3 Ring, “Painting by Numbers” 126–127. Ring provides an excellent exposition of how
Douglass embraces “Christ-based values” while rejecting the hermeneutical warping of its
pro-slavery adherents. She also underlines the problems of elevating Douglass’s narrative
as authentic or original.
4 For differing but highly generative accounts of how white racial anxiety, in particular,
structured transatlantic debates concerning the interrelation of political sovereignty, humane
reform, race, and animality as they pertain to white heteropatriarchal reproductive futurity
 and salvation during the nineteenth century, see Hartman, SCENES OF SUBJECTION;
Grier, Pets in America; Mason, Civilized Creatures; and Pearson, The Rights of the
Defenseless.
5 Deborah E. McDowell, in the introduction to Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 101.
6 McBride 3, 5.
7 An actant is that entity or activity which “modif[ies] other actors.” Latour, Politics of Nature,
75. On “noise” see Michel Serres’s cybernetic approach in Serres, The Parasite and
Hermes, 123–124. For a different take on noise see also Moten, In the Break. In Moten’s
highly-influential text, his interest is in the scream or what is in excess of speech as
disruption and fugitive action. The emphasis in this chapter is different. Exploring and
naming noise’s other potentials, I am concerned with the way the orator’s speech and the
verbal quality of the slave are interpellated, in such a manner that forecloses the interruption
of meaning. Moreover, as in the case of Douglass, one’s speech could be considered a
performance of eloquence and experienced as unintelligible simultaneously, precisely
where its political demand is unsettling and especially where it is cataclysmic. Here, as in
the subsequent chapter, I am also concerned with where speech itself commonly does not
even register as utterance or is coercively rearranged into consent to the terms of
domination. As in chapter 2, I describe (channeling Spillers) this as the predicament and the
mark of black mater that conditions not just that of Douglass’s speech but of modern
globalizing discourse more generally. Michel Serres argues that noise or the parasite is
constitutive of communication; all communication is vulnerable to interruption by the noise
that is constitutive to it. Thus, what is at stake is not primarily whether a disruption has
occurred but whether a disruption actually interrupts or forestalls communication. As noise
is a relational quality or affect rather than inherent; it can therefore emerge while being
inaudible due to habituated unlistening.
8 Texts that historicize and analyze the conditions of early African American autobiography
with respect to the conventions of abolitionist discourse and other literary modes and forms
include Foster, Witnessing Slavery; Foreman, “Manifest in Signs”; McBride, Impossible
Witnesses; Andrews, To Tell a Free Story.
9 Douglass, “Frederick Douglass” 4, emphasis added. Douglass is not proposing that all
farming is brutalizing. Rather, he argues that slavery is brutalizing to both humans and
animals as it coarsens humans’ treatment of life. However, Douglass’s humanism does
have him privileging particular aspects of humanity that are seen as uniquely human, such
as reason and affection, even if he seeks to recognize these traits in animals. But his
recognition of animal reason and affection still positions animals as lacking “to a limited
degree.” Animal studies scholars such as Derrida question how securely “the human”
possesses these very characteristics, and others such as Vicki Hearne argue that the
comparisons do not take difference seriously. As a dog’s nose is its strongest sense and the
average dog’s nose is exponentially stronger than the typical human’s, critics such as
Hearne ask: on what basis do we compare humans and animals? For thinkers such as
Hearne, the presumptive politics of comparison is the problem as it tends to take presumed
human attributes as the norm from which to compare animals. Arguably, by privileging the
gaze, Beloved also participates in Western, anthropocentric ocularcentricism even while
contesting the terms of its logic. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am; Hearne, Adam’s
Task.
0 It is difficult to suggest that theoretical, ethical, and political questions should be
coterminous with a species distinction with the human on one side and everything else on
the other. Nevertheless, for a sampling of recent scientific research on animal intelligence
and emotion, see Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only?; Griffin, Animal Minds; Bekoff and
Jamieson, Interpretation and Explanation; Bekoff and Pierce, Wild Justice; Bekoff and
Goodall, The Emotional Lives of Animals; Peterson, The Moral Lives of Animals. While
these texts foreground a world of multiple intelligences and communicative beings, they do
so at the risk of reinforcing scientism and anthropocentricism by preserving “the human” as
norm. In my work, indeed in this chapter, I have tried to trace the limitations of both
scientism and identification (with all its vicissitudes) as the grounds on which one bases an
ethics.
1 Fragments of this speech are often circulated in animal rights literature. For an example of
a prescriptive approach see Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison.
2 For an alternative reading of the “humane” and of Douglass in My Bondage and My
Freedom, see, Boggs, Animalia Americana, esp. 138–140 and 77–107.
3 See Scenes of Subjection on the question of empathetic identification, 17–25.
4 Although the event was held at the “Colored Fair Grounds,” the Tennessean gives a
detailed account of the whites in attendance: their anticipated and actual numbers, their
societal standing, and their projected responses to Douglass’s “address, and the manner
and style of delivery, and the sentiments which it contained.” See Douglass, “Frederick
Douglass,” 4.
5 For a discussion of these issues during the Progressive Era, see Lundblad, The Birth of a
Jungle.
6 The literature here is long. For a critique of sentimental identification as a mode of ethics,
perhaps start with Lundblad (Birth of a Jungle), Hartman (Scenes of Subjection), Pearson
(Rights of the Defenseless), and Grier (Pets in America). For variations on the subject of
affect(ability) and affect(ivity), see, respectively, Ferreira da Silva (Global Idea of Race) and
Mel Y. Chen (Animacies).
7 While not directly referencing or quoting the work of Giorgio Agamben, this chapter is
informed by his highly influential contributions to animal studies and posthumanism. The
psychoanalytic theory and criticism of Jacques Lacan and Hortense Spillers also loom large
as influences. Agamben, The Open; Lacan, Écrits; and Spillers, Black, White, and in Color.
8 Articles that underline the manner in which Beloved undermines or complicates empathy
between reader and characters as the novel’s approach to ethics include Travis, “Beyond
Empathy”; Hale, “Fiction as Restriction”; Phelan, “Sethe’s Choice”; Wu, “Doing Things with
Ethics.”
9 For an article on Beloved that stresses the narrative’s contradictions and aphorisms as
central to its ethics, see Harding and Martin, “Reading at the Cultural Interface.”
0 Morrison, Beloved. Again, Morrison is fictionalizing and exploring the racialization of the
Oedipal relation at the register of the paradigm rather than making a historical point or for
the sake of pursuing historical accuracy. However, on questions regarding the enslaved’s
gendered, familial, and sexual relations as they existed under slave law, I would suggest
Margaret Burnham’s important work: Burnham, “An Impossible Marriage” 187.
1 Saidiya Hartman has identified the slave’s fungibility, which is both economic and legalistic,
as a major characteristic of the institution. Hartman describes fungibility as the
 “abstractness and immateriality of blackness characterized by the replaceability and
interchangeability of black people within the logic of the commodifying practices of
enslavement” (Scenes of Subjection 21).
2 Mae G. Henderson provides an excellent discussion of Schoolteacher’s empiricism with
respect to the fields of history and ethnography as opposed to science and medicine.
3 My discussion of invention riffs off of Darieck Scott’s examination of the concept in
Extravagant Abjection.
4 Freud, The Uncanny 14.
5 Darieck Scott does a great reading of this shaking as tied to the feminized conceptions of
hysteria and female orgasm. Orgasm and the hysteric system are metonymically related in
Freud’s early theory of hysteria. For Scott, this shaking is the bodily notation of the distance
between Paul D’s actual male embodiment, his sense of failure, and a broken ideal (Scott,
Extravagant Abjection 142).
6 In The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death, Abdul JanMohamed
defines the death-bound subject as occupied by the zone between Spillers’s flesh and
meat, or “insensate flesh” (JanMohamed 10). On the production of blackness as meat, see
also Gray, “Necrophagy at the Lynching Block” 13–15; Marriott, On Black Men. For an
approach that further considers these two modes of meat production in their distinction see
Wadiwel, “Chicken Harvesting Machine.”
7 See Slavery and Social Death, where Orlando Patterson argues that “laboring” for the
master’s economic wealth is only one form that slavery takes. Not all slaves increased the
master’s economic profits, but all slaves labored for the symbolic accruement of the
master’s status.
8 We must think critically about the enthusiastic fetishism of ontological slippage in much
recent posthumanist, ecocritical, and speculative-realist work. Not only does the erection of
ontological dualism necessarily entail contradiction and aporia, but for these very same
reasons, they also require an exception, and black people have been burdened with those
contradictions. Fred Moten’s work is essential reading for serious thinking on the question of
objecthood. Moten, In the Break.
9 In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Malabou variously describes plastic reading as “a new
reading method,” a “new transformed type of structural approach,” or, more specifically, as
“the metamorphosis of deconstructive reading”: “The plastic reading of a text is the reading
that seeks to reveal the form left in the text through the withdrawing of presence, that is,
through its own deconstruction. It is a question of showing how a text lives its
deconstruction.” Malabou 51, 52. Ian James argues that plastic reading attempts to “discern
how the destruction or deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence leads to a mutation of
form, and, indeed, arises necessarily from a fundamental mutability of form per se. In this
sense, plastic reading is, like plasticity itself, defined as movement or passage between the
formation and dissolution of form” (James 85).
0 I share Samantha Frost’s concern about imaginings of the organismic body as limitless
unfolding and want to affirm her insistence on the evolutionary constraints and delimitations
of somatic potential. While ultimately indeterminable embodiment’s procession—its
emergent quality as it is entangled with an environment—is limited by what its evolutionary
history introduces into the realm of possibility. My argument is that the imagination of
limitless morphology is conditioned by slavery. Frost, Biocultural Creatures.
1 Brown’s essay provides an important historical analysis of discourses of plasticity in the
influential theories of eugenics and transhumanism while remaining optimistic about what
the plasticity of life introduces into possibility—an optimism I share even if it is not the focus
of the argument presented here.
2 More recently, Malabou’s conception of plasticity has extended to an engagement with
neuroscience. “Neuroplasticity,” Malabou explains, means the brain is modulated by the
unfolding of our experiences—and these modulations do “not just” document “that the brain
has a history but that it is a history” (Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? 4). The
neurobiological concept of “neuroplasticity” commonly describes the brain’s ability to
reorganize itself by forming new adaptive neural connections across the life course,
allowing neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to
adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.
Contrasting sharply with its predecessors, which characterized the brain in genetically
deterministic terms, as a static control center, the discourse of neuroplasticity emphasizes,
instead, the dynamic modulating function of experience and the continuous development of
the brain over the life course. Neuroplasticity has been heralded in the popular press as a
promise of salubrious futures, enunciated in an ableist key: cures for autism and ADHD, for
instance. Since the 1990s a more expansive conception of neuroplasticity has also been put
forward, neurogenesis, one that Tobias Rees contends Malabou largely ignores.
Neurogenesis challenges the idea of adult cerebral fixity, suggesting that the dynamism of
the adult brain is not limited to synaptic communication and that the development of new
neurons extends into adulthood. By marginalizing neurogenesis, Rees argues, Malabou’s
“synapse-centered conception of the brain” is actually “a pre-plasticity conception. And her
notion of cerebral plasticity is a relic of a time in which the brain’s main feature was not
plasticity—but its fixity” (Rees 266).
Moreover, in her recent turn to neuroscience, or the discourses of neuroplasticity,
Malabou risks charges of material reductionism and scienticism in constructing an ontology
of the real based on the flux of experimental research and recent findings. In an attempt to
map the interrelations and effects of social networks of power and neural networks,
Malabou argues in What Should We Do with Our Brain? that capitalistic society is
isomorphic to neuronal organization. I would argue it is a racial capitalism and the not-yet-
past of slavery that conditions biotechnological and biocapital imaginaries, including those
that shape the history of neuroscience. I thank Cameron Brinitzer, Gabriel Coren, and Mel
Salm for bringing Rees’s critique to my attention.
Lastly, Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s new work is crucial to this discussion. The Brain’s Body:
Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics provides an urgent and necessary rejoinder to
contemporary discourse that often assumes binary sex difference, such as neuroplasticity,
overdetermining their findings. See also Jordan-Young, Brain Storm and Fine, Delusions of
Gender.
3 On the figuration of animality (human and otherwise) as a state of privation, see Seshadri,
HumAnimal.
4 On dissemblance see Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”, and Hine, “Rape and
Inner Lives.” On aphasia see Jakobsen et al., “Two Aspects of Language.” See also Frank
Wilderson’s important discussion of antiblackness and aphasia, “The Vengeance of
Vertigo.”
5 Ngai 126.
6 Jameson 202, 268.
7 For more information, see Stearns, “Gender and Emotion,” esp. 135.
8 See Darieck Scott for a reading of male-on-male rape on the chain gang in Beloved
(Extravagant Abjection 126–152). Paul D once tries to escape from slavery, only to be sold
to a new owner, who he eventually tries to kill. Foiled in his attempt, his ankles and wrists
are shackled before being tethered to a buckboard by rope. Paul D subsequently finds
himself on a chain gang. The chain gang quarters that greet Paul D are “wooden boxes.”
The convicts have “a door of bars that you could lift on hinges like a cage [emphasis
added]” which “opened into three walls and a roof of scrap lumber and red dirt” (Morrison,
Beloved 125). The “grave” is two feet over his head; Paul D is five feet underground in a
ditch (Morrison, Beloved 125).
The jailer’s placement of Paul D in the earth potentially implies that he has descended
below the rank of animals and has become insect—his cage, an exoskeleton. But the cage
does not fulfill vital functions, as the exoskeleton typically does, including excretion,
sensing, feeding, protecting the muscles, and acting as a barrier against predatory
organisms. For Paul D, the cage as exoskeleton fails in its essential function: it is not a form
of protection at all. Literally lower than dirt, Morrison notes, “anything that crawled or
scurried” can join him; and what can join Paul D would likely feast on him and/or the
excrement Paul cannot remove from the cage that has now become part of his body
(Morrison, Beloved 125). This skeleton, instead of protecting his muscles, actually atrophies
his bodily strength along with his mind. Commonly for arthropods, when the time comes, if
they do not shed their exoskeleton, they will die from suffocation. For Paul D, his
exoskeleton is a redundant symbol of and means by which he would experience his “captive
embodiment” and living death (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection 86).
9 Alex Weheliye, in Habeas Viscus, makes a similar point in the following:

The concentration camp, the colonial outpost, and slave plantation suggest
three of many relay points in the weave of modern politics, which are neither
exceptional nor comparable, but simply relational. Although racial slavery and
the Holocaust exhibit the state of exception, they do so in different legal and
political ways, since slavery’s purpose was not to physically annihilate, at
least not primarily, as much as to physiologically subdue and exploit, erasing
the bios of those subjects that were subject to its workings. (37)

In doing so, Weheliye quite directly and persuasively problematizes the Nazi
concentration camp as “ultimate incarnation” and the mandate of “zone of indistinction” in
Agamben’s theory of biopolitics (34). However, what is paramount, in this chapter, is the
plasticity of black(ened) people at the register of the paradigm rather than the instance of
the historical slave. In the process of developing such a theory, or by implication, plasticity
unsettles and displaces both “suspension” and “zone of indistinction” as the sin qua non
of biopolitics. This is not to say that history is not important here, but rather that as
Hartman states, slavery is “yet to be undone.”
0 My thinking on transparency and opacity is shaped by the work of Glissant (Glissant and
Wing, Poetics of Relation).
 Chapter 2. Sense of Things

Portions of this chapter appeared in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Jackson,

