Zakiyyah Iman Jackson - Becoming Human

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations

Phillip Brian Harper

Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

Jos A. Quiroga

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Negrn-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon B. Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain

Christina Crosby

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Amber Jamilla Musser

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyongo

Queer Times, Black Futures

Kara Keeling

Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Melissa E. Sanchez

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Robb Hernndez

Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora

Keguro Macharia

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

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2020 by New York University

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ISBN : 978-1-4798-9004-0 (hardback)

ISBN : 78-1-4798-3037-4 (paperback)

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For Derrick, my cosmic love

Color illustrations appear following chapter 2

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World argues that key texts of twentieth-century African diasporic literature and visual culture generate unruly conceptions of being and materiality that creatively disrupt the humananimal distinction and its persistent raciality. There has historically been a persistent question regarding the quality of black(ened) peoples humanity. African diasporic literature and cultural production have often been interpreted as a reaction to this racializationa plea for human recognition. Becoming Human takes a different approach, investigating key African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual texts that critique and depose prevailing conceptions of the human found in Western science and philosophy. These texts move beyond a critique of bestialization to generate new possibilities for rethinking ontology: our being, fleshy materiality, and the nature of what exists and what we can claim to know about existence. The literary and visual culture studied in Becoming Human neither rely on animal abjection to define being (human) nor reestablish human recognition within liberal humanism as an antidote to racialization. Consequently, they displace the very terms of black(ened) animality as abjection.

Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into liberal humanist conceptions of the human but, rather, frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of a history of blacknesss bestialization and thingification: the process of imagining black people as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of colonial myths and racial hierarchy. Toni Morrisons