Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize

"This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways...African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett's analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have 'been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.'...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought."
--Ron Charles, Washington Post

For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal--the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark--in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people--all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.

Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

"A gripping work...Bennett's lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read."
--LSE Review of Books

"These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics."
--Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog

"Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining."
--Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

Author: Joshua Bennett
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 02/08/2022
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780674271166

About the Author
Bennett, Joshua: - Joshua Bennett is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Owed and The Sobbing School, winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. His writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.