“Sense of Things.” For further thought on the question of void in my work, please see
Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void.”
My use of the term “onto-epistemology” is an attempt to think with as well as depart from
Barad’s work on entanglement and the problematics of representationalism. Barad states,
“onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way
to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how
specific intra-actions matter” (“Posthumanist” 829).
I use the term “local” not to signify “isolation” or a lack of politically complex encounters with
discontinuous onto-epistemologies near and far; rather, the use of “local” here is meant in
the relative sense given the relatively recent emergence of the global scale introduced by
processes of enslavement and imperial domination. See, for instance, Jayasuriya and
Pankhurst, The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean and Alpers, East Africa and the Indian
Ocean. I thank LaMonda Horton Stallings for bringing these texts to my attention. See
Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason for her use of “epistemic violence.”
See Robinson, Black Marxism for thought on “racial capitalism.”
Robinson Crusoe, Oroonoko, and The Blazing World in English and Don Quixote in Spanish
have been variously described as the first novels in either English or Spanish. Sinapia is
generally regarded as the first Spanish utopia, and Blazing World, similarly, is often
considered the first work of science fiction.
Wynter, “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth,’” 503.
To take but one example, in a process that contemporarily often goes by the name of
biopiracy or bioprospecting, Western biomedicine and pharmaceutical corporations
“discover,” expropriate, and recast indigenous knowledge of plant and animal species.
Through the enactment of purportedly secular rituals of copyright, patent, and
commercialization, indigenous knowledge is cleaved from the onto-epistemologies with
which it is embedded, and once purified this newly repackaged knowledge is then prepared
for sale and distribution in accordance with market logics. See Mgbeoji, Global Biopiracy
and Shiva, Biopiracy. Arguably, Mami Gros Jeanne is a symbol of the confluence of African
and Western biomedicine and science on two counts: 1) As a nurse, spiritual healer, and
seer, she is comfortable moving between indigenous and Western science, bridging the
two; 2) her story recalls the way Western medicine has historically expropriated and
repackaged indigenous knowledge and mined black women’s bodies and biomedical
knowledge, for instance, under slavery and prior to the professionalization of medicine,
enslaved women’s knowledge of midwifery, inoculation, and medicine more generally was
essential to preserving all classes on the plantation.
Many thanks to Amanda Renée Rico for bringing to my attention the Jessica Langer text.
Gibbons 27.
0 Definitions of “postcolonial SF” vary. For instance, Andy Sawyer’s foreword to Science
Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World suggests that “an explicitly postcolonial science
fiction not only has to be written from outside the traditional strands of Western science
fiction . . . but explained and criticized from outside them too” (Sawyer 10), and Hoagland
 and Sarwal’s “Introduction” more broadly defines postcolonial SF as “texts that draw such
explicit and critical attention to how imperialist history is constructed and maintained” (10).
On postcolonial SF, see Raja et al., The Postnational Fantasy and Hopkinson and Mehan,
eds., So Long Been Dreaming. David Higgins’s review of Science Fiction, Imperialism and
the Third World provides a productive introduction to some of the issues regarding
definition. Higgins, “Postcolonial Science Fiction.”
1 Black mater, as mater, as matter, gestures toward a web of interconnected signifiers such
as materiality and black femininity, maternity, natality, and relation to the mother. The black
mater(nal) as I describe it here is closely related to what Fred Moten in In the Break
describes as the “silenced difference” of “black materiality” at the meeting point of
discursivity and materiality: “In a fundamental methodological move of what-has-been-
called-enlightenment, we see the invocation of a silenced difference, a silent black
materiality, in order to justify a suppression of difference in the name of (a false)
universality” (205). I am also invigorated by recent work by Denise Ferreira da Silva that
examines questions of black mater for the question of “world,” in particular “Toward a Black
Feminist Poethics.” The approach here is informed by the Lacanian Real rather than Leibniz
and focuses on the particular problem of the definite article “the,” as a qualifier of “world.” In
light of the work by Quentin Meillasoux and other realist approaches to “world” and
anticorrelationist stances (i.e., some new materialist approaches), I have argued for a
disenchantment of the idea(l) of “the world” as a knowable concept, while holding on to the
notion of incalculable and untotalizable worldings. “The world,” and especially “the world as
such,” I argue, fails as a concept (at knowability) but succeeds as an idea(l) of imperialist
myth predicated on the absent presence of what I call the black mater(nal). This critique is
not limited to any particular representation of “the world” but is a rejection of the concept of
“the world.”
My use of the term “common sense” is informed by Antonio Gramsci’s use of the term in his
Prison Notebooks. For another important use of the term, drawing from and expanding
Deleuzian thought, see Keeling, The Witch’s Flight.
2 My argument about “nonrepresentability” is in conversation with and indebted to a tradition
of black feminist and queer theorizing on the problem of representation: Evelynn
Hammonds’s formulation of “black (w)holes,” Hortense Spillers’s analysis of “body-flesh”
and “mythic time,” Sylvia Wynter’s “demonic ground,” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s
“intersectionality.” They have also produced indispensable analysis of the modern injunction
against the black mater(nal)’s representability as an enabling condition of the modern
representational grammar. See Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings.” More recently, Kara
Keeling and Rizvana Bradley have produced energizing work on the relation between black
femininity and capacity through a critical engagement with black women’s filmic
representations. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight and Bradley, “Reinventing Capacity.” Lacan
uses the term “foreclosure” to investigate the possible psychical causes of psychosis.
Lacan, The Seminar. He locates the cause of psychosis in the absence of the (symbolic)
father from the scene of Oedipal family, thereby limiting the family to the mother-child dyad.
He concludes that the absence of the father or the Name-of-the-father is the central causal
factor for psychosis, which is understood as a severed connection or disjuncture between
the Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real. I am not using the term “foreclosure” in this strict
Lacanian sense. My use is more informed by the aforementioned black feminist
investigations of the burdened sublimity of the black mater(nal).
3 For more on the racialized distinction between immanence and transcendence, “belief” and
“scientific fact,” see Bruno Latour’s “On the Cult of the Factish Gods,” 1–66.
4 For a fuller discussion of raciality in Hegel’s arguments on world history, please see Denise
Ferreira da Silva’s superb reading of Hegel in Toward a Global Idea of Race.
5 Andrews and Colucciello Barber’s respective Deleuzian approaches to immanence attempt
to think the fullness of immanence and problematize historical, hierarchical dualisms
between transcendence and immanence. However, this chapter seeks to identify the
powerful and seemingly inescapable ways that the reciprocal productions of race and
gender haunt both the ongoing perpetuation of this dualism and its critiques as the very
terms themselves are racialized and gendered. L. Andrews, “Black Feminism’s Minor
Empiricism”; Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God.
6 This argument is informed by Jacques Derrida’s important work in Of Grammatology and
Margins of Philosophy concerning “structure of absence” and “différance.”
7 I thank Vanessa Agard-Jones for urging me to think more about what space is doing in this
work.
8 My use of the term “myth” is primarily informed by Hortense Spillers’s concept of “mythic
time” in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” which reworks the concept of myth in Roland
Barthes’s Mythologies. In Spillers’s deployment of myth, black femaleness is the iterative
and recursive material-discursive site, where the dominant system of values variably
(re)produces itself in “mythic time” rather than in a temporally and/or socially progressivist
manner. However, a number of scholars have written about myth in Brown Girl primarily as
it relates to folklore and religious studies, works that do not emphasize the social regulatory
function of myth in the sense that Spillers does and I extend. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe.” See, for example, Coleman, “Serving the Spirits”; Baker, “Syncretism”; and
Anatol, “A Feminist Reading.”
9 Besides Spillers, Morrison, Crenshaw, Wynter, and Hammonds’s indispensable
engagements with the problem of black(ened) female sexuation in the field of
representation, namely that “she” is both essential to the dominant mode and grammar of
representation and necessarily invisible, Meg Armstrong provides an excellent introduction
to race, gender, and sexuality in Kant and Burke’s theorizations of the sublime. See
Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”; Hammonds, “Black (W)holes”; and Armstrong,
“The Effects of Blackness.” This is a topic I take up at great length in work in South Atlantic
Quarterly (SAQ): see Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void.” On blackness and Kantian thought,
see Judy, “Kant and the Negro.”
0 As the black mater(nal) cannot be comprehended as a unified object with definite
identifiable endpoints, it invokes the infinite in size and power, appearing boundless on both
registers and, therefore, resists a mental form in the mind or imagination as well as
understanding or conceptualization. Moreover, one could not “know” the serialized,
empirical content of the black mater(nal) in its all at-once-ness or as it presumably exists but
only in its serialized conception, which due to processual capacities of thought and human
finitude would always remain incomplete. A book that names and engages this challenge
via the question of “the world” and the infinity of things is Markus Gabriel’s Why the World
Does Not Exist. This chapter invokes the aesthetic experiences of the beautiful and sublime
as they are read in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. While I am neither strictly adhering here to
Kant’s philosophy nor the influential philosophical inquiries into the sublime offered by
Edmund Burke and Jean-François Lyotard, the question of how the black female figure
 constitutes and disrupts these powerful analyses is taken up in an article in South Atlantic
Quarterly. Jackson, “Theorizing in the Void.”
1 The phrase “modern grammar of representation” indexes my attempt to think with and
alongside Hortense Spillers’s “American grammar” and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “modern
grammar” and “modern representation.”
2 On the notion of performance/performativity, here I am thinking with Karen Barad who
states the following: “[T]he representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror
preexisting phenomena is a metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as
well as traditional realist, beliefs. . . . A performative understanding of discursive practices
challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting
things. . . . The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the
focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they
mirror nature of culture?) to matters of practices/doings/actions” (802). Barad,
“Posthumanist Performativity.”
3 See Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Fact
for a critique calling into question the presumed primacy of the scientific method in the
practice of science. Latour and Woolgar find that representation is constituted alongside
practice at every level and that experiments are not rigidly performed or regulated in
accordance with “scientific method.” On the contrary, experiments typically produce
inconclusive results, and much scientific fact is constructed during the subjective process of
deciding which results to include and exclude. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life.
4 See Robert Heinlein’s definition of science fiction, for instance: “Realistic speculation about
possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and
present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific
method. To make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of ‘almost all’) it is
necessary only to strike out the word ‘future’” (Heinlein “Science Fiction” 9).
5 For critiques and extensions of Heidegger’s metaphysics, see Mel Chen on the concept of
stone and Graham Harman on the concept of object.
6 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Hereafter cited as Fundamental
Concepts.
7 Additional important exegeses on animality in Heideggerian thought include: McNeill, “Life
Beyond the Organism”; Franck, “Being and the Living”; Kuperus, “Attunement”; Oliver,
Animal Lessons, esp 193–207; and Krell, Daimon Life.
8 Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 16. Hereafter cited as Thinking.
9 This is the quote in its entirety: “[T]he beginning of Greek philosophy makes the impression
which alone is, according to the everyday understanding, suitable for a beginning: it
appears, to use another Latin root, primitive. In principle, the Greeks then become a kind of
highgrade Hottentots, and compared to them modern science represents infinite progress.
Quite apart from the particular nonsense that is involved in this conception of the beginning
of Western philosophy as primitive, it must be said: this interpretation forgets that the
subject here is philosophy, something that belongs among the few greats things of man.
Whatever is great, however, can only have had a great beginning. Indeed, its beginning is
always what is greatest. Little is only the beginning of little things, and their dubious
greatness consists in belittling everything; little is the beginning of decay which can also
become great in the end, but only in the sense of vastness of complete destruction”
(Introduction 12). For Heidegger, what starts off small will stay small, even if it “progresses”;
 even if it aspires to greatness, it will never achieve greatness and remain small because
‘greatness’ must be present at its origin. As Vycinas puts it, “The decline of the great is the
beginning of the small which starts small even though it may ‘progress’” (135). A number of
scholars working in the area of philosophy of race have offered considerations of racism in
Heidegger’s work; see the following notable critique: Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality
of Being.”
0 As Mel Chen has rightly insisted, to oppose humanness to the stone or inanimate, as
Heidegger does in his metaphysics, is to misrecognize that embodied humanity, in contrast
to his idealized metaphysical concept, is capable of composing stones, such as calcium
deposits. Moreover, Chen asserts, “Stones themselves move, change, degrade over time,
but in ways that exceed human scales.” So as it turns out stones do not mirror received
representations. Chen, Animacies 210, 235.
1 My thanks to Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús for encouraging me to linger on this point. Hegel’s
contradictory statements on African religion, the equivocation and reversals pertaining to
lack and alterity are mirrored in Heidegger statements regarding “the animal.”
2 Markus Gabriel has written an important new book challenging the idea of the world as
graspable, finite totality. In Why the World Does Not Exist, Gabriel rejects the metaphysical
concept of a domain of all domains or an all-encompassing object called the world. The
pursuit of such a domain leads to infinite regress, as every account of the world would
introduce something new into it such that a new domain would have to be introduced in
order to accommodate the totality of totality ad infinitum. In other words, Gabriel is not
simply arguing “the world” is nonempirical; Gabriel also maintains it does not appear
anywhere at all. There is no domain of domains that houses “the world.” If there were, what
of the house? Is the house in “the world” or not? One implication of Gabriel’s argument is
that it interdicts the idea of a unifying metaphysical presence.
If we assume totality, as Glissant does, I do not think we can access it; it would not be
determinable. I agree with Gabriel, the world is problematic as a concept, not because of its
ontological invalidity but its epistemological spuriousness. While we can conceive of and
contemplate the world as a unitary whole or totality as Glissant puts it, but we cannot know
it. Any claim to knowledge of the world as such is tantamount to imperialism. Moreover,
because we cannot know it and appears in no context does not necessarily imply its
ontological in-existence but rather this contextlessness should interdict any definitive—
rather than speculative—claim about it, including affirming or precluding its existence.
3 Regarding philology and the so-called Hottentot, Shane Moran draws on the work of
Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Martin Bernal to show how the study of language was
integral to the formation of racial discrimination in South Africa. Moran demonstrates the
central role of literary history to the cultural racism and ideology that fed into apartheid by
tracing the ethno-aesthetic figuration of the Bushmen. Moran, Representing Bushmen.
4 My thanks to Kyla Wazana Tompkins for this felicitous phrase. Michel Foucault is famous
for his conceptualization of power’s lability and distributed agency. Here, I am interested in
theorizing that which Michel Foucault would not, namely domination (Foucault, “The Subject
and Power”). Foucault famously equivocated before ultimately sidestepping the question of
agency under conditions of domination. Prior to quickly shifting and remaining with the
question of power’s relational forms and dynamics, Foucault vacillates: he argues in one
place that domination is the calcification of relation and therefore can neither be the proper
site of an inquiry into the dynamics of power nor of relationality but rather their disablement.
 But elsewhere he allows for some modicum of relational capacity and distributed agency to
exist in domination. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern.” My aim is not so much to settle
the question of capacity and/or relationality; rather, what I am more interested in exploring
concerns how movement at the ontic register of experience does or does not alter the
nature of domination and its ontologized terms in Brown Girl in the Ring.
5 See Stein, “Bodily Invasions;” Shukin, Animal Capital; Neel, Bioinsecurities.
6 See Jasbir Puar on “debility” in “Prognosis Time.” In an extended work on debility, Puar
offers the following distinction: “debilitation” is distinct from the term “disablement” because
it foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming dis-
abled (Puar, “Right to Maim” xiv). I mobilize the term “debility” as a needed disruption (but
also expose it as a collaborator) of the category of disability and as a triangulation of the
ability/disability binary. . . . [D]ebilitation is a necessary component that both exposes and
sutures the nondisabled/disabled binary (“Right to Maim” xv).
7 Giselle Liza Anatol has noted, “One of the great strides that Hopkinson makes in her
narrative is not only subverting the idea of the innately maternal woman, but specifically
debunking the contradictory European constructions of African-descended women as (a)
hyper-maternal mammies and (b) genetically apathetic, cold-hearted, and emotionally
distant mothers: stereotypes generated during the slave era and continuing into the present
day in various forms” (“A Feminist Reading” 33).
8 See Wynter’s “Miranda” and “Ceremony” for an articulation of black people’s signification
as chaos and irrationality in the discourses of Man.
9 Black maternity and madness had become nearly synonymous for Ti-Jeanne. Ti-Jeanne
even initially wonders about her own “waking dreams,” if they were brought on by “the
stress of learning how to cope with a newborn baby” (20). Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the
Ring.
0 I co-organized a panel on race and sensoria with Kyla Wazana Tompkins, where I
presented a part of this chapter, for the American Studies Assciation’s 2015 annual
conference. On that panel, Kelli Moore offered a presentation on black womanhood and
vertigo, the ear, and proprioception in light of Spillers’s concept of “vestibularity.” Moore’s
emphasis on the gap between voice and vision in black women’s testimony in domestic
violence cases inspired me to at least begin to think about how said gap might function in
Hopkinson’s text. That presentation has now generated a publication: see Moore, “Affective
Architectures.”
1 While Ti-Jeanne’s development as a character pivots on this conflict, it is starkly conveyed
in how Ti-Jeanne saw Mami’s “bush medicine” in comparison to Western bioscientific
medicine. While Mami used both as a healer and a formally trained nurse, “Ti-Jeanne didn’t
place too much stock in Mami’s bush doctor remedies.” . . . Ti-Jeanne would have preferred
to rely on commercial drugs. . . . Ti-Jeanne didn’t understand why Mami insisted on trying to
teach her all that old-time nonsense” (Hopkinson 36–37). But it was commercial, Western
medicine’s imbrication in commercial networks and state power that threatened to dissolve
the already fragile familial relations she had. I thank Darius Bost and Alvin Henry for helping
me develop this point and for being such great sounding boards for this work.
2 For synthetic and critical engagement with this topic, see Strother, Inventing Masks and
Gikandi, “Picasso.”
3 Wallace’s essay is productively riven with deep ambivalence and unsettled conclusions.
But in addition to this view, she expresses a conviction that it is indeed possible (and even
 desirable) for these collections to be made available to black artists in the West, who may
(and arguably already have) discover(ed) generative models in the ruins. Wallace, “The
Prison House of Culture.”
4 See also Gikandi’s discussion of the meeting of Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams and
canonical artist Pablo Picasso. Upon being introduced to Williams, Picasso looked at him
and remarked that he had “a fine African head” that he would like to use as a model.
Gikandi notes the following about that encounter: “Williams was disappointed that he was
appealing to Picasso merely as an object or subject of art, not as an artist, not as a body,
not even as a human subject” (455–456).
5 See Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.”
6 In After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux defines correlation as “the idea according to which
we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either
term considered apart from the other” (5). I am thinking here not only of Kant on the
different races of man and on national characteristics but also of Hegel’s thoughts on the
geographical basis of world history and their elaborate and fallacious reasoning, whereby
geography, reason, and time become the watchwords of an emergent, racially teleological
conception of “universality” and “world.” See Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment for excerpts
from these thinkers on these topics.
7 Eduardo Vivieros de Castro also contends that the terms through which Kant raises the
question of “correlationism” must be de-transcendentalized because the self–other frame
through which the question is cast is not universal but particular (de Castro, Cannibal
Metaphysics). With Vivieros de Castro, my argument is related. I agree that Kant’s mode of
questioning is neither universal nor should it be transcendentalized, but more than that, I
seek to explore the manner in which his mode of inquiry is an effect of an imperial history
and rationality. Moreover, Meillasoux, in a critique of correlationism, defines it as “the idea
according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being and
never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). While not the aim of this chapter, I
hope one consequence of these pages is a disruption of the “thought vs. world” frame of the
debate about correlationism. On noise, see Serres, Hermes.
8 Fred Moten’s work is indispensable on the question of blackness and object-status, see in
particular “The Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream” in In the Break.
9 This paragraph is taken almost in its entirety from an article I wrote entitled “Outer Worlds.”
0 The phrase “hieroglyphics of the flesh” is borrowed from Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe.”
1 See the following works that question eighteenth-century Eurocentric aesthetic standards
for “art” and that centralize the internal forces of change producing formal dynamism rather
than attributing innovation to relations with the West (especially Strothers, who cites other
scholars working in a similar vein): Achebe, Hopes and Impediments; Arnoldi, “Playing the
Puppets;” Strother, Inventing Masks. See Ferreira da Silva’s Towards a Global Idea of Race
for the insidiousness of the “culture” concept in the human sciences:

