Introduction: Blackness Without Analog
1. Is the Animal the New Black?
2. Blacks and Dogs in the Americas
3. The Commensal Dog in a Creole Context
4. Dog Ownership in the Diaspora
5. The Naked Truth About Cats and Blacks
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Bénédicte Boisseron is associate professor of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (2014).
Dazzling in its reach and groundbreaking in its methodology,
Afro-Dog redraws the contours of intellectual inquiry with dogs at
the lead. Boisseron aims to rethink the hyper-legality of racism
and the practice of inequality in ways that are radical and
far-reaching.
*Colin Dayan, author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life*
Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog hones in, acutely and in detail, on
the often-unhappy convergence of 'animal' and 'black' in current
and historical thought, deftly dismantling their rhetorical
obfuscations while sacrificing neither 'the animal' nor 'the
black.' Instead, she calls for attending to human-animal encounters
through the lens of black and animal defiance, a kind of subversive
interspecies alliance that could empower both. Brilliantly
enlisting theoretical and critical voices in critical race studies,
animal studies, Afropessimism, ecofeminism, and more, Boisseron
brings a crucial Black Alantic and diasporic perspective to bear on
blackness and the question of the animal to show, not that
blackness and animality are comparable, but that black people and
animals have been and are historically and concretely
connected—most often in the form of 'man' and 'dog.'
*Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz*
In Afro-Dog, Boisseron brilliantly demonstrates how the
relationship between race and personhood has been missing entirely
from the current human/animal rights debate, resulting in the
argument that animals constitute the new 'slaves.' In doing so she
offers a long overdue exploration of the larger and more extended
links in American and French culture where blackness and animality
have become almost interchangeable in popular discourse.
*Sandra Gunning, University of Michigan*
Afro-Dog is a timely effort to tackle the fraught relations between
posthumanism and postcolonialism and between animal studies and
African American studies. Inflected by continental philosophy,
Boisseron’s readings follow a historical trail of dogs from the
Middle Passage to the Ferguson unrest in order to theorize a legacy
of connections between racism and speciesism, but without posing a
false analogy between the two. Especially insightful and important
are her arguments about the potential dangers of intersectional
analyses which 'risk reproducing what they mean to reject.'
*Kari Weil, author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies
Now?*
Afro-Dog is an amazing book! The animal is not 'the new black';
animals are not the new slaves; and animal studies is not heir to
the postcolonial turn. Instead, racialization, specifically New
World blackness, is now present in all things animal. Whether as
large dogs imported to the Americas to attack indigenous and
African rebels or their repressive use in Standing Rock and
Ferguson, Bénédicte Boisseron brilliantly explores dogs as
instrumental accessories in defining human essence as white,
impelling readers to consider the fundamental relationship between
challenging speciesism and transcending colonialism. A must-read
for anyone interested in the study of animals, enslavement, and
race.
*Jane Gordon, University of Connecticut*
Boisseron documents and elaborates on the 'animalization' of blacks
and the 'blackification' of animals, the two having often been
treated the same by Euro-americans and in their
laws....Recommended.
*Choice*
An engaging, synthetic, and quick read on the importance of
understanding the flaws of privilege in the making of activist
engagements. As such, it should be read by scholars of Atlantic
slavery, racial identity, and the animal liberation movement.
*H-Florida*
Boisseron shows the interconnectedness of Blackness and the animal,
both through how systems of oppression persistently associate
Blackness and animality, and through how Caribbean and other
non-European cultures relate in less controlling, less calcified
ways to animals.
*Environmental Humanities*
A major contribution.
*Society & Animals*
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