An other: a black feminist consideration of animal life

by Sharon Patricia Holland

Overview

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 MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478020097
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Series:	Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke UniversityPress.

Table of Contents

How to Read This Book  xi
Primer: What the Animal Said  xv
1. Vocabularies : Possibility  1
2. Companionate : Species  51
3. Diversity : A Scarcity  90
4. Love : Livestock  139
5. Horse : Flesh  165
6. Sovereignty : A Mercy  222
The Open : . . .  254
Acknowledgments  257
Abbreviations  261
Notes  263
Bibliography  303
Index  317

Editorial Reviews

"Holland’s argument stands out for its attention to insurgency, ethical action, and justice in the intersections of Blackness, femaleness, Indigeneity, and animality. . . . Ultimately, Holland’s contribution to Black, feminist, animal, and posthuman studies offers an ethical reconsidering of human/animal being and possibilities of opening hum:animal relations."

Pamela B. Junen Literary History

"Holland’s pointed questions and remarks, the sheer breadth of topics, and easy, conversational prose, provide for an enriching and quite fascinating literary analysis. . . . An Other provides new takes on well-known texts (e.g., Twelve Years a Slave and Toni Morrison’s Beloved), and an engaging and provocative introduction to lesser-known novels and social movement history that deserve a wider audience."

Hypatia - Maneesha Deckha

Sharon Patricia Holland’s an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland’s enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book.

Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life - Sarah Jane Cervenak

"This book is speculative and academic at the same time. Therefore, it appeals to both general and scholarly audiences. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of Black studies and the environmental humanities, exploring such issues as just futures, racial and environmental justice, the more-than-human world and the relationship between humans and more-than-humans (in particular, animals). It is a complex read, but one that will make everyone rethink the relationship between humans and animals from an ethical perspective, reconsider Blackness, ponder the consequences of racial oppression and the ongoing environmental crisis, and fight for equality."

European Journal of American Studies - Tatiana Conrad

With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume.

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century - Kyla Wazana Tompkins

"Sharon Patricia Holland's an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland's enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book."--Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of "Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life"

"With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume."--Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of "Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century"

From the Publisher