[T]he racial, the nation, and the cultural—fulfill the same signifying task of
producing collectivities as particular kinds of modern subjects. Each,
however, has very distinct effects of signification: (a) the racial produces
modern subjects as an effect of exterior determination, which institutes an
 irreducible and unsublatable difference; (b) the nation produces modern
subjects as an effect of historical (interior) determination, which assumes a
difference that is resolved in an unfolding (temporal) transcendental essence;
but (c) the cultural is more complex in its effects because it can signify either
or both. (xxxvii)

2 The phrase “out of the world” is taken from Mbembe’s On the Postcolony.
3 This quote is drawn from Wynter’s reading of Fanon’s reading of black(ened) men on the
occasions when they had “to meet the white man’s eyes” (110), as a prelude to the failure of
intersubjectivity, at least one that would be occasioned by the black’s ontological resistance.
Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic”; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Here, I altered
gendered assignations to accord with the focus of my analysis. Wynter also notes in the
preceding page the gendered specificity of Fanon’s narration of black(ened) men’s
experience of antiblackness, as well as what is shared across lines of gender:

While the black man must experience himself as the defect of the white man
—as must the black woman vis a vis the white woman—neither the white
man or woman can experience himself/herself in relation to the black
man/black woman in any way but as that fullness and genericity of being
human, yet a genericity that must be verified by the clear evidence of the
latter’s lack of this fullness, of this genericity. The qualitative aspects of the
two group’s mental states with respect to their respective experiences of the
sense of self are not only opposed, but dialectically so; each quality of
subjective experience, the one positive, the other negative, depends on the
other. (40)

n these pages, I am interested in how the black mater(nal)’s nonrepresentability enables this
entire field of antinomic dualisms.
4 See Boas, Race, Language, and Culture and Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man.
5 It is more interesting, and perhaps more relevant, to investigate the racial logic of Boas’s
empiricism here, given both the common assumption that the “science of culture”
established a decisive break with scientific racism as well as the pride of place
anthropological translation holds in the scholarship on Hopkinson’s writing. However, this
investigation could easily extend to the empiricism of David Hume, commonly described as
the founder of empiricism, and perhaps does so by implication as Hume is well-known for
the likening of a multilingual black man to a parrot. Michael Hanchard comments upon the
infamous analogy in the following: “Hume’s cryptic commentary has dual significance, for it
implies that the only civilizational possibilities for people of African descent were reactive
and imitative. The act of mimicry itself, its subversive and infra-political implications
notwithstanding, entails a temporal disjuncture. In historical and civilizational terms, Africans
in the aggregate could—at best—aspire to caricature. They could only mimic the aggregate
European” (Hanchard 252).
6 A number of critics have noted that the depiction of the orisha in Brown Girl does not
appear to re-present any practicing tradition but rather the “blending,” “fusing,” and
“dissolving of the boundaries in religious practices” as a “basis for a unique pan-Caribbean
 identity” (see M. Coleman). Or as Wood has noted, “tracing specific religious references
seems to become an academic enterprise” as the novel’s religious pantheon appears to
perform in such a way as to undermine our “ability to ‘place’ or locate these deities and
practices” (319). Wood, “Serving the Spirits.”
7 In contrast, please see Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-
American Art and Philosophy for his highly influential argument mapping cultural continuities
and what are called “survivals” between West African religion, particularly Yoruba religion,
and “New World” religious and cultural practice. This process of transcription is mapped in
spatiotemporal terms—from a putative African past to a (presumably Western) modernity—
such that when Africans, even “ancient” Africans, possess cultural properties ascribed to
“modernity,” those properties are still framed in comparative terms that presume the
“modern” is proper to the West. Furthermore, in framing its intervention in terms of a
disruption of a commonly held assumption that finds Africa lacking vis-à-vis signifiers of
“modernity,” its corrective misses an opportunity to fundamentally call into question the
mode of thought that seeks to distinguish and order a relational hierarchy between
“primitive” and “modern” technologies and lifeworlds. In short, it recasts rather than
forestalls a hierarchical binary between “modernity” and “tradition,” bestowing the
“traditional” with a positively inflected alternative value—that of transcendence. Moreover, in
building an argument about the Yoruba’s “transcendence” over the violence of the Middle
Passage and colonial violence, for instance, it fails to adequately account for the disruptive
and creative power of history, thus obscuring the dynamics of change that accompany
“Yoruba” practice (Thompson, Flash of the Spirit). For a related set of critiques of
anthropological claims to continuity, see Scott, “An Obscure Miracle of Connection,”
(Refashioning Futures 106–127) and “That Event, This Memory.” And, of course “invention”
here alludes to Mudimbe’s important book The Invention of Africa.
8 Here I am in agreement with Scott’s (Refashioning) contention, in a gloss of his first book,
Formations of Ritual: “The argument (one, it seems to me, still not sufficiently recognized)
was that anthropological objects are not simply given in advance of anthropological
projects, but are constructed in conceptual and ideological domains that themselves have
histories—very often colonial histories. My point, therefore, was that unless anthropology
attends, in an ongoing and systematic way, to the problem of the conceptual-ideological
formation of the objects that constitute its discourse, it will not be able to avoid the
reproduction of colonialist discourse” (13). See also Omi’seke Tinsley’s “Black Atlantic,
Queer Atlantic” which also calls into question the Middle Passage as “origin” (192). The
term “science of culture” is taken from the often-described founder of cultural anthropology,
Edward Burnett Tylor. His highly influential Primitive Culture developed the thesis of
“animism” and is known for being the first-systematic empirical study of the topic. Tylor
describes the reformist mandate of anthropological science as follows: “[W]here barbaric
hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view. It is a harsher,
and at times even painful office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old cultures
which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this
work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. Thus, active at
once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a
reformer’s science” (Tylor 453).
9 Other critics in (feminist) science studies have raised different but related concerns about
representationalism. Notable works include Hacking, Representing and Intervening; Rouse,
Engaging Science; Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.” See also Holbraad, who, like
 Barad, has rearticulated ontology in the terms of the performative and whose term
“production” informs and shares aspects with the approach I develop in these pages.
Holbraad, “Definitive Evidence, from Cuban Gods.”
0 Scott, Extravagant Abjection; Marriott, “No Lords A-Leaping.”
 Chapter 3. “Not Our Own”

The full Haraway quote in the epigraph is as follows, “Species reeks of race and sex; and
where and when species meet, that heritage must be untied and better knots of companion
species attempted within and across differences. Loosening the grip of analogies that issue
in the collapse of all of man’s others into one another, companion species must instead
learn to live intersectionally. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet 105–106.
Making a different but related point, Neel Ahuja has argued that the American Indian body
has been cast as the paradigmatic natural victim of disease: “a viral terra nullius.” In the
context of the Iraqi war, Ahuja argues, the state of the “nonimmune Indian” was the ominous
figure underwriting fear and intervention in the imperialist discourse of bioweaponry and
emerging disease (Ahuja 141–142).
It is the process by which the rhizome breaks out of its boundaries (deterritorializes) and
then reassembles or re-collects itself elsewhere and else-when (reterritorializes), often
assuming a new or shifted identity. If you break a rhizome, it can start growing again on its
old line or on a new line. Connections are constantly breaking (deterritorialization) and
reforming. Giger, Conversation and Figuration.
Du Bois, The Comet; Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman; Schuyler, Black Empire.
Deleuze and Guattari use the term “arborescent” to characterize “thought” marked by
essentialist totalizing principles, binarism and dualism. In A Thousand Plateaus, the term’s
counterpoint is Deleuze’s model of the rhizome. Derived from the way genealogy trees are
drawn, arborescence is characterized by centrifugal unidirectional growth. Rhizomes, on the
contrary, are noncentralized and not regulated by any structure. Rhizomes mark a
horizontal and nonhierarchical conception, they do not work via dialectics and subsumption
but by ceaseless expansive connection, with no respect whatsoever for established
categories or boundaries and thus generate heterogeneous links that are indifferent to the
taxonomic thinking. For a concise explanation of key Deleuzian terms, see Parr, Deleuze
Dictionary.
While some have read “Bloodchild” through the lens of the African American slave narrative,
Butler was vocally set against those readings. However, I do not agree with Butler that
those readings should not be pursued; I believe they have yielded persuasive textual
analysis, most notably Karla Holloway’s reading of “Bloodchild” in Private Bodies, Public
Texts. However, I do believe Starship Troopers and “The Screwfly Solution” are much more
resonant intertexts.
Starship Troopers tells the story of a soldier Rico and the development of his military
career set against the backdrop of an interstellar war between mankind and an arachnoid
species known as “the Bugs.” In Heinlein’s coming-of-age story, the human characters, or
Terrans, unquestioningly believe that humans are superior to “Bugs” and that humans are
destined to spread across the galaxy, which some have interpreted as a quest for racial
purity. However, Robert A. W. Lowndes argues that the war between the Terrans and the
Arachnids is not about a quest for racial purity but rather an extension of Heinlein’s belief
that man is a wild animal. According to this theory, if man motivated by the will to survive
rather than morality were to be confronted by another species, similarly motivated, and with
war-waging technology, then the only possible moral result would be warfare. See “In
Contrary Motion.”
 In the “The Screwfly Solution,” a Nebula Award–winning story, Tiptree also takes up the
question of the role of the biological in human societal and cross-species motivations of
violence. However, in “The Screwfly Solution,” an epidemic of organized murder of women
by men has emerged. Some scientists, based on laboratory animal research, suspect the
violence has its basis in a sex-selective insanity, but the murderers themselves think of it as
a natural fulfillment of instinct and have formed a new religious movement, Sons of Adam,
that justifies their actions based on an elaborate misogynistic onto-theology. The story
centers on Alan, a scientist working on parasite eradication in Latin America, and his
family’s response to the plague of murders. Eventually, Alan succumbs to the murderous
impulses he initially tries to resist, killing his daughter and leaving his wife, Anne, one of the
last female survivors to be hunted by a swelling mob. At the close of the novel, Anne,
pursued by an entire society bent on femicide, discovers the source and motivation behind
the plague of murders: an alien species is intentionally causing the human race to destroy
itself so that the aliens can have Earth for themselves.
See Rieder, Colonialism; Kerslake, Science Fiction; and Seed, “The Course of Empire” for
critiques of imperialism in the science fiction genre.
Hulme argues, “What is at issue is not just an idea (of eating human flesh) but rather a
particular manner of eating human flesh—ferociously—that is denoted in the European
languages by the specific term ‘cannibalism.’ . . . Cannibalism is a term that has no meaning
outside the discourse of European colonialism: it is never available as a ‘neutral’ word.”
Cannibalism “gained its entire meaning from within the discourse of European colonialism”
(83–84, 86). Hulme, Colonial Encounters. Beth Conklin’s Consuming Grief is an intervention
into common misconceptions of funerary cannibalism.
“Vagina dentata” is locally and historically variable. “The myth generally states that women
are terrifying because they have teeth in their vaginas and that women must be tamed or
the teeth somehow removed or softened—usually by a hero figure—before intercourse can
safely take place” (Creed 2). Tompkins defines queer alimentarity as “a presexological
mapping of desire, appetite, and vice” whereby “eating functions as a metalanguage for
genital pleasure and sexual desire. But eating is often a site of erotic pleasure itself, what I
call, as a means of signaling the alignment between oral pleasure and other forms of
nonnormative desire, queer alimentarity” (“Racial” 5).
0 Barthes’s notion of mythic time suggests a temporality that troubles “before” and after;”
thus, its ritual enactment appears to efface historicist lines of dividing one epoch from
another. Barthes, “Mythologies.”
1 Butler’s “Bloodchild” shares many motifs with James Tiptree Jr.’s (Alice B. Sheldon’s) 1977
Nebula Award–winning short story, “The Screwfly Solution,” such as penetrating parasites
and male sexism. “The Screwfly Solution” tells the story of an epidemic of femicide. It
exposes sexism’s bestialization of women, explores the danger of animalizing sex, and
implies that being labeled “animal” potentially carries a lethal threat for all beings:

We discussed the book, how man must purify himself and show God a clean
world. He said some people raise the question of how can man reproduce
without women but such people miss the point. The point is that as long as
man depends on the old filthy animal way God won’t help him. When man
gets rid of his animal part which is woman, this is the signal God is awaiting.
(Tiptree)
 “Animal” analogies appear throughout the text and underwrite the realist dimensions of
the story’s medical explanation. Not only is the epidemic thought to be rooted in the
biological locus of sexual reproduction, but it is also manifest in the Great Apes. In a
communication penned by Professor Ian MacIntyre, the story explains the epidemic as
follows:

A potential difficulty for our species has always been implicit in the close
linkage between the behavioural expression of aggression/predation and
sexual reproduction in the male. This close linkage involves (a) many of the
same neuromuscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and
sexual pursuit, grasping, mounting, etc., and (b) similar states of adrenergic
arousal which are activated in both. . . . In many if not all species it is the
aggressive behaviour which appears first, and then changes to copulatory
behaviour when the appropriate signal is presented (e.g., the three-tined
sickleback and the European robin). Lacking the inhibiting signal, the male’s
fighting response continues and the female is attacked or driven off. It seems
therefore appropriate to speculate that the present crisis might be caused by
some substance, perhaps at the viral or enzymatic level, which effects a
failure of the switching or triggering function in the higher primates. (Note:
Zoo gorillas and chimpanzees have recently been observed to attack or
destroy their mates; rhesus not.) Such a dysfunction could be expressed by
the failure of mating behavior to modify or supervene over the
aggressive/predatory response; i.e., sexual stimulation would produce attack
only, the stimulation discharging itself through the destruction of the
stimulating object. In this connection it might be noted that exactly this
condition is commonplace in male functional pathology, in those cases where
murder occurs as a response to, and apparent completion of, sexual desire
(Tiptree).

