Postmodern Culture

No one will dispute that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has set the stage for deeper engagements with our collective feelings about racial disparity and the natural world. Black scholars are at the forefront of thinking through these perilous times into a future that might, finally, be able to hold us. In Joshua Bennett's spare and gorgeously written Being Property Once Myself, we are asked to begin this journey through "a black aesthetic tradition" that "provides us with the tools needed to conceive of interspecies relationships" (4). He asks: what are the ethical concerns that come forward from negated personhood, legally and philosophically? The title of Bennett's book is taken from a Lucille Clifton poem in which kinship with the natural world produces black life. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson travels brilliantly in the same psychic life of blackness in Becoming Human, which shares similar objects and theoretical underpinnings; both texts explore the impactful nature of an antiblack world. As Jackson states in her "Introduction," she wants to take note of "our shared being with the nonhuman without suggesting that some members of humanity bear the burden of 'the animal'" (12). Her text strives to unmake the terms of the debate itself, offering up even its title as an oxymoron in black thought, as the works of African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual artists "displace the very terms of black(ened) animality as abjection" (1).

Bennett's work reads across the canon, and reimagines sociality, interiority, and feeling through the prism of black studies, ecocriticism, and affect theory as he engages in extensive and rewarding readings of literature, focusing on the ways in which these authors "render animal life" (9). His text is not interested in the "undertheorized plight of nonhuman animals." Rather, Bennett's analysis wants to draw attention to animal life as "a site of recognition and reckoning" (11). Each chapter is devoted to thinking with animal life as a figure for a remapping of black interiority. The first chapter, "Rat," explicates Richard Wright's attention to animal life as a mediation of black death. Beginning with Tara Betts's poem, "For Those Who Need a True Story," Bennett deftly navigates the complexity of non-human animal life and black life and the significance of the language of pests, infestation, and vermin that demonstrates the meaningful co-habitation of black human and animal life. Students of Wright's work will immediately understand the originality of Bennett's reading as he utilizes Wright's purposeful foreclosure of sympathy for Bigger as a way to understand what actually subtends an antiblack world. In this reading, Bennett is quick to remind us that we judge Bigger's actions as his "natural inclination toward cruelty" rather than as a "sociological problem." Wright wants to lay bare this problem in writing about Bigger's predicament: "Bigger is more violent than he is kind, and that is precisely the point. He is in the world and of it" (39). His reading of Wright's literary critics is nothing short of brilliant. Along the way, he exposes the flawed infrastructure obscured by a one-to-one correlation between Bigger and the rat: that the relationship between these two beings is one of contestation. That contest is at issue in Bennett's work. In this theatre, rat and human co-create—out of contestation, perhaps, but what then happens to that ethical life as a potentiality for the kind of kinship, rather than objectification, that Bennett seeks to engage? If Bigger's future might be bound with the symbol of the rat but the rat's future cannot be seen or told, does the consideration of non-human animal life still rest upon a contestation that produces a human...