Toward Black Animality Studies

Abstract

ver the last ten years, animal studies scholarship has taken a critical race turn just as scholarship on race revises standard accounts of the relationship between race and animality. As a corrective to scholarship that treats speciesism as the grounds for racism (or appropriately recruits race-based dehumanization as the analogic precedent for animal rights), scholars have turned both to the material histories that connect race and species in counterintuitive ways and to the racialization of animality. Neel Ahuja has reprimanded “the conflation of race and species” in animal studies, wherein racial discourse is assimilated into species discourse, for “flattening out historical contexts that determine the differential use of animal (and other) figures in the process of racialization.”1 A suite of scholarship, including works by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Mel Y. Chen, Colleen Boggs, Michael Lundblad, and Claire Jean Kim, has examined the various and varied sites of entanglement between animality and race.