Catchin’ Strays: On Pet Negroes, the Black Domestic, and the Politics of Comfort

Abstract:What if the category of the pet as a category was defined by forced domestication rather than species? In her 1943 essay “The Pet Negro System,” published in The American Mercury, Zora Neale Hurston theorizes 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, which has significant consequences for what Hortense Spillers refers to as “intramural Black life.” Exploring Hurtson’s formulation and delineation of the “pet Negro” and “stray” classes, this article argues that Hurston offers us a critique of Black elite comfort and complicity beyond the popular rhetorical discourses of domesticated (dis)loyalty thus opening up a framework for thinking of intraracial betrayal not as a matter of idiosyncratic cowardice, but as a reminder of how the singularity of anti-Blackness assures ontological precarity and produces anti-sociality. Taking seriously Saidiya Hartman’s articulation that “the domestic space, as much as the field, defined [the enslaved’s] experience of enslavement and the particular vulnerabilities of the captive body,” this essay considers the narrative of domestication as it concerns theories of the pet, the animal, and the enslaved fungible Black subject.