Animals and Race
Published on 1. February 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
227 pages
978-1-61186-445-8 (ISBN)
Description
The intersection of race and species has a long and problematic history. Western thinking specifically has demonstrated a societal need to try to conceive of race as a purely biological fact rather than a social construct. This book is an academic-activist challenge to that instinct, prioritizing anti-racism in its observation of the animal-race intersection. Too often, as Benedicte Boisseron has indicated, this intersection typically appears in the form of animal activists instrumentalizing racial discrimination as a vehicle to approach animal rights. But why does this intersection exist, and, perhaps more importantly, how can we challenge it moving forward? This volume examines those two critical questions, taking an interdisciplinary approach in moving across subjects including art history, film studies, American history, and digital media analysis. Our interpretation of animals has, for centuries, been fundamental in the development of Western race thinking. This collection of essays looks at how this perspective contributes to the construction of racial discrimination, prioritizing ways to read the animal in our culture as a means for working to dismantle this conception.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
East Lansing, MI
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
24
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-61186-445-8 (9781611864458)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres received their PhD in English from Michigan State University, specializing in early modern literature, animal studies, and horror literature. Thurston-Torres was the recipient of a Newberry Library Fellowship and has been nominated for multiple queer literature awards.
Content
Contents Introduction: A Racial History of Animals Of Domestication and Violence This Is a Thoroughbred Boy: Exploring the Lives of Slave Children and Animals | Rachael L. Pasierowska The Double Standard: German Shepherds, Race, and Violence | Silke Hackenesch and Mieke Roscher Sheep Trouble on Clifton Beach: Sacrificial Sheep Exorcising the Demon of Racism? | Benita de Robillard Of Menageries and Empires Llamas, Snakes, and Indigenous Colonial Equivalency in the Andes | Rachel Sarah O'Toole Disguise Hunting and Indian Otherness in Theodor de Bry's Brief Narration of What Befell the French in Florida (1591) | Thomas Balfe Reframing Whiteness in the Zoo: Snowflake the Gorilla in Modern Media | Elizabeth Tavella Of Prey, Sex, and Gender The Miseducation of Henrietta Forge: Whiteness and the Equestrian Imagination in C. E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings | Angela Hofstetter From Apes to Stags: Black Men, White Women, and the Animals That Code Them in Horror Cinema | Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres Queer Trouble at the Origin: Steven Cohen's Cradle of Humankind (2012) | Ruth Lipschitz #RateASpecies: Reviewing Animal Commodities on the Internet | Soledad Altrudi Of Food and Kin Civil Rats and the Human Exceptional: A Vegan-Historical Account of the Rat Extermination Act of 1967 | Thomas Aiello The Cry of the Wolf: Exposing the Peril of Racism Lurking in the White Sheep Complex | Rajesh K. Reddy Contributors Index