Claire Jean Kim - Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age

When Asian immigrants, African Americans, or Native people in the United States harm animals in their (cultural) practices, controversy is sure to follow. Dangerous Crossings offers a compelling analysis of three of these impassioned disputes: the battle over the live animal markets in San Franciscos Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over the Makah tribes decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Moving beyond simplistic explanations about culture clashes and double standards, Claire Jean Kim shows that in each dispute, race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power, fashioning the animal, the Chinese immigrant, the Black man, and the Indian in the white imaginary. In each dispute, too, the optic of cruelty and ecological harm, evoked by animal advocates, confronts the optic of racism and cultural imperialism, evoked by race advocates. The answer to this conundrum, she argues, is a multi-optic approach to social justice, one that takes multiple forms of domination seriously and encourages an ethics of avowal among different justice struggles.

CLAIRE JEAN KIM is a Professor of Political Science and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on Asian American politics, Black politics, comparative race studies, social movements, and human-animal studies. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000), won two awards from the American Political Science Association the Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. Dr. Kim has also written numerous journal articles and book chapters. She coedited, with Carla Freccero, a special issue of American Quarterly entitled Species/Race/Sex (2013). She is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

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In July 1996, the San Francisco Commission on Animal Control and Welfare held a much-anticipated meeting. For nearly a year, the Commission, an advisory board to the citys legislative body, the Board of Supervisors, had held heated public hearings on whether to ban the sale of live animals for food in the city, a move that would especially affect the merchants in Chinatown who sell turtles, frogs, birds, fish, and other animals. It was finally time for the Commission to hold a vote. The meeting room at the Taraval Police Station was full and an overflow crowd of hundreds gathered outside. On the street, animal activists held up signs condemning cruelty toward animals in Chinatowns live animal markets, while Chinese Americans held up signs condemning the cultural imperialism of their critics. The crowd waited, murmuring. The air was thick with tension. The Commissioners passed the ban with a vote of 7 to 3, with one abstention. When the vote was announced, the crowd roared and police officers escorted Commissioners out of the back of the building for their personal safety.