2 For a similar approach, see Haraway’s When Species Meet, where she maintains a belief
that ethical veganism bears crucial witness to the extremity of the quotidian brutality
directed toward animals while adding,

I am also convinced that multispecies coflourishing requires simultaneous,

contradictory truths if we take seriously not the command that grounds
human exceptionalism, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ but rather the command that
makes us face nurturing and killing as an inescapable part of mortal
companion species entanglements, namely, ‘Thou shalt not make killable.’
There is no category that makes killing innocent; there is no category or
strategy that removes one from killing. Killing sentient animals is killing
someone, not something; knowing this is not the end but the beginning of
serious accountability inside worldly complexities. (Haraway, Species 105–
106)
 Similarly, on the question of symbolic anthropophangy, see hooks, “Eating the Other” and
Derrida, “Eating Well.”
3 Her earliest novels such as Survivor, midcareer Xenogenesis series, and “Bloodchild” all
attempt to problematize some of the more imperialist dimensions of the science fiction
genre. This chapter will provide a more detailed discussion of colonialism and SF in relation
to “Bloodchild.” See Ahmed, “Affective Economies.”
4 The study of nonlinguistic sign making and interpretation (communication, meaning, habits,
and regulation) in biological living processes is biosemiotics. Biosemiotics proposes that
signification, meaning, and interpretation are intrinsic to biological life. The field aims to
shed light on unsolved questions in the study of semiotics, such as the origin of signification
in the universe. Biosemiotics challenges purely mechanistic interpretations of the organism
and a reductive notion of instinct as sufficient causation by indirectly investigating the co-
evolution of an organism’s dynamical semiosis (its informational quality and sign action)
with its physicality as situated by environmental interaction, including that which occurs
between other living signs. Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll (discussed in chapter 2) is
considered a progenitor of the field, but the term was coined by Friedrich Salomon
Rothschild. See von Uexhüll, A Foray; Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics; Wheeler, The Whole
Creature; and Barbieri, Introduction to Biosemiotics.
5 Unlike Butler, I believe that the disagreement between critics and the author as well as
among critics about what “Bloodchild” is “about” is generative. I believe that Butler’s fiction
is a philosophical event of such magnitude that critics have only begun to grasp the depths
of its complexity and interventions. Uninterested in confirming or countering Butler’s claims
concerning what the work is “about,” here I pursue a line of investigation that considers the
function of “species” in “Bloodchild,” which extends to Butler’s oeuvre more generally. My
inquiry by no means exhausts the philosophical potential of Butler’s fiction but approaches
the politics of colonialism and raciality through the logic of species that reinforces it.
6 Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
7 I would agree that the transparency thesis is a phantasy of autopoesis rather than
grounded in a rigorous cybernetic theory of autopoesis where a system is always situated
and thus mutually constitutive with determinants internal and external to its “self” regulation
and “auto” institution. Phantasies of autopoesis or “self-unfolding, self-representing,”
suggest the self decides upon its own essence and existence and has the “the ability to
design, decide on, and control one’s action” (Toward 39, 42).
8 Alva Gotby has written a dissertation on the work of Ferreira da Silva titled “Body,
Geography, Exteriority: Race and Spatiality in the Writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva.”
Gotby’s reading of Ferreira da Silva is highly instructive. Gotby, “Body, Geography,
Exteriority.”
9 The history of the idea of and the term terra nullius is hotly debated. Fitzmaurice dates the
idea to the 1888 Berlin Conference and the “Scramble for Africa,” others much earlier
(Reynolds 3). Some frame it as a “legal fiction” (Connor), whereas for others it is an
organizing logic whether uttered during the early period of European colonial expansion and
settlement or not. Nevertheless, there are some touchstones of the idea: Locke subscribed
to the belief that God gave the world “to the use of the Industrious and Rational.” The
presumption that indigenous economies did not improve the land was taken as justification
for regarding their claims to the land nonexistent and perceived as evidence that indigenous
peoples were in a so-called state of nature: in other words, in a state prior to rationality and
 self-governance. Europeans, already thought to have left the state of nature behind, were
then imagined to add value with the appropriation of land, and in fact presumably no
appropriation could be said to have rightfully occurred according to the circular logic of terra
nullius. The clearing away and extermination of peoples in the name of civilization,
development, and progress is inseparable from this idea. Both genocide and territorial
expansion and settlement are upheld by the twinned myth Francis Jennings has described
as “virgin lands and savage peoples” (The Invasion of America). For the implications of the
concept, see Mills, The Racial Contract. For the history of the concept, see Connor, The
Invention; Rowse, “Terra Nullius”; Borch, “Rethinking”; Fitzmaurice, “Geneaology”; and
Reynolds, The Law of the Land.
0 As Theodora Goss and John Paul Riquelme note, in referring to the Oankali as a “people”
in Xenogenesis, Butler implicitly invites the reader to accept its dual attribution: as aliens
and as ontological equals (“The Gothic” 198). Similarly, in “Bloodchild,” the term “Tlic
people” denotes both their ontological equivalence while also acknowledging their species
difference.
1 Bhandari et al. 598–599. They lay their larvae in the wounds left by the flies, mosquitos,
and ticks that act as their vector. Their eggs are released at the point when the human host
is bitten. It would be ill-advised to attempt removal of the maggots by squeezing or cutting
them out because they literally anchor themselves to the host by several ringed, concentric
rows of posterior facing spines and a pair of anal hooks. The Tlic in “Bloodchild,” like some
species of parasitic flies, have both the potential to be a harmful parasite and beneficial
symbiont. For instance, a botfly’s survival depends on the area not becoming infected, and
it rarely does because the larva releases an antibiotic into its burrow while feeding, which
guards against infection. There is still some debate about whether the botfly is bacteriostatic
or bacteri(o)sidal, or even if such a distinction is necessary if an agent is highly
bacteriostatic. See Harrison, Internal Medicine, “Ectoparasite”; Kettle, Medical and
Veterinary; and Passos et al., “Penile Myiasis.”
2 The “Red Queen” is a term used in evolutionary biology to account for parallel evolution in
linked species, where adaptation by one species threatens the survival of the linked
species, triggering a reciprocal evolutionary move (348). Bollinger, “Placental.”
3 Conversely, Laurel Bollinger argues that while the Preserve might be an “internment
camp,” it could also be “a way to keep desperate Tlic from forcing humans into such
dangerous pregnancies” (“Placental” 333). Bollinger’s reading suggests more mutual
symbiosis than parasitic symbiosis. I understand that Bollinger wants to distinguish her
reading from those concerning master–slave relations, but I see more power inequity than
her reading suggests. She suggests that Butler’s depiction of interspecies love, intimacy,
emotional closeness, and physical dependence discourages the slavery analogy, but I do
not believe that the master–slave relation is incompatible with these “mutualistic ties.” See
Scheer-Schazler, “Loving” who also makes a similar argument.
4 Florian Bast, in his analysis of Fledgling, attempts to correct this common
misunderstanding. However, the misunderstanding exists, I would argue, because the idea
of symbiosis has been used as a paradigm for understanding human relations. That
symbiosis is freighted with evolutionary connotation politicizes its metaphorical uses all the
more. Bast, “‘I Won’t Always Ask.’” See also Peppers, “Dialogic Origins”; Bollinger,
“Symiogenesis”; and Haraway, Primate; for texts that discuss symbiosis in Butler’s work.
5 Immunity has been a prominent metaphor in the metaphysics of modern political
philosophy and contemporary theories of the social, at times engaging with scientific studies
of the immune system, or more or less ignoring them. I provide an analysis of Octavia
Butler’s “Bloodchild” that makes a philosophical contribution to this tradition of thought, one
that aims to explore how her work rethinks topics central to this tradition—freedom,
embodiment, and the sense of the political—and therefore sets her apart. See the following
for key works on immunization, but keep in mind that this tradition stretches back to the
political philosophies of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and Hegel: Luhmann, Social Systems;
Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies”; Martin, Flexible Bodies; Derrida,
“Autoimmunity”; Cohen, A Body Worth Defending; and Esposito, Immunitas.
6 Many contemporary symbiosis researchers reinvoke a definition that does not rely on a
rigid distinction between parasitism and mutualism, as certain associations may be both
parasitic and mutualistic at different stages or under different environmental conditions.
Moreover, “benefit” itself may sometimes be difficult to define. Sapp, Evolution by
Association 203.
7 Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber provide an extensive list of recent research that suggests
“defense” in the face of pathogens and cancer is only a partial view of how the immune
system regulates populations.
8 National Institute of Health. “Human Microbiome Project,” 2013.
9 “After the Human Genome Project” 2013.
0 Michelle Erica Green has made an argument that “Bloodchild” also indirectly comments on
assisted reproductive technology among other reproductive issues such as welfare reform
and abortion rights:

Butler published “Bloodchild” during a year when controversies over abortion,

in-vitro fertilization, and the prevalence of unnecessary caesarean sections—
topics cloaked in the metaphors of the story—reached a peak. 1984 also
witnessed a political campaign characterized by the polarization of complex
constitutional issues into monolithic positions: school prayer versus religious
freedom, welfare abuse versus urban poverty, “pro-life” versus “pro-choice,”
apartheid versus sanctions. (Green, “There Goes the Neighborhood” 173)

1 In fact, myiasis, or the infestation of a human or other vertebrae’s body by parasitic fly
larvae, is sometimes intentionally introduced as a medical treatment to clean out necrotic
wounds (Greer, “In the Spotlight”). In particular, green bottle fly larvae are most suitable, as
they restrict themselves to eating dead tissue. They also help to prevent secondary infection
by eating and releasing proteolytic digestive enzymes that dissolve dead tissue, which
reduces bacterial activity and stimulates healing. Additionally, as a result of a rise in cases
of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, maggot therapy, or “maggot debridement therapy,” is
increasingly a treatment option (Sherman, “Maggot Therapy”). It was even approved as a
therapy by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2004, making maggots the first FDA-
regulated live organism to be marketed in the United States for the treatment of pressure
ulcers, venous stasis ulcers, neuropathic foot ulcers, and traumatic and postsurgical
wounds that are unresponsive to conventional therapies (Greer 12).
2 This is when slavery analogies are nearly irresistible, despite Butler’s protests. Here she
seems to illustrate and invite metaphoric considerations of slavery. And some have pursued
this interpretation. Such readings are highly generative and convincing. I find it somewhat
perplexing that Butler would take such offense to them. Please see Helford, “‘Would You
Really . . . ?’”; Holloway, “Private Bodies”; and Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughter.
However, Orlando Patterson has warned that slavery should not be defined solely through
the notion of property. Slavery is commonly a property relation, but it exceeds the property
relation: “My objection to these definitions is not that I do not consider slaves to be property
objects. The problem, rather, is that to define slavery only as the treatment of human beings
as property fails as a definition, since it does not really specify any distinct category of
persons. Proprietary claims and powers are made with respect to many persons who are
clearly not slaves. Indeed, any person, beggar or king, can be the object of a property
relations. Slaves are no different in this respect” (Patterson 21–22). Patterson cites a
common example: marriage. Both spouses are the property of the other, even if not typically
described as such as a matter of social convention but nevertheless are bound by
proprietary claims and power. Additionally, I believe it would be possible to write
convincingly about how this story resonates with humanitarian forms of “benevolent” tyranny
in the forms of refugee camps and foreign aid. I began this chapter looking at how the
American narratives of conquest set in motion the cultural politics of colonial affect.
However, I would be curious to consider how these narratives shape the story in ways that I
leave unaddressed, especially in light of scholarly attention this issue has received as it
pertains to Xenogenesis, which was produced during the same period and has overlapping
themes and symbolism (see for instance, Wallace, “Reading . . . Xenogenesis”.
3 While anthropologists such as Le Bon, Robertson Smith, and McLennan thought “primitive
peoples” lacked the capacity for individuality, others such as Tylor insisted, in a more
Hobbesian vein, that “primitive peoples” were excessively individualistic and selfish. The
Comaroffs argue, despite the presumptions of anthropological tropes of Euro-individualism
versus African communitarianism, “Nowhere in Africa were ideas of individuality ever
absent” (Comaroff and Comaroff 17–18). See also Le Bon, The Crowd; Stocking, Victorian
Anthropology; Beidelman, Robertson Smith.
4 Here I am extending what Kelly Hurley has classified as “body horror”: a “human subject
dismantled and demolished: a human body whose integrity is violated, a human identity
whose boundaries are breached from all sides” (205). Hurley, “Reading Like an Alien.”
5 At one point she states, “I have done what you demanded. I have asked you?” But, she
actually never does. She asks, “Would you really rather die than bear my young?”
(“Bloodchild” 25). This is an existential question, not a plea for his consent.
6 As Etienne Balibar argues in “‘My Self’ and ‘My Own’”: “There is nothing natural in the
identification of self and own, which is really a norm rather than a necessity, and reigns by
virtue of a postulate” (41). As he argues, “The issues of subjectivity and consciousness are
not identical” but tend to be conflated in the discourse of “possessive individualism” (22).
7 See Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.
8 The phrase “Prioprietor of His Own Person” can be found in Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government. See Mitchell’s “Can the Mosquito Speak?” for a critique of social science’s
failure to theorize the way nonhuman agents and nondiscursive forces shape colonial
capitalist events. According to Butler’s fiction, it is through evolutionary adaptability and
relationality that subjectivity unfolds not through autonomous individualism.
9 While some characters (like Qui, for instance) in the narrative abject “animals” and
“animality,” it is crucial to distinguish that from what Butler’s narrative(s) performs, which I
argue problematizes and ultimately rejects this stance. Critics such as Sherryl Vint and
Staci Alaimo offer persuasive arguments that Butler’s work characteristically departs from
human–animal dualisms.
0 Haraway clarifies that “companion species” is not synonymous with the notion of
“companion animals”: the latter tends to equate to the notion of pets or domesticated
animals whereas “companion species” is “less a category than a pointer to an ongoing
“becoming with” (Haraway, “Encounters” 99).
1 Butler’s fiction questions definitions of humanity that rely on the abjection of life deemed
animal. However, in “Bloodchild,” Butler is not directly challenging how humans treat
animals. It is not a text on “animal ethics,” “rights,” or “welfare.” And from those
perspectives, I am sure her intervention is seen as limited. Having said that, her fiction
generally calls for a democratization of force, eating and being eaten, such that humans are
not spared from violence. For Butler, violence is an inescapable part of human subjectivity,
and humans must confront that our bodies are meat for others. Additionally, her fiction
invites the reader to recognize one’s own violence and to confront its manifold sources and
effects. In Xenogenesis, the Oankali’s attempts to annul violence only beget more violence.
Thus, her writing places emphasis on a practice of interspecies accommodation and
compromise rather than invest in top-down notions of human responsibility, pity, and ethics.
Moreover, any practice of animal ethics should critically interrogate the status of “the
human” as the privileged, even exclusive, agent of ethics. This unidirectional notion of
ethics seems to return ethical subjectivity to notions of “stewardship” that underwrote
slavery, colonialism, and dominion—albeit a kinder, gentler version.
2 Laurel Bollinger explores “the love story” dimension more than I do. Her argument is
persuasive:

For the story to do the work Butler imagines, Gan cannot be forced to choose
the pregnancy, not even to protect his sister, who would otherwise serve as
host—the love must be for T’Gatoi, not simply for his own family. Butler
makes the point forcefully when Gan realizes that part of what motivates him
not to let T’Gatoi, approach his sister is something like jealousy or
possessiveness. He finds that he wanted to keep [T’Gatoi] for myself,” a
recognition he himself struggles to accept: “I didn’t understand it, but it was
so.” Part of his commitment to T’Gatoi means protecting her, even as a
private commitment in his own consciousness: “Take care of her, my mother
used to say. Yes” The “yes,” a stand-alone sentence, represents a full
affirmation of the decision he has made, and affirmation that makes his
dynamics with T’Gatoi closer to mutualism than to parasite/host or
exploitation. Moreover, T’Gatoi has allowed him the space to affirm his own
participation. (“Placental” 334–335)

While I think the “love story” is an important part of the story and advances the argument
that “symbiosis” rather than unmitigated “exploitation” characterizes this relationship, I
think Bollinger’s elevation of the “love story” potentially obscures the very dimensions of
their relationship that are so often read as colonialism or slavery. While I do think Butler
 arrives at mutualism, she does so through a history of interspecies entanglement that
suggests parasitism as well. T’Gatoi and Gan’s “partnership” is invested in the hope that
mutualism could guard against the always present possibility of the recurrence of human
violence toward the Tlic and Tlic human “breeding pens.” Thus, their relationship is a
threshold to mutualism rather than a suggestion that parasitism between the two people
is impossible.
3 There’s some risk in framing a scene of reproduction—egg implantation by ovipositor—as
a scene of sex in that, as Myra Hird notes, “Most of the organisms in four out of five
kingdoms do not require sex for reproduction” and “during most of our evolutionary heritage,
our ancestors reproduced without sex” (Hird, “Naturally Queer” 86). However, Butler is not
simply trying to re-present nature but generate a highly philosophical allegory in order to
stimulate interrogation of the politics of species, sex/uality, and gender.
4 The predominate understanding of human impregnation suggests that the female egg is
basically passive and unlike sperm, which actively pursues and penetrates the egg.
Feminists, such as Linda Birke, among others, have critiqued this idea. See Birke,
Feminism and the Biological.
5 See Anne Fausto Sterling’s Sexing the Body for a critique of the idea of binaristic
dimorphism in humans. For works that problematize and displace the presumption of
dimorphism in nonhuman life see: Hird, “Naturally Queer”; Roughgarden, Evolution’s
Rainbow; Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance; Hayward, “Fingeryeyes.”
6 Moreover, as Eric White notes regarding Xenogenesis, “Undoing the privileging of genital
over other erogenous zones, alien sex is polymorphously perverse” (“The Erotics of
Becoming” 404).
7 As Myra Hird notes, “Human bodies, like those of other living organisms, are only ‘sexed’
from a particularly narrow perspective. The vast majority of cells in human bodies are
intersex (and this category itself is only possible by maintaining a division between female’
and ‘male’ chromosomes), with only egg and sperm cells counting as sexually dimorphic.
Most of the reproduction that we undertake in our lifetimes has nothing to do with ‘sex:’”
This includes DNA recombination (cutting and patching of DNA strands), cell fertilization via
merging, and cell division via meiosis (halving chromosome number, in making sperm and
eggs) and mitosis (cell division with maintenance of cell number) (Hird, “Naturally Queer”
85). She states further, “[W]ithin bacterial being, the female/male, sex/gender distinction has
no meaning. Since bacteria recognize and avidly embrace diversity, they do not discriminate
on the basis of ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ differences at all” (87).
8 See Hayward, “Fingeryeyes.” See also her “Spider City Sex,” where she argues the
transsexed body is “emphatically more” in relation to received binaristic categories of sex
(245): “I want to proffer that the representational emphasis on being woman for mtfs tends
to limit other orderings of meaning and materiality at work in transitioning, trans-sexing.
These ontological battles over who is a woman or not foreclose—partly because of the pain
they cause—discussions about the fullness or moreness of the transitioning body” (235).
What undergirds Hayward’s thinking here is the processional and improvisational nature of
all bodies with respect to their entanglement with life history and environment, a matter
discussed in these pages: “Sexual differences (not sexual difference) remain unfinished;
sexual ontologies stay active, ongoing, differentiating. If sexual difference and sexuality are
exuberances, contingencies, then sex is profusive, a superabundant happening” (235).
9 The list of literature here is long, but for work that investigates the function of “the black
female body” as icon, specimen, and material metaphor in the bioscientific/medical history
of sex/gender, specifically as it pertains to the mutually constitutive development of intersex,
trans, and homosexuality as legible terms, perhaps start with Somerville, “Scientific
Racism”; Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies”; Doane, “Dark Continents”; Reis, Bodies in
Doubt; Schiebinger, Nature’s Body; Stepan, “Race and Gender.”
Objecting to the “acultural” pretense of feminist discourse, one that privileges a biologized
conception of (human) being over other(ed) ontological schemas, in “‘Genital Mutilation’ or
‘Symbolic Birth,’” Wynter argues that a global conception of “woman” and “patriarchy” can
only be brought into view and its accompanying intellectual exchange commence from
within these terms alone because these categories are themselves colonial. This is not to
say that sexism and patriarchy are not a problem for “other cultures” but that the
assessment of the problem must engage the foundational antiblackness and coloniality of
the discourse of sex/gender itself.
0 Wilson, “Biologically Inspired Feminism.” Relatedly, animal models in experimental science
tend to rely on a biologically deterministic conception of sex by bypassing the role of gender
in sex difference in humans as well as ignore distinctions of morphological sex and
reproduction that demarcate human from nonhuman models: see Richardson, et al.,
“Opinion.”
1 See McClintock, Imperial Leather for an analysis of the gendering and sexualization of
imperialist discourse in the context of the British Empire. She argues that the “virgin” lands
of Africa, Asia, and the Americas were “libidinally eroticized”; imperialism erected a
patriarchal narrative on colonized lands thought to be “passively awaiting the thrusting, male
insemination of history, language, and reason (McClintock 22, 31). Additionally, Thibodeau
reads the story as challenge to heteronormative notions of “beauty, maternity, partnership,
and choice” that are often reproduced in imperialist encounters with extraterrestrials in
science fiction. She argues that alien–human relationship is effectively “queer
heteronormativity” with respect to “family, birth, eroticism.” Amanda Thibodeau states:

