an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

Sharon Patricia Holland thinks through the human animal divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals and spotlighting those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. In an other , Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVEs incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrisons A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnetts films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Summary:"Sharon Patricia Holland's an other brings a Black feminist analysis to thinking about human and animal relations. Specifically, Holland wants to know what relation animals have to Black humanity. For example, she studies MOVE-the communal organization advocating for nature laws and natural living in Philadelphia in the 1970s-and the way they lived alongside animals. She emphasizes the racial logics of this situation, especially in terms of the policing and white racist anti-MOVE protests that followed. What sets Holland's work apart from other books that think about human and animal relationality is her focus on cohabitation and being with each other. This focus challenges ways of thinking about ontology in post-continental philosophy, new materialism, and animal studies and also opens a new approach to these fields from the perspective of Black studies and Black feminist theory"-- Provided by publisher Contents How to read this book Primer : what the animal said Accident Love 1 Vocabularies : Possibility 2 Companionate : Species 3 Diversity : A scarcity 4 Love : Livestock 5 Horse : Flesh 6 Sovereignty : A mercy The open : . . . Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index