Animal Alterity: Blackness, Indigeneity, and the Human in Twentieth-Century America

Pergadia, Samantha; Pergadia, Samantha

This session consists of three presentations strictly limited to 15 minutes and a 10 minute response by junior faculty and graduate students, each addressing racialized and gendered difference as these categories intersect with the concept of (non)human animality. In a refusal of the sectarianism and retrograde nationalisms that proliferate in the contemporary moment, the panel brings black and indigenous studies to bear on twentieth century American literature and popular film as it elaborates on Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s idea that “humanization” is no antidote to antiblack (and settler) violence (Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, 2020). Together, the papers ambitiously think across genres and through the sprawl of the twentieth century, 1899-1981, in an effort to attend to the discursive shifts as well as the continuities in both a Western imagination around colonized peoples and BIPOC’s responses to or moves beyond that imagination. Also drawing on Joshua Bennett’s MLA-Prize winning Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the Ends of Man (2020), and Pauline Wakeham’s 2021 essay, “The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism: Genocide, Attrition, and the Long Emergency of Invasion,” the panelists each contribute to the profoundly nascent subfield wherein racialized subjects historicize and theorize nonhuman animality, in this case, through literature and film.

Jordan T. McDonald’s paper interrogates discourses of Black domesticity and pethood within narratives and critiques of intraracial disloyalty. Examining Zora Neale Hurston’s 1943 essay, “The Pet Negro System,” McDonald explores the “pet Negro” within the social and political structure of the 20th century American South as a figure whose existence is shaped by an anti-Black economy of allowances. McDonald juxtaposes the process of domestication in theories of the pet alongside those that concern the enslaved, fungible Black subject. Ultimately, the paper argues that Hurston put forth a theory of the pet as a biopolitical category defined by technologies of domestication rather than species, in a move that was far ahead of its time in and beyond African-American literature.

Kali Simmons takes up the curious series of ‘creature feature’ horror films that clawed their way through American cinemas during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Simmons explores Orca (Michael Anderson, 1977), Prophecy (John Frankenheimer, 1979), Nightwing (Arthur Hiller, 1979) and Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981) as films fearful of the long-term impacts of modernity upon the natural world–-a cultural anxiety voiced most resoundingly in the hit film Jaws (Stephen Spielberg, 1975). The paper demonstrates that each of the four films in question deviates from the generic formula of Speilbeg’s ur-text by representing their monstrous antagonists as an extension of Indigenous communities experiencing environmental racism. Noting that this representational grammar of Indigenous creatureliness can only partly be explained using the logics of primitivism, the presentation probes for the deeper aesthetic and epistemological frameworks that orient this unique sub-genre. Ultimately, Simmons argues that the grammar of Indigenous creatureliness exposes the entanglements of race, gender, and animality as foundational to settler colonialism as an ongoing project.

Examining Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), the late Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), and Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), Alex Alston argues that these authors use animal-metaphor and a literary rendering of becoming-animal as a device to not only critique but go beyond antiblack animalization toward a collective if unwieldy theory of black life in and as animal life. Juxtaposing the uses of animality in Morrison and Hurston, especially, with critiques of the Human as a colonial and antiblack formation that increasingly characterize the field, Alston also troubles contemporary black studies’ neglect or turn away from African-American literature.

Samantha Pergadia will give a 10 minute response (leaving 5 minutes of “wiggle room” for the session in addition to the required 15 minutes of questions) to the panel presentations that further sutures the interventions that the panel collectively offers while also pointing out different and perhaps conflicting implications of the panelists approaches. Pergadia’s comments and questions will kick-start the question portion of the session by emphasizing how urgent the interventions of these fields concerning the question of animality are for one another, for literary studies, for animal studies, and indeed, for the future of human life, yet untethered from colonial biopolitical hierarchies and the West’s impoverished discourse of species.

585 Animal Alterity: Blackness, Indigeneity, and the Human in Twentieth-Century America: Calls for Papers