The notion that human beings, in their quest to explore the frontier of space
and create new possibilities of freedom and proliferation, might end up in
such an inverted and subversive sex/gender system queers not only our
notions of sex and gender, of family and power, but also queers the very
impulse to seek new worlds where anything is possible. (“Alien Bodies” 272–
273)

2 Here I am thinking with and borrowing from Eva Hayward’s beautiful description of her
haptic encounters with coral (“Fingeryeyes”).
3 This argument does not discount Arthur Frank’s observation that “experience . . . is the
perpetually shifting synthesis of this perpetually spiraling dialectic of flesh, inscription and
intention” (Frank, “Reconciliatory” 58). Neither is it a refutation of “interactive models of
causality” and the gendered problem of labeling the body “passive,” as articulated by Lynda
Birke; rather, it is attentiveness to the limitations of notions of sovereignty, autonomy, and
agency attributed to the subject, and it provides a critique of the violence these notions do
to subjectivity. It is critical of the feminization of the body and does not suggest that women
 bear the burden of an erroneously gendered vision of corporeality (Birke 22, 29). For
another analysis of receptivity, particularly as it pertains to Asian racialization and gay
sexuality, see Nguyen, A View from the Bottom.
4 Derrida in “The Animal That Therefore I Am” also identifies the physical vulnerability of
embodiment.
5 Nahum Chandler provides an important reminder: “As given in the philosophical discourse
from John Locke to Immanuel Kant we can name three motifs, dimensions of a contractual
horizon: (1) one does not own something, property, if one is not free to do with it as one
pleases (one owns something if one can do with it as one pleases); (2) one’s negotiation of
transfer of property (or participation in a contract) is considered binding only if one is
considered autonomous in such transfer or participation; and (3) a slave, as property
himself, cannot transfer property, including himself, or enter into contract, in his own name”
(160). Mills and Pateman provide indispensable analysis of the history and politics of social
contract theory. See Pateman, Sexual Contract.
6 As Ferreira da Silva notes, in Toward a Global Idea of Race, according to Locke, the “self-
possessed” and “self-determined” subject subjects himself to the exterior ruler, “political
society” because acknowledging that an “individual” may desire to appropriate another’s life,
freedom, and possessions—instituting a “state of war” that may lead to a “state of slavery,”
being under another’s absolute power—individuals recognized the need for regulation
beyond natural (divine) law: “Freedom from absolute, arbitrary power is so necessary to and
closely joined with a man’s preservation that he cannot part with it but by what forfeits his
preservation and life together” (Ferreira da Silva 52).
7 Haraway, “Encounters” 97–114.
8 However, the more radical argument that symbiogenesis produces speciation is still very
controversial.
9 Jan Sapp’s history of the theory of symbiosis documents that in 1868 Swiss botanist,
Simon Schwendener explained the symbiogenesis of lichen from alga and fungus via an
analogy to master–slave relations, and this framework was met with “bitter opposition”
because it challenged taxonomical distinctions and troublingly posited master–slave
relations as integral to evolution’s character (Evolution 4). More recently, British biologist
Nick Lane in Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life refers to the origins
of eukaryotic cells by drawing from slavery analogies, including phrases as “shackled” cells
and “menial slave cells” (Lane 225). And in 2003, South African British biologist T.B.L.
Kirkwood published “Mitochondria and Programed Cell Death: ‘Slave Revolt’ or Community
Homeostasis?” Similarly, the language of the integrated organism is gaining traction among
historians and advocates of a symbiotic view of life.
0 For a fuller analysis of the complexity of the pamphlet’s context and reception see Nyong’o,
The Amalgamation Waltz.
1 See Coleman, “Race as Technology” for an elaboration of race as a technology.
2 “Cannibalism,” a term that emerges from the racial, also surfaces in Margulis and Sagan’s
The Origins of Sex 149–152.
3 For an analysis of the gendering of E. coli, see Spanier 56.
4 Additionally, Margulis commenting on the delayed acceptance of the theory of evolutionary
association stated the following: “The healthy, positive, perhaps even feminine connotations
 of symbiosis and mutualism have suggested that research on these topics is relatively
unimportant” (“Words as Battle Cries” 675).
5 While Haraway’s early comments on Butler’s Xenogenesis recapitulate the metaphorical
substitution of race for species, her more recent work sharply criticizes such substitutions—
yet ironically, via turning intersectionality, a theory about the illegibility of violence against
black women and the indifference and/or tepid modes of redress that accompany such
illegibility, into a catchall phrase for something like multidimensional analysis: “Loosening
the grip of analogies that issue in the collapse of all man’s other’s into each other,
companion species must instead learn to live intersectionally” (Haraway “Encounters” 101).
The critique here is not intended to dismiss any of this well-intentioned work; rather, it
documents the isohomology and symbiosis of race and species such that even putatively
antiracist projects can find their articulations haunted by this enmeshment. Thus, any
articulation of the organism that endeavors to “solve” or “correct” the ills of society should be
met with as much scrutiny as those that purport objectivity and neutrality. Authors that also
create analogies between interspecies hybridity and miscegenation: Luckhurst (“Horror and
Beauty”) and Green (“There Goes The Neighborhood”).
6 Admittedly, the quotes around miscegenation suggest some self-consciousness about this
application. However, the use of the term may reveal that “miscegenation” is the primary
paradigm through which speciation is understood. “Miscegenation” may in fact be the most
readily available language. If so, this is a question for posthumanist criticism to engage
alongside investigations of science, technology, and reproduction.
7 I believe that Butler’s earlier works are implicated in this very problem. However, it is
important to remember that she was the only well-known black woman writer in the science
fiction genre—a genre publishers believed black people did not read—for most of her
career. Xenogenesis is where it is most commonly suggested that aliens were a figure of a
racialized “other.” And, as Jennifer Wolmark has noted, the first copies of Xenogenesis had
a white Lilith on the cover despite the character’s blackness between the covers (166). It
seems to have gone unconsidered that to some degree Butler may have refigured “race” as
“gender” in her narration of her black female protagonist Lilith: “Do you know understand
why they chose you—someone who desperately doesn’t want the responsibility, who
doesn’t want to lead, who is a woman?” (Butler, Dawn 157). Some scholars have gone
ahead and included the missing racial signifier and proceeded to read the trilogy as a
commentary on the specific existential conditions of black women. Additionally, Butler has
recounted in interviews that she modified her accounts of race to assuage science fiction’s
(mostly white) readership. She acknowledged curtailing the violence of slavery in Kindred
because “there was only so much an audience would take.” She also said that Mind of My
Mind was a commentary on aspects of inner-city black life “that we don’t like to talk about,
but was only implicitly so, which only some readers got.” She recalled in her Charlie Rose
interview that an editor told her it wasn’t necessary to have any black characters in science
fiction because you can say anything you want about race by way of extraterrestrials. This
incident inspired Butler to write an article critiquing those kinds of views in the science
fiction community. See Francis, Conversations; Butler, “Interview with Charlie Rose”; and
Wolmark, Aliens and Others.
8 Nor would he kill to avoid acceptance of this vulnerability. At the end of the story, he
assures T’Gatoi that he would not have shot her, despite the fact that he could (Butler,
“Bloodchild” 28).
 Chapter 4. Organs of War

Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology.” See also Duster, “Buried Alive.”
See Diana Coole for a critique of the Cartesian debates around the concept of the agentic
subject and theory of agency as a spectrum of capacities: Coole, “Rethinking Agency.”
In an interview with Greg Thomas, Wynter puts it yet another way: “I am trying to insist that
‘race’ is really a code-word for ‘genre.’ Our issue is not the issue of ‘race.’ Our issue is the
issue of the ‘genre’ of ‘Man.’ It is this issue of the ‘genre’ of ‘Man’ that causes all the ‘–
isms.’” See Wynter, “ProudFlesh” interview.
Wynter, “ProudFlesh” interview.
A perturbed system is deviated from its nominal functioning. A perturbation can arise from a
source external to a system or the emergence of a variation internal to a system.
My understanding of “event” draws directly from the work of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou
but also draws influence from thinkers of anticolonial revolution such as David Marriott’s
reading of the work of Frantz Fanon (“No Lords A-Leaping”). See also Badiou, Being and
Event and Žižek, Event.
Art historians and art journalists have typically approached this work via the disciplinary
protocols of art history and framed Mutu’s work as principally indebted to European artists
such as Dadaist Hannah Höch. For instance, A New Yorker article on Mutu opens with “The
Nairobi-born, Brooklyn-based artist, forty-one, is a modern-day Hannah Hoch, deftly
braiding the satirical, the political, and the decorative in her collages” (New Yorker,
“Wangechi Mutu”). On occasion her work has been put in conversation with African
diasporic artists like Romare Bearden but almost never with nonblack women of color artists
of color like Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta, despite Mutu repeatedly citing their influence.
Willis, “Wangechi Mutu.”
The following provides an excellent analysis of the racialized, gendered, and sexual
aesthetics of disrobed African female bodies in the genre of ethnographic photography;
perhaps its most iconic case, National Geographic, receives systematic attention: Lutz and
Collins, Reading National Geographic.
Rather than call Haeckel’s falsification of evidence into question, Haeckel biographer Robert
J. Richards invites and performs a reevaluation of the nature of Haeckel’s transgressive act
—arguing that the Romantic Naturphilosophie of Goethe, which valued the elevation of
archetypal forms over realist representation, was the source of Haeckel’s inspiration, and
thus he did not strive to deceive readers. Richards contends that others have evaluated
Haeckel based on present standards of academic honesty and empiricist methodology—
standards not embraced by, or unavailable to, Haeckel. As a result of ahistoricist critiques
and misrecognitions, Richards argues, a fuller acknowledgement of Haeckel’s importance
for the history of evolutionary theory has been obscured, making way for a far-too-easy
dismissal of Haeckel as anti-Jewish, and even proto-Nazi, in the work of some historians,
biologists, and religious critics of evolutionary theory. Richards emphasized two illustrations
that undercut the allegation that Haeckel’s thought, in particular, provided an unambiguous
precursor to Nazism. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Haeckel did not endorse anti-
Semitism—placing Ashkenazi Jews at the apex alongside other Europeans in his
hierarchical classification of races. Furthermore, the National Socialist Party’s Department
of Race Politics directly and conclusively rejected an association with Haeckel’s monism.
 That said, while I am persuaded by Richards’s reassessment of Haeckel’s politics
concerning Jewishness, there remains a profound racist legacy imbuing Haeckel’s
evolutionary theory in general and his recapitulation theory in particular. Assessing the
implications of his indisputable antiblack racism, as his artistic legacy surfaces in the work
of Mutu, is the central animating question informing my engagement with Haeckel in this
chapter. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life.
0 For instance Agassiz, due to a hardline commitment to polygenesist creationism or Georg
Heinrich Otto Volger, based on a uncompromising rejection of transmutation. See
Richards’s Tragic for an analysis of these debates.
1 Darwin is commonly believed to be a monogenesist, a position held to be at least
preferable to the polygenesist view. However, I want to caution against drawing too sharp a
distinction between these two positions. In the Descent of Man, Darwin urged his readers to
adopt language that more accurately reflected the common usage of the terms “race” and
“species.” While Darwin maintained that there was one human species composed of many
varieties or races, he also claimed to have long argued that the distinction between
“species” and “race” was arbitrary.
2 For a reading of how Medusa was racially marked in nineteenth-century archaeology and
in psychoanalysis see: Khanna, Dark Continents. My thanks to Eva Hayward for bringing
this text to my attention.
3 Rutsky, “Mutation, History, and Fantasy in the Posthuman.”
4 See Chelsea Mikael Frazier’s “Thinking Red, Wounds, and Fungi in Wangechi Mutu’s Eco-
Art” for a more sustained reading of this work, particularly as it relates to fungi and the
ecological.
5 Rutsky 107.
6 For a sampling of the major players of this transcontinental debate, see Jefferson, Notes;
Long, History; Rush, “Observations”; Imlay, Topographical; White and von Soemmering, An
Account; Buffon et al., Natural History; and Burnet, Of the Origin.
7 While this story is commonly told, it is often told in a manner that isolates this moment from
its historical and epistemological context, resulting in further spectacularization and
pathologization of black women’s embodiment and sexuality. This is a risk or even an
inevitability of the racist misogyny of our times. But my aim, at least, is not to simply re-
circulate “shocking” depictions but to contextualize and account for the workings of these
fundamental images in the imagination of antiblack racialization and of the logics of sex-
gender more generally. I think part of the reason historical and epistemological contexts go
unattended is because it draws Europeans and Enlightenment (science and reason) closer
to its enabling abjections: passions and mythology.
8 For more historical detail, see Schiebinger, Nature’s Body.
9 For an expansion of my thoughts on the icon of “the black female body” and measurement,
see Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void.”
0 Washington, Medical Apartheid. See also Owens, Medical Bondage.
1 Despite widely documented racial inequities in the severity and impact of a number of
persistent pain conditions, researchers have only begun to investigate a link between
perceived discrimination and pain-related symptoms. In what is thought to be the first study
to examine this question, Edwards found that episodes of “major lifetime discriminatory
events were the strongest predictors of back pain report in African Americans, and
 perceived day-to-day discrimination was the strongest predictor of back pain report
specifically in African American women” (Edwards 379). Additionally, significant
relationships also emerged on measures of mental health among African American
participants. As a whole, these findings support the biopsychosocial perspective on pain.
2 Frazier, “Thinking Red” 181.
3 Jasbir Puar makes a similar point when she states, in The Right to Maim: debility is “a
process rather than an identity or attribute, a verb and a doing rather than a happening or
happening to or done to” (Puar, Right 73).
4 Knopf-Newman, Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison. Stacy Alaimo also discusses the
prescience of Lorde’s The Cancer Journals as well and led me to the Knopf-Newman quote.
Alaimo, Bodily Natures.
5 Hartman, “Reading the Scar” 159; see also Khalid “Demilitarizing Disease” and Jain,
“Cancer Butch” 522.
6 Hartman, “Reading the Scar” 159.
7 See Feagin and McKinney, Many Costs, “Significance.”; Hayward et al.
8 Michelle Murphy, in a recent article asks “What counts as reproduction? Where does
biological reproduction reside?” As an answer to this deceptively simple question, she offers
the provocation of “distributed reproduction,” which aims to bring into view aspects of
reproduction occurring beyond bodies within uneven spatial and temporal structures of
environmental injustice and latency. Along the way she reconceptualizes the idea of
“assisted reproduction” to include “infrastructures”: “state, military, chemical, ecological,
agricultural, economic, architectural agencies “that ‘assist,’ alter, reaarange, foreclose,
harm, and participate in the processes of creating, maintaining, averting, and transforming
life in the inter-generation time.” Further stating, a capacious sense of infrastructures
includes sedimentations such as colonial legacies, the repetition of gendered norms in
material culture, or the persistence of racialization” (emphasis added). My approach here
has much in common with Murphy’s, but my emphasis is different; with Mutu and Lorde, my
aim is to demonstrate that these infrastructures do not “abandon” or harm “unintentionally.”
They are integral to what Frank Wilderson terms the “gratuitous violence” of antiblackness;
in other words I suggest that the spatial and the temporal are arranged by antiblackness.
Murphy, “Distributed”; Wilderson, Red, White, & Black.
9 S. Lochlain Jain has noted that the marks on the body, commonly associated with cancer,
are not a direct result of cancer but rather of cancer treatments born of military technology:
“Radiation as a cancer treatment developed post-WWII in an effort to both find peacetime
uses of military atomic technologies as well as to study the effects of radiation exposure. . . .
Nitrogen mustard was discovered in WWI to destroy quickly dividing cells, and become the
first chemotherapeutic. So in terms of the development of treatments, the hundreds of
thousands of cancers caused by nuclear testing, and economies of cancer treatment, the
multibillion dollar industry of the ‘war on cancer’ ties in thoroughly with massive
infrastructures of the military industrial complex” (524).
On the conditions of possibility for “globality,” see Williams, Capitalism and Slavery;
Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea; Rodney, How Europe.
0 Arguably, Lorde’s A Burst of Light, written during a period when her metastasized cancer
spread to her liver, is even more militant in its indictments of the social determinants of
disease:
 I’m not being paranoid when I say my cancer is as political as if some CIA
agent brushed past me in the A train on March 15, 1965 and air-injected me
with a long-fused cancer virus. Or even if it is only that I stood in their wind to
do my work and the billows flayed me. What possible choices do most of us
have in the air we breathe and the water we must drink? . . . When I speak
out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to
save my life in every sense. Government research grants to the National
Cancer Institute were cut in 1986 by the exact amount illegally turned over to
the contras in Nicaragua. One hundred and five million dollars. It gives yet
another meaning to the personal as the political. (133)

1 See Quach et al., “Experiences”; Polite and Olufunmilayo, “Breast Cancer”. Margaret
Whitehead has put forth the term “health inequities” as alternative; the latter better identifies
the social rather than biological basis of both race and its unequal health burdens.
Whitehead, “Concepts.”
2 Taylor et al., “Racial Discrimination” 46, 51. A growing body of literature suggests that
mistreatment due to racial discrimination can lead to psychological stress, which likely
contributes to somatic disease generally, including breast cancer, especially when black
women are under the age of fifty. This leads to higher incidence among young black women
and black women’s higher breast cancer mortality rates at every age. See Cuevas et al.,
“Discrimination.” See also Lepeak et al., “Persistence.”
3 Additionally, Dignam found that doctors are less likely to opt for surgeries that would
conserve black women’s breasts in cases where less drastic options were medically
acceptable: “Black women were much more likely to have received total mastectomy rather
than lumpectomy with radiation therapy” (62). Similarly, in Long et al., they found that
African American women have lower incidence of uterine cancer but almost twice the
mortality rates (Long et al., “Disparities”).
4 The decrements imposed by racism have been widely documented in psychological
literature, and recent cognitive science studies provide increasing evidence to suggest that
racist culture potentially undermines executive functioning: Salvatore and Shelton; Holoien
and Shelton; Murphy et al.; Jones et al.; Inzlicht and Kang. See also Krieger; Utsey et al.;
Harrell; Blackmore et al.; David and Collins; Dole et al.; Williams, “Race, Socioeconomic
Status” and Edwards.
5 See McEwen and Stellar, “Stress and the Individual”; McEwen, “Stress Adoption and
Disease”.
6 Cole, “Chronic.”
7 Here I depart from an argument advanced in a number of recent feminist materialist works,
which claim that this moment’s “posthumanism” is emblematized by “new” modes of the
commodification of life by extending market logics to the molecular scale. I find this
assertion somewhat odd given that it coincides with the public’s increased attention,
renewed attention even, to “The Tuskegee Experiment” and the HeLa cell—both of which
predate “the posthuman.” Furthermore, as I have suggested here, the biotechnological
encroachment of the market into the sphere of life that they describe is taking place in a
manner that is rather uneven and ultimately reinscribes black people’s marginalization as
consumers in the case of gene-expression profiling for breast cancer, or within the category
of the human itself, as in the case of BiDil, a treatment for heart disease marketed in such a
 way as to suggest a homology between “race” and “species.” Rosi Braidotti, The
Posthuman (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and
Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (University of Washington Press, 2008). Hosu Kim and
Jamie Bianco, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough, and
Jean Halley (Duke University Press, 2007). See Roberts, Fatal Invention, for a discussion of
BiDil. On BiDil see Anne Pollock, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable
Preoccupations with Difference (Duke University Press, 2012).
8 A University of Maryland–led study found that racism might accelerate aging at the cellular
level. Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA capping the ends of chromosomes that
protect against DNA degradation. Shorter telomere length is associated with increased risk
of premature death and chronic disease such as diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease,
arthritis, stroke, and heart disease. The researchers found that the men—irrespective of
economic class standing—who had experienced greater racial discrimination and also
displayed a stronger implicit (or unconscious) bias against their own racial group had the
shortest telomeres. Dr. David H. Chae, assistant professor of epidemiology at UMD’s
School of Public Health and the study’s lead investigator sums up the results in the
following way: “African American men who have more positive views of their racial group
may be buffered from the negative impact of racial discrimination. In contrast, those who
have internalized an antiblack bias may be less able to cope with racist experiences, which
may result in greater stress and shorter telomeres . . . Our findings suggest that racism
literally makes people old.” The results of the University of Maryland–led study are
consistent with prior studies (cited in the study) that have found that those with a bias
against their own racial group are more vulnerable to the impact of racial stigma and that
greater in-group identification and positive racial evaluation may lessen the negative impact
of racial discrimination (107–108). See Chae et al., “Discrimination.”
 Coda

Changes in the accessibility of DNA, or the opening and closing of DNA to transcription,
relies on molecules labile to environmental influence, including those heritable across
mitosis, without involving changes to the underlying DNA sequence (Landecker and
Panofsky, “From Social”; 338, 343). Moreover, epigenetically relevant environmental events
and agents often establish meaningful changes in gene expression that have the potential
to stably persist in mitotic cell division over many generations of cells, even after the initial
agent or event ceases to be present (Landecker and Panofsky 343).
Research has particularly traced the variable impact of pollutants, stress, and nutrition on
molecular processes and systems. J. Niewohner, “Epigenetics” 279–98.
Landecker and Panofsky 349.
In addition to the HGP’s capitalization on the idea of genetic race, it also had substantial ties
to corporate power brokers.
While it is not my intention to document all of the social structural and environmental
(f)actors said to create epigenetic events, I would add one more point along these lines
regarding intergenerational effects. Researchers now claim that nutritional deficiencies and
maternal psychosocial stress can change biological settings for children, with effects on
such functions as glucose metabolism, blood pressure regulation, fat deposition, and the
physiologic response to stress. While they do not rule out completely the theoretical
possibility that there may be a genetic cause of these inequities, there is no evidence to
support the view that genetic differences between groups explain these inequities (Kuzawa
and Sweet, “Epigenetics” 7). Indeed, in light of the Human Genome Project’s rejection of
genetic racial difference, geneticists were forced to confront the possibility that social
(f)actors were essential and not subsidiary to modulations of the body in ways never
thought to be imaginable within the reigning biomedical model. Moreover, studies have also
shown that the germ cell can be altered through male sperm epigenetically as well.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, relatively few studies examine the male line’s contribution of
epigenetic outcomes.
That being said, the epigenetic impact of past racism would diminish with each successive
generation free from exposure to racism. However, even in the hypothetical situation I
describe, racism nevertheless would impact generations to come.
Metz 111–12. I take note of Julie Guthman’s important qualification: stating that something is
epigenetically atypical is not to suggest that it is automatically pathological or to imply that
pathology is absent from the statistically normal (Guthman, “Doing Justice” 3). Furthermore,
if morphological norms are commonly predicated on the assumption that whiteness secures
what is “normal,” then it is problematic to assume that all deviations from the norm are
therefore pathological. As Guthman notes, what is epigenetically “non-normative” may also
be a healthy adaptive response: “Epigenetic changes, that is, are not always for the
worse. . . . While we need to take biology seriously we must resist efforts to find ethical
answers in biological norms” (Guthman 13, 14). The epigenetic production of
nonnormativity, on any scale, is not what I am addressing here. Rather, my field of concern
 is the manner with which socially constructed difference is somatized epigenetically due to
differential exposures that produce inequities in impairment, illness, and death.
See McLuhan, Understanding Media and Stiegler, Technics and Time for theorizations of
technology as supplemental to the human body and to the development of human culture.
Researchers in the United Kingdom and United States decided to test to what extent
“access” to healthcare could explain black women’s significantly poorer outcomes from
breast cancer treatment, and they found that “equal access” did not necessarily lead to
improvement in outcomes. Moreover, the inequity in outcome appears to be widening even
as cancers become easier to detect and treat (Copson et al. 231). Similarly, they found not
only racially disparate rates of survival despite equal “access” but also racially unequal
treatment was still coupled with equivalent rates of access.
0 According to Ron Voorhees, who runs the Allegheny County (PA) Health Department and
is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh: “What we find is that the
infants of black mothers who have graduate degrees, whether they be doctors, lawyers,
professionals, they are people with potential for good incomes; they still have much higher
rates of infant mortality even compared with a white woman who dropped out of high
school.” Beras, “Pittsburgh.” Other news outlets have reported similar reports: T. Williams,
“Infant Mortality.” Peer-reviewed studies have also documented the devastatingly high rates
of infant mortality among black women college graduates and professionals: see
Schoendorf et al., “Mortatlity”.
1 Similarly, as Pickering has noted, “almost all” of the explanations of racial inequity in rates
of hypertension have “involved the underlying assumption that there is some genetically
determined physiological difference” (Pickering 50).
2 Overall, recent studies suggest that the explanatory power of socioeconomic variables and
the predicative scripts attributed to them have been destabilized in the emergent study of
racialized patterns of physical health. See Kwate et al., “Experiences.” Their study
underscores blackness’ irreducibility:

experienced racism did not vary significantly by a variety of demographic

variables including age, income or education, evidence of the widespread
nature of racism. . . . Moreover, conscious awareness of racism as a stressor
may not be necessary to result in physiological stress responses. In our
study, appraisal of stress due to racism was not related to health outcomes;
rather, the frequency of racist events alone predicted negative health
outcomes. (456, 457)

Additionally, Nancy Krieger, a leading scholar studying racial and gender health
inequities, has studied the impact of racism on high blood pressure and found “the non-
significant association” between hypertension and socioeconomic variables. Krieger’s
study, paralleling the findings of others cited therein, demonstrated that identified “unfair
treatment” and “gender discrimination” predicted hypertension status among only black
(and not white) respondents. “[T] hese data support the view that the experience of being
black in the United States carries a risk for high blood pressure that can be modified by,
but not reduced to, gender and class position” (1278, 1279). Krieger, “Racial and Gender
Descrimination.” See also Dignam, “Differences,” and Quach et al. “Experiences.”
3 Researchers have found that medical providers still discriminate against black patients
even when blacks have economic class privilege, further suggesting that race is not a
metonym for socioeconomic class nor is antiblackness classism in disguise. While poor
blacks experience class-associative discrimination rooted in “disgust” and “contempt,”
professional blacks are viewed as potentially exploitative and untrustworthy:

They elicit envy and jealousy. In addition, people respond to the misfortunes
of these groups with schadenfreude, pleasure at the suffering of others,
which also predicts harm. Specifically, when witnessing the misfortunes of
members of these groups, people show activation of neural reward centers
and display just barely detectable smiles (measured electromyographically
from their zygomaticus [smile] muscles). (Dovidio and Fiske, “Under” 946)

According to Dovidio and Fiske both groups experience “active harm” and “attack”
responses from healthcare providers. To bring attention to this study is not to reduce
racial health inequity to individual physician bias. Surely physician bias is only one among
many factors—policies and practices of health care systems, the finance and delivery of
services—that produce racial inequality in the healthcare system, but it does challenge
the assumption that policies that seek to address “access” are the sine qua non of
remedy. See also Smedley, “Lived.”
4 See Farmer and Ferraro, “Racial Disparities” for a discussion of earlier work that espoused
this view and for their critique of this literature.
5 One notable exception occurs with respect to late-onset breast cancer rates for affluent
older white women—that is, breast cancer that presents after the age of fifty-five. However,
it has been proposed that the delay of first pregnancy relatively common among white
affluent women may help us pinpoint the underlying logic of a correlational link between
whiteness and increased rates of breast cancer in older women, especially as delayed
pregnancy, in the Hall and Rockhill study, has been observed to present similar trends in
cancer incidence in black affluent women as well. However, while older white women get
late-onset breast cancer at higher rates than black women, for intermediate and higher
socioeconomic status (SES) black women inequities in prognosis, treatment, and mortality
conform to the racialized pattern found in women diagnosed at an earlier age regardless of
SES. To make matters even more complicated, on the one hand, having children at a
younger age has been associated with a lower risk of breast cancer over the life course; on
the other hand, it is also associated with an increased risk of developing the more
pernicious cancers found disproportionately in young black women. See Krieger, “Social
Class”; Hall and Rockhill, “Race”; Parise and Caggiano, “Disparities.”
Other studies have put forth competing hypotheses (low levels of breast feeding, physical
inactivity, poor dietary practices, age at menarche, use of oral contraceptives, etc.); though
most have not been satisfactorily studied, they are nevertheless reviewed in Bernstein et.
al., “Ethnicity.” See also Pathak et al., “Breast Carcinoma.”
6 Relatively advantaged black people are found to have poorer physical health along many
measures than whites of lower socioeconomic status, and at times, socioeconomic
advantage is correlated to decrements in health in the comparative context of blackness,
particularly with regard to cardiovascular disease, low birth rate, mortality, and even
 reported health status. In a broad-based study examining the socioeconomics of racial
health inequities, Farmer and Ferraro found a pattern consistent with a “diminishing returns
hypothesis” in which as SES levels increase, blacks do not have the same improvements in
health as their white counterparts with the racial inequity being largest at the highest levels
of SES. See Smedley, “Lived”; Farmer and Ferraro, “Racial”; Calvin et al., “Racism”;
Williams and Neighbors, “Racism”; and Dressler, Dressler, “Social.” Two studies found that
the black–white mortality ratio actually increases with rising socioeconomic status. See
Krieger et al., “Racism, Sexism, and Social Class” and David and Collins, “Differing.”
Read and Emerson found that more highly educated black immigrants from Europe had
worse health than less-educated West Indian immigrants:

We find that black immigrants from Europe look much more like U.S.-born
blacks than they do white immigrants from Europe, and white immigrants
from Europe look more like U.S.-born whites than they do their black
compatriots. What is more, European countries have much higher standards
of living than either African or West Indian countries—their incomes and
employment rates are higher, better extended vacation time, and better
health care. So, on average, European black immigrants should have better
health than other black immigrants. We find the opposite. (Read and
Emerson, “Racial” 195)

7 D. Williams et al., “Racial Differences” 337. Williams puts it quite plainly: “[S]ES measures
are not equivalent across racial groups. That is, there are racial differences in income
returns for a given level of education, the quality of education, the level of wealth associated
with a given level of income, the purchasing power of income, the stability of employment
and the health risks associated with working in particular occupations.” See also D.
Williams, “Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Health” and Krieger et al., “Racism, Sexism,
and Social Class.”
8 Dorothy Roberts has also noted that the “snapshot” approach to socioeconomic data
collection on the part of biomedical researchers ignores subjects’ entire life experience and
the economic variability therein, creating false equivalence among subjects. Poverty and
deprivation in early life may continue to have consequences later in life (Fatal 118).
9 With respect to cardiovascular disease, see Lewis et al., “Chronic.” In their study analyzing
the link between perceived discrimination and cardiovascular disease in black and white
women, researchers found that both white and black women reported a history of
discriminatory experiences; what made black women’s experiences significant is that black
women’s experiences with discrimination were typified by a generality or “everyday”
discrimination. Although the majority of black and white women reported having
experienced at least one instance of racial discrimination, black women ranked higher in
measures that tracked chronic discrimination, underscoring the need for studies to
disaggregate “racism,” “racial discrimination,” and “perceived discrimination” and to
distinguish acute from chronic experiences of discrimination: “Research suggests that it is
the persistence or chronicity of stressors over time that contributes to most negative
cardiovascular outcomes, rather than the occurrence of an acute event or series of events”
(362). See also Troxel et al., “Chronic,” which emphasizes the chronicity and pervasiveness
 of health stressors in the lives of black women and discusses the limitations of using
discrete measures to investigate the health burden of gendered racialization.
0 Most studies do not include black people, indigenous people, and people of color in the
same study. For the time being, it appears that the antiblack racism correlates to
incomparable effects if we look comparatively across nonblack (white and poc) groups. For
a study that compares reproductive health inequities among black, indigenous, Asian
Pacific Islander, and white women, see Joslyn et al., “Racial.”
1 Consider the David and Collins Illinois study (“Birth Weight”), which compared birth
outcomes in foreign-born and US-born African Americans but also linked these data with
information on birth weights across several generations of children subsequently born in the
United States. The first generation of foreign-born black mothers had a birth weight
distribution nearly identical to US whites, but among subsequent generations of mothers
born in the United States, the birth-weight distribution of African immigrants shifted in the
direction of a convergence with the lower African American mean.
Similarly, in the first study to disaggregate the health status of black immigrants by their
region of birth, comparing the health status of black African, South American, West Indian,
and European immigrants to that of US-born blacks and to each other, researchers
observed a pattern: while it has been widely reported that black immigrants typically have a
better health status than US-born blacks, and some health markers even indicate parity with
that of US-born whites (like infant mortality mentioned above), this black immigrant health
“advantage” appears isolated to those whose reference location is one in which whites are a
racial minority (Africa and South America). These immigrants experience better health than
those from racially mixed contexts (West Indies), who in turn enjoy better health than those
from majority white racial contexts (Europe). Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that US-
born blacks and black Europeans, both from majority white regions, do not differ
significantly on any health status measures and were found to have the most impaired
health. Moreover, the study concluded on a sobering note: “If our thesis is correct, the
health advantage cannot survive across generations in the United States because black
immigrants and their children from all origins will eventually resemble US-born blacks, as
their racial contexts shift from abroad to the United States. Irrespective of selective
immigration, the health of black immigrants will likely erode as they are exposed to the
harmful effects of discrimination and racism,” in particular that of “cumulative exposure” to
race-related stress (Read and Emerson, “Racial,” 195).
2 What must be acknowledged is that few studies actually examine the paternal line. One
consequence of this bias is that it gives the problematic impression that the paternal line is
either unaffected by the biocultural effects of inheritance and life course or that the impacts
of paternal bioculture is inconsequential to intergeneration life. This is a problem that has
been acknowledged by a number of feminist science studies scholars. For recent critiques
see Sharp et al., “Time to Cut the Cord”; Sharp et al., “It’s the Mother!”
Celia Roberts provides a historical analysis of the idea of “sex hormones” that is
beneficial for our critical reflection on why the research primarily focuses on female bodies
as well as troubles binarized notions of hormonal sex differences (“A Matter of Embodied
Fact”). Similarly, Emily Martin has done crucial work on gendered, sexual phantasies of
gonads, troubling the construction of female bodies as more passive and receptive (“The
Egg and The Sperm”). Sarah S. Richardson has done important work problematizing the
 reductionism of the movement from a primarily hormonal account of sex to a primarily
genetic account of sex: Richardson, Sex Itself.
3 Even if it is a given that gender and sex are entangled epigenetic pathways in the
distribution of health and debility, epigenetic studies still tend to conflate sex and gender
rather than consider how sex and gender (identity, presentation, performance) may
correspond in diffuse and nonlinear ways across a life course. This inattentiveness to
gender inhibits these studies’ ability to consider how gender mutability and profusion shape
the phenomena they study and attempt to account for both among a population and
relationally between populations. The following raise these related questions with respect to
the all too common biocentric approach to sex difference in research studies. See Eliot and
Richardson, “Sex in Context”; Shattuck-Heidorn and Richardson, “Sex/Gender.”
Along these lines, there is some consternation that the epigenetics of endocrine
disruption might portend the end of “proper” sexual dimorphism and heteronormative
reproduction. A number of recent analyses have offered considered pushback to this kind of
sensationalism, underscoring the danger of employing epigenetics to—once again—figure
trans and intersex people as a problem. These texts, in their respective efforts, trouble
attachments to a sex/gender binarism that is not only fraudulent but hierarchical in its
effects. See Guthman and Mansfield, “Plastic People”; Murphy, “Distributed”; Ah-King and
Hayward, “Perverting Pollution.”
And, finally, Mel Chen reminds us that toxicity is already here, we are all to relatively
degrees polluted and yet the distribution of toxicity is of biopolitical concern. See Chen,
Animacies.
4 Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
5 See also Kuzawa and Sweet, “Epgentics” 2; Landecker and Panofsky, “From Social” 335.
6 Dulac, “Brain Function” 728.
7 Citing Krieger, “Stormy Weather.”
8 Citing Gluckman et al., “Metabolic”; Vickers et al., “Neonatal.”
9 For two perspectives on race as a “variable” in epidemiological research, see Jones,
“Invited Commentary” and Kaufman and Cooper, “Commentary.”
0 In thinking about what art can do in the way of justice, I have taken inspiration from two
conversations: the first is Patricia Saunders in conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,
“Defending the Dead”; the second, Saidiya Hartman and M. NourbeSe Philip: “A Question
of Africa.” Thanks to Christina Sharpe for bringing these dialogues to my attention.
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 Index

Italic page numbers refer to figures in insert.

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah, 187–88

bjection, 33–34, 85, 103, 126, 131; animal, 1–4, 12–15, 18–20, 37; in Beloved,
38, 47, 62, 68–69, 73, 82; black maternity and, 210; in “Bloodchild,” 142, 145,
157, 247n39, 247n41; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 90, 108; in The Cancer
Journals, 192; Hartman on, 46; in Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine
Tumors, 189; racially gendered, 5, 8, 23, 27–29
bolitionism, 26, 49–52, 56–57, 222n6, 223n18
Acampora, Ralph, 96–97
African masks, 110–11, 114
Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 160, 224n27
Age of Discovery, 25
Ahuja, Neel, 104, 239n2
Alaimo, Staci, 42, 247n39, 255n24
American Indians, 25, 172, 239n2
Anatol, Giselle Liza, 234n37
Andrews, Lindsey, 231n15
nimal studies, 12, 14, 16–17, 85, 223n19
nimism, 238n58
Anthropocene, 150
nthropocentrism, 130, 147, 148, 149, 223n19, 224n20; critiques of, 15;
Eurocentric, 77–78, 123, 156; humanism and, 81
nthropology, 8, 100, 117, 238n58; fetishization of African masks, 111;
human/animal relationship in, 160; primitiveness in, 139, 246n33; race in, 117–
18, 183, 237n55
nti-Semitism, 253n9
partheid, 31, 33, 234n33, 245n30
Aristotle, 24, 26, 221n25
Armstrong, Meg, 231n19
Autenrieth, Johann Heinrich Ferdinand von, 173
 utopoiesis, 5, 122, 163, 179, 212, 243n17
Avebury, Lord (John Lubbock), 173

aartman, Sara (“Hottentot Venus”), 8

alibar, Etienne, 142–43, 246n36
antu peoples, 31
arad, Karen, 42, 150, 184, 228n2, 232n22, 239n59
arthes, Roland, 231n18, 241n10
ast, Florian, 244n24
ernal, Martin, 234n33
estialization, 23, 27, 190; of blackness, 1, 4, 13, 18, 37, 48, 59, 67, 183
ig like us ideology, 137–38
iko, Steve, 31
iocentrism, 159–65, 169, 171, 199, 201, 263n23; definition, 42
iology, 87, 95–96, 127–31, 152–53, 161–71, 181, 193–94, 197–214; in Beloved,
81; biosemiotics and, 242n14; in “Bloodchild,” 40–41, 122, 125, 136–38, 143–
44, 148–51, 157, 241n11; in The Cancer Journals, 43, 191–92; Darwin and,
18; evolutionary, 244n22; Hegel and, 30; in Histology of the Different Classes
of Uterine Tumors, 42–43; plasticity and, 3, 226n42; in “The Screwfly Solution,”
239n6; sex and, 9, 159, 249n50, 255n28; slavery and, 47; species discourse
and, 37, 156
iopower, 10, 12, 17, 199, 228n49, 263n23; in Beloved, 46, 61, 77–78; in
“Bloodchild,” 128, 131; in The Cancer Journals, 192, 195; epigenetics and,
201–4, 210–12; in Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 160;
racialized animality and, 15, 20, 37; slavery and, 45, 47, 53
iosemiotics, 242n14
iotechnology, 41, 43, 151, 167, 197, 226n42, 256n37
lack Consciousness movement, 31
lack mater, 41, 83, 88–93, 101, 108, 112–20, 223n17; black mater(nal), 39, 154,
230nn11–12, 231n20, 237n53
lack studies, 12, 15, 17, 35, 163
Black Tail, 168, 190
The Blazing World, 86, 229n5
oas, Franz, 117, 237n55
ohm, David, 115
ollinger, Laurel, 244n23, 247n42
 ontius, Jacob, 181–82
radley, Rizvana, 230n12
rand, Dionne, 83
rickman, Celia, 139
rody, Jennifer DeVere, 74
rown, Eric C., 40–41, 128
rown, Foxy, 102
rown, Jayna, 73
rown, Kathleen, 6
rown, Kimberly Juanita, 194
uffon, Comte de, 24
urke, Edmund, 231n20
urnett, James. See Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett)
utler, Judith, 128
utler, Octavia, 245n32, 247n42, 247nn38–39, 248n43; “Bloodchild,” 2, 37, 40–
41, 117, 121–58, 239n6, 242n15, 243n20, 244n21; Kindred, 130, 252n67;
Xenogensis series, 130, 155, 242n13, 243n20, 245n32, 247n41, 248n46,
251n65, 252n67

Calarco, Matthew, 93–95

Calvin, Rosie, 207
Canada, 102–3
Canary Islands, 175, 177
annibalism, 125, 183, 240n8
apitalism, 45, 247n38; racial, 86, 104–5, 226n42
arcinogenesis, 43, 165, 191
Caribbean, 1, 13, 88, 102, 118, 126; European colonialism in, 13, 34, 126; pan-
Caribbean identity, 237n56; slavery in, 86. See also individual countries
Césaire, Aimé, 19, 85
Chae, David H., 257n38
Chain of Being, 8, 38, 48–55, 76, 81, 180
Chandler, Nahum, 250n55
Chen, Mel, 233n30, 263n23
Chesnutt, Charles, The Goophered Grapevine, 123
hiaroscuro, 31
Christianity, 6, 31, 48, 50–51
ivilization, 5, 11–12, 115, 139, 172, 174, 182, 237n55, 243n19
Civil War (US), 153–54
ollage, 42, 164, 167, 179, 184–85, 253n7
Collins, James W., 262n21
olonialism, 32, 36, 44, 112, 174, 238nn57–58, 245n32, 255n28; blackness and,
1, 45, 155, 228n49, 249n49; in “Bloodchild,” 41, 122–30, 145–46, 151, 156–
58, 242n15, 247n42; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 102–4; cannibalism and,
240n8; in Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 188;
human/animal relationship and, 23, 40, 247n38, 247n41; natural history and,
181; necropolitics and, 203, 205; in One Hundred Lavish Months of
Bushwhack, 179; terra nullius and, 243n19; universal humanity and, 14, 25.
See also imperialism; postcolonialism
Colucciello Barber, Daniel, 231n15
Columbus, Christopher, 125–27
omparative anatomy, 50, 173, 182
Conrad, Joseph, 21
Cooks, Bridget R., 169
Cope, E. D., 174
Copernican Revolution, 88
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 230n12, 231n19
Cuba, 34
Cuvier, Georges Leopold, 26

Darwin, Charles, 18, 153, 160, 170, 173; on natural selection, 128; on plasticity,
10, 71; on race and species, 160, 171, 254n11; research travel by, 177–78.
See also neo-Darwinism; Social Darwinism
Dasein (Heidegger), 99
David, Richard J., 262n21
ebility, 197–98, 234n36, 255n23, 263n23; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 105, 108; in
The Cancer Journals, 165, 190, 194
Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 178, 229n5
ehumanization, 5, 18, 20, 23, 28, 38, 46–47
Deleuze, Gilles, 123, 167, 231n15, 239n5
emonic ground (Wynter), 93
Derrida, Jacques, 15, 71, 127, 132, 150, 231n16, 234n33; on human/animal
relationship, 57–59, 79, 95–101, 223n19; on race, 159
Descartes, René, 12, 79, 87, 186–87
Dignam, James J., 256n33
iscourse of species (Wolfe), 14, 37, 41, 49–50, 125, 129, 222n11
DNA, 42, 111, 161, 200–201, 248n47, 257n38
Don Quixote, 86, 229n5
ouble-consciousness, 102, 105, 109, 189
Douglass, Frederick, 2, 38, 43, 47, 82, 222n13, 223n19; “Kindness to Animals,”
36, 53–57, 223n17, 224n24; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 36–
37, 45, 48–49, 51–53, 55, 57, 59, 81
Douglass, Patrice, 219n2
Dovidio, John F., 260n13
Du Bois, W. E. B., 85, 105, 189; The Comet, 123
Dyer, Richard, 31

ast Indies, 175, 181. See also individual countries

merson, Michael O., 261n16
ngland, 6–7, 111, 174–75, 186. See also Great Britain; United Kingdom
nlightenment, 12, 181, 221n20, 221n21, 254n17; race in, 3, 14, 23–24, 34, 81
pigenesis, 41; epigenome, 43, 163, 167, 200–201
thnography, 100, 117–18, 168, 225n32, 238n58, 253n8

anon, Frantz, 58, 102, 114, 189; on antiblackness, 19, 85, 237n53; on black
embodiment, 13, 114; on historico-racial schema, 162
anuzzi, Robert, 56
armer, Melissa M., 261n16
emininity, 69–70, 75, 148–49, 178–79, 183, 189, 198; black, 8–9, 83, 116,
230nn11–12; white, 8, 185, 187
eminism, 134, 192, 198, 249n49; black, 5, 92, 123, 125, 190, 230n12; eco-, 42;
feminist science and technology studies, 239n59, 248n44, 263n22;
intersectional, 10; materialist, 9, 42, 256n37; new materialist, 85;
posthumanist, 129, 151, 155; science fiction and, 124–25, 147
eminist materialism, 9, 42, 159
erreira da Silva, Denise, 19, 117, 130–31, 232n21, 236n51, 243nn17–18,
250n56
etish, 111, 113–14, 168, 225n38
ichte, Johann Gottleib, 97–98
irst Nations peoples, 103. See also Temagami
iske, Susan T., 260n13
itzmaurice, Andrew, 243n19
esh (Spillers), 10, 18, 30, 35, 113, 193, 225n36, 230n12; in Beloved, 70, 78, 81,
84; black female flesh, 4, 85–86, 168, 198; in “Bloodchild,” 121–22, 128; in
Brown Girl in the Ring, 83, 105, 119; in The Cancer Journals, 190, 194–95;
definition, 193; hieroglyphics of, 113, 166, 236n50; in Histology of the Different
Classes of Uterine Tumors, 166; human/animal relationship and, 4, 6; plasticity
and, 3, 11, 19, 48
oucault, Michel, 25, 87, 203–4, 234n34
rance, 8, 57, 71. See also French Revolution
rank, Arthur, 250n53
razier, Chelsea Mikael, 188
rench Revolution, 50
reud, Sigmund, 68, 139, 189, 225n35
rost, Samantha, 42, 226n40
ungibility, 62, 111–12, 114, 225n31

Gabriel, Markus, 231n20, 233n32

Gaines, Malik, 179
Garrison, William Lloyd, 48–49
Gates, Henry Louis, 3, 219n3
ender, 97, 125, 154, 204, 209, 220n8, 237n53; bacteria and, 248n47; in
Beloved, 38, 47, 58–82, 84, 225n30; in “Bloodchild,” 37, 40–41, 122–24, 130–
51, 252n67; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 110, 113–20; in The Cancer Journals,
191–98; epigenetics and, 263n23; health and, 259n12, 261n19; in Histology of
the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 165–90; hormones and, 263n22;
human/animal relationship and, 4, 29, 159–60, 249n50; imperialism and,
249n51; in One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack, 179; passivity and,
250n53; racialized, 5–15, 85–86, 101, 155, 182–88, 231n15, 231n19, 254n17.
See also femininity; heteropatriarchy; masculinity; patriarchy
enetic reductionism, 200
enomic individuality, 134–35
German Idealism, 97
Germany, 38, 97, 101, 128, 169, 172–73
eschlecht, 97–101
Gibbons, Luke, 88
Gikandi, Simon, 113, 235n44
Gilbert, Scott F., 134
Gill-Peterson, Julian, 220n9
Glissant, Édouard, 94, 100, 168, 233n32
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 170
Goldmann, Lucien, 86
Gordon, Joan, 124
Gordon, Lewis, 19, 33
Goss, Theodora, 243n20
Gotby, Alva, 131
Gould, Stephen Jay, 171–73
Gramsci, Antonio, 230n11
Gravlee, Clarence, 161, 206
Great Britain, 8, 112, 149, 251n59. See also England; United Kingdom
Green, Michelle Erica, 245n30
Guthman, Julie, 258n7

Haeckel, Ernst, 42, 162, 165, 169–71, 184–85, 189, 253n9; Art Forms in Nature,
178; Challenger research, 175–79; Generelle Morphilogue, 172; “Kunstformen
der Natur,” 15; Report of the Radiolara, 175–76; Stem-Tree of Plants, Protists,
and Animals, 14
Haeckel, Karl, 177
Hammonds, Evelynn, 230n12, 231n19
Hanchard, Michael, 237n55
Haraway, Donna, 155, 242n12, 251n65; on natureculture, 42; on science fiction,
41, 124; on species, 121, 129, 239n1, 247n40
Hartman, Saidiya, 19, 55, 214, 222n4, 225n31, 228n49; on black abjection, 27–
28, 46, 219n2; on black subjection, 27; on sentimentality, 56
Hayward, Eva, 148, 249n48, 250n52
Hearne, Vicki, 223n19
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 87, 109, 111, 119, 221n26, 233n31, 236n46; on
human/animal relationship, 25, 98; on plasticity, 10, 71, 73, 220n8; on race, 5,
 22, 29–33, 74, 89–90, 99, 112, 117
Heidegger, Martin, 81, 109, 111, 119, 233n29, 233n31; on human/animal/object
distinction, 37–39, 85–86, 93–101, 233n30
Heinlein, Robert: Starship Troopers, 123, 232n24
HeLa cell, 204
Helford, Elyce, 147
Henderson, Mae G., 225n32
eteropatriarchy, 10, 47, 65, 146, 147, 148
Hill, Shannen, 31
Hird, Myra, 137–38
istorico-racial schema (Fanon), 115, 162
HMS Challenger, 175–79
Hoagland, Ericka, 229n10
Höch, Hannah, 253n7
Hollander, Anne, 31
Hollinger, Veronica, 124
Homo Narrans, 34
Hopkinson, Nalo, 43, 83, 125, 184, 237n55; Brown Girl in the Ring, 1, 37–39,
88–94, 101–20, 231n18, 234n34, 234n37, 235nn39–41, 237n56
Hottentot trope, 8, 34, 98–99, 233n29, 234n33. See also Baartman, Sara
(“Hottentot Venus”)
Hulme, Peter, 240n8
Human Genome Project, 200, 202
Humboldt, Alexander von, 170, 177–78
Hume, David, 22–24, 113, 237n55
Hurley, Kelly, 246n34
ybridity, 6, 24, 31, 88, 118, 156, 251n65
ylomorphism, 9, 160

mmanence, 39, 87, 118, 157, 231n15; plasticity and, 71–72; racialized, 5, 89,
93, 113
mmunity, 134–35, 196, 239n2, 244n25
mperialism, 16, 33, 86, 159, 169, 173–75, 178, 221n21; in Beloved, 47;
blackness and, 45, 83, 85, 91, 109, 230n11; in “Bloodchild,” 123, 125, 129,
131, 145–46, 158, 242n13; British, 149, 249n51; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 83,
 118–19; correlationism and, 236n47; Dutch, 181; epigenetics and, 194; Great
Chain of Being and, 50; in Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine
Tumors, 167; human/animal relationship and, 25, 57; militarism and, 239n2;
national literature and, 88, 101; race and, 38–39; Roman, 40, 129; science
fiction and, 229n10; universal humanity and, 29, 44–46; the world as such and,
100, 233n32. See also colonialism
mpressibility (Schuller), 10
ndigenous people, 7, 32–33, 87, 102, 126, 229n7, 262n20. See also American
Indians; First Nations peoples; Taíno; Temagami
ndonesia, 181
nternational Monetary Fund (IMF), 16
ntersectionality, 5, 10, 230n12, 239n1, 251n65
ntra-activity (Barad), 42–43, 150, 164, 184

acobs, Naomi, 139

ain, S. Lochlain, 255n29
amaica, 24
ames, Ian, 226n39
anMohamed, Abdul, 70, 225n36
apan, 172, 175
efferson, Thomas, 10, 22, 26
ohnson, James, 186
ordan, Winthrop, 6–7, 49–50

Kant, Immanuel, 43, 98, 113, 164, 178, 231nn19–20, 250n55; on correlationism,
112, 236n47; on race, 22, 24–25, 151, 236n46
Keeling, Kara, 230n12
Kenya, 34, 167
Kidd, Benjamin, 174
Kipling, Rudyard, 174–75
Knopf-Newman, Macy Jane, 191
Krieger Nancy, 259n12
Kuzawa, Christopher W., 203, 213
Kwate, Naa Oyo A., 259n12

acan, Jacques, 224n27, 230n12

 andecker, Hannah, 201
ane, Nick, 251n59
anger, Jessica, 88
atour, Bruno, 232n23
e Bon, Gustave, 246n33
eClerc, Georges-Louis, 24
egae, Ezrom, 43; Chicken Series, 2, 31–33, 221n28, 1a–b
e Guin, Ursula: The Left Hand of Darkness, 124
eibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 230n11
évi-Strauss, Claude, 10, 71
ewis, Tené T., 261n19
beral humanism, 46, 66, 157; human/animal distinction in, 12, 15–16; race in,
1–2, 18–21, 38, 46–47, 59–60, 77
iebman, Elizabeth, 181, 183
innaeus, Carl, 182; Systema Naturae, 42, 165
inne, Carl von, 24, 184
ocke, John, 125, 151, 243n19, 250nn55–56; Second Treatise of Government,
125, 142, 247n38; Thoughts on Education, 55
ondon Medical and Chirurgical Review, 186
ong, Beverly, 256n33
orde, Audre, 160, 198–99, 203, 214, 255n28; A Burst of Light, 159, 194–96,
256n30; The Cancer Journals, 1, 37, 41, 43, 165–66, 190–92, 196
owndes, Robert A. W., 239n6
ubbock, John. See Avebury, Lord (John Lubbock)
ukács, György, 86
yotard, Jean-François, 231n20

MacPherson, Crawford Brough, 143

Malabou, Catherine, 10, 71–73, 220n8, 226n39, 226n42
Malaysia, 181
Mansfield, Becky, 210–11
Margulis, Lynn, 128, 137, 151–54, 251n64
Martin, Emily, 263n22
masculinity, 56, 136, 147–50, 189; militarized, 192, 195, 198; racialized, 9, 13,
62–64, 68, 74–78, 83–85
Mason, Jennifer, 48
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 48, 57
matrix-figure, 4, 13, 85
Mbembe, Achille, 19, 199, 213; on animality, 21, 34; on colonial hierarchies, 28;
on necropolitics, 199, 203–5; on universalism, 30
McBride, Dwight, 51–52
McClintock, Anne, 149, 249n51
McDowell, Deborah, 51–52
McKittrick, Katherine, 19, 45
McLennan, John Ferguson, 246n3
Meillassoux, Quentin, 112, 230n11, 236nn46–47
Melzer, Patricia, 124
metaphysics, 87, 88, 112–13, 142–43, 159, 172, 233n32; antiblackness and, 9,
38–39, 119, 160; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 101, 105, 114–15, 119–20;
Hegelian, 99; Heideggarian, 37, 85–86, 95–99, 111, 233n30; human/animal
relationship and, 12, 15, 25; immunity and, 244n25; of presence, 226n39;
representationalism and, 232n22
miscegenation, 153–56, 251n66
Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the
American White Man and Negro” (pamphlet), 153–54
modernity, 4, 117–18, 238n57; imperialism and, 83, 109, 221n21; slavery and,
38, 44–45
Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett), 182
monogenesis vs. polygenesis debates, 22, 171, 254n11
Moore, Kelli, 235n40
Moran, Shane, 234n33
Morgan, Jennifer, 7, 186
Morrison, Toni, 43, 231n19; Beloved, 1, 36–38, 46–47, 58–82, 84, 203, 223n19,
225nn28–30, 227n48
Morton, Samuel George, 173
Moten, Fred, 19, 66, 223n17, 225n38, 230n11
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 45
Mudimbe, Valentine, 87
Murphy, Michelle, 255n28
Musser, Amber, 168
mutability, 166, 171, 191, 193; epigenetics and, 199, 210–12, 263n23; plasticity
and, 11, 71–73, 226n39
Mutu, Wangechi, 160, 203, 214, 253n7, 253n9, 255n28; Histology of the
Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 1–2, 37, 41–43, 164–69, 173, 178–80,
184–85, 187–94, 198–99, 2–13; One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack,
179, 16

Nares, George, 175

National Geographic, 168, 253n8
aturalism, 60, 175–76, 181–83, 188
atural selection, 128
atureculture, 42, 138
Naturphilosophie, 170–71, 175, 253n9
Nazis, 228n49, 253n9
ecropower, 15, 18, 37, 53, 63, 165, 199–205
eo-Darwinism, 151
eo-slave narratives, 46, 222n6
Netherlands, 181
ew materialism, 12, 17, 73, 104, 230n11
Ngai, Sianne, 75
Nilges, Mathias, 123

Okorafor, Nnedi, 125

Oliver, Kelly, 97
Oroonoko, 86, 229n5

Panofsky, Aaron, 201

atriarchy, 81, 157, 249n49, 249n51; heteropatriarchy, 10, 47, 65, 146–49,
223n14; racialized, 60–63, 75–77, 84
Patterson, Orlando, 222n3, 225n37, 245n32
Pearson, Wendy Gay, 124
Peffer, John, 31, 221n28
Peppers, Cathy, 155
erformativity, 8, 85, 92, 128, 165, 179, 184, 232n22
hysiognomy, 6, 8
Picasso, Pablo, 235n44
Pickering, Thomas G., 259n11
Piercy, Marge, Woman on the Edge of Time, 124
Pitts-Taylor, Victoria, 226n42
lasticity, 19, 43, 50, 213, 220nn8–9, 226n41; in Beloved, 47, 58–82; blackness
and, 3, 5, 10–11, 35–39, 48, 166, 228n49; human/animal relationship and, 16,
23, 29, 33; Malabou on, 10, 71–73, 226n39, 226n42; neuroplasticity, 226n42;
ontologized, 10; slavery and, 219n2
olitical theory, 35, 40, 129; science fiction as, 41, 124
Polynesia, 181
ornography, 8, 168, 190
ornotroping, 209
ostcolonialism, 16, 88, 123, 167
osthumanism, 224n27, 225n38, 251n66, 256n37; feminist, 129, 151, 155;
human/animal binary in, 12, 16–17, 85
re-Socratics, 98
Puar, Jasbir, 192, 234n36, 255n23

Quach, Thu, 196

ueer alimentarity (Tompkins), 126, 241n9
ueer theory, 5, 124

adiolarian, 170, 175–76, 178

Raengo, Alessandra, 168, 188
Read, Jen’Nan Ghazal, 261n16
ealism, 39, 88–89, 230n11, 232n22, 253n9; materialist realism, 71; science
fiction and, 91, 106, 113, 117, 123, 232n24, 241n11; speculative realism,
225n38
ecapitulation (Haeckel), 169–74, 253n9
eceptivity, 146, 149–51, 263n22
Red Queen effect, 133, 244n22
Rees, Tobias, 226n42
Reider, John, 126
epresentationalism, 33, 91, 111, 113, 119–20, 232n22, 239n59
eproduction, 4, 12, 200, 223n14, 248n47, 251n66; in “Bloodchild,” 41, 121–58,
241n11, 245n30, 248n43; in The Cancer Journals, 43, 165; distributed,
255n28; in Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 42, 164, 166;
 human/animal relationship and, 249n50; plasticity and, 11; racialized, 13, 37,
77, 159, 167, 181–82, 185–86, 193–94, 199, 205, 209; reproductive health
disparities, 37, 167, 202–12; sociogeny and, 163, 169
Republican Party, 154
hizome (Deleuze), 121–22, 125, 239n3
Richards, Robert J., 170, 176–78, 253n9
Richardson, Sarah S., 263n22
Ring, Betty J., 222n13
Riquelme, John Paul, 243n20
Roberts, Celia, 263n22
Roberts, Dorothy, 193, 197, 206, 210, 261n18
Robertson Smith, William, 246n33
Robinson, Cedric, 104
Roman Empire, 40, 129
Rutsky, R. L., 180

agan, Dorion, 152–54

aid, Edward, 234n33
alisbury, Joyce E., 222n9
app, Jan, 40–41, 134, 245n27, 251n59
artre, Jean-Paul, 115
awyer, Andy, 229n10
cheper-Hughes, Nancy, 104
chiebinger, Londa, 182–83
chiller, Friedrich, 175
chleiden, Matthias Jakob, 170
choeck, Helmut, 75
chuller, Kyla, 10–11, 220n8
chuyler, George, Black Empire, 123
chwendener, Simon, 40, 251n59
cience fiction, 92, 138, 145, 229n5, 242n13, 249n51, 252n67; definition,
232n24; genre conventions of, 123–27, 129; as political theory, 41, 124;
postcolonial, 88, 229n10; queer, 124
cott, Darieck, 101, 225n35, 238n58
egade, Alexandro, 179
 entimentality, 63, 77, 79, 182, 224n24; racialized, 10–11, 26–27, 37–38, 47, 52–
58; sentimental novel, 222n6
erres, Michel, 223n17
exual violence, 62, 76, 105, 227n48
hakespeare, William, 12–13
hannon, Laurie, 12
harpe, Christina, 19, 203
hawl, Nisi, 125
heldon, Alice B./Raccoona. See Tiptree, James, Jr./Raccoona Sheldon/Alice B.
Sheldon
helley, Mary, 146
hukin, Nicole, 104
ims, J. Marion, 185–86, 188
Sinapia, 86, 229n5
lavery, 3, 33–36, 44, 112, 116, 126, 221n25, 225n37, 229n3; afterlife of, 5, 73,
194, 220n5; in Beloved, 58–81, 225n30, 227n48; in “Bloodchild,” 41, 122–33,
138, 142, 150–51, 158, 239n6, 244n23, 245n32; in Brown Girl in the Ring, 88,
102; fungibility and, 225n31; human/animal relationship and, 23, 28, 47–58,
247n41; in “Kindness to Animals,” 53–57, 222n13, 223n19; in Kindred,
252n67; Middle Passage, 10, 62, 118, 238nn57–58; in Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, 45, 47–53, 57; natural history and, 40–41, 251n59; neo-
slave narratives, 37–38, 45–46, 222n6; novel and, 86; partus sequitur ventrem
(legal doctrine), 159; plasticity and, 10–11, 219n2, 226n40, 226n42, 228n49;
racialized gender and, 7, 11, 84, 186–87, 194, 229n7, 234n37; social contract
theory and, 250nn55–56; symbiosis as, 153, 155; universal humanity and, 14,
25–27, 45–46
mallwood, Stephanie, 10
ocial Darwinism, 174
ociogeny (Wynter), 34, 169, 184–85, 194, 212–13; antiblackness and, 5, 199; in
“Bloodchild,” 157; definition, 161–63; nature/culture binary and, 42
outh Africa, 31, 33–34, 234n33, 251n59
oweto uprising, 31
panier, Bonnie, 155
peciesism, 17, 23, 156
pencer, Herbert, 174
 pillers, Hortense, 19, 91, 223n17, 224n27, 231n20; on black female sexuality,
8–9, 190, 231n19; on the female within, 83; on flesh, 84, 193–94, 225n36,
230n12; on mythic time, 231n18; on vestibularity, 235n40
quier, Susan, 121
tein, Rachel, 105
tereotypes, 4, 149, 168, 188–89, 234n37
weet, Elizabeth, 203
ymbiosis, 167, 244n24, 245n26, 251nn58–59, 251nn64–65; in “Bloodchild,” 37,
40–43, 121–58, 244n21, 244n23, 247n42

aíno, 125–27
auber, Alfred I., 134, 245n27
axonomy, 125, 152, 156, 184–85, 239n5, 251n59; blackness and, 14, 24–25,
40, 42, 60, 80, 83–85, 88, 164–76; reproduction and, 121, 154
emagami, 103
Tennessean, 53–54, 224n24
erra nullius, 122, 132, 239n2, 243n19
hibodeau, Amanda, 149, 249n51
hompson, Robert Farris, 238n57
homson, Charles Wyville, 175, 176
iptree, James, Jr./Raccoona Sheldon/Alice B. Sheldon, “The Screwfly Solution,”
123, 239n6, 241n11
ompkins, Kyla Wazana, 125–27, 234n34, 235n40, 241n9
ranscendence, 39, 87, 89–90, 118–19, 231n15, 236n47, 238n57
ransmogrification, 3, 70–71, 81
ransparency thesis, 130–31, 151, 243n17
ylor, Edward Burnett, 238n58, 246n33
yson, Edward, 182

United Kingdom, 259n9. See also England; Great Britain

niversal history, 126
niversal humanity, 14, 126; racialized, 18, 20, 23, 27–33, 45–46, 79

ertigo, 39, 83, 91, 102, 105, 114–16, 120, 235n40

Vivieros de Castro, Eduardo, 236n47
on Uexküll, Jakob, 94
Voorhees, Ron, 259n10
Vycinas, Vincent, 233n29

Waddington, Conrad, 200

Walcott, Derek: Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 102
Walcott, Rinaldo, 103
Wallace, Michelle, 111–12, 235n43
Washington, Harriet, 186–87
Weheliye, Alex, 19, 35, 162, 228n49
White, Eric, 248n46
Wilderson, Frank, III, 19, 114, 195, 255n28
Williams, Aubrey, 235n44
Williams, David R., 207, 213, 261n17
Williams, Eric, 86
Williams, Patricia J., 102
Wilson, Elizabeth, 149
Wolfe, Cary, 14–15, 49, 96, 125, 222n11
Wolmark, Jennifer, 252n67
Woolgar, Steve, 232n23
he world as such, 39, 88, 89, 90, 100, 105, 120, 230n11, 233n32
World Bank, 16
worlding, 34, 40, 92, 142, 184, 230n11; Heidegger and, 95, 97, 100; racialized, 1,
90, 101, 119–20
Wright, Richard, 219n3
Wynter, Sylvia, 19, 94, 221n20, 231n19, 237n53, 249n49; on demonic ground,
93, 230n12; on literature, 86–87, 90, 101; on race, 20, 252n3; on Self/World,
111; on sociogeny, 5, 42, 115, 1610163

Yoruba religious practice, 117–18, 238n57

 About the Author

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor in the Department of

English at the University of Southern California.