Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Published by New York University Press 2020

Becoming Human

Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Volume 53 in the series Sexual Cultures

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479890040.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Argues that blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.

Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness—the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that disrupt not only the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also by challenging the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

Author / Editor information

JacksonZakiyyah Iman:

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience.Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience.

Reviews

Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:
Brilliantly reframes the relation between blackened life and the category of the human, by shifting the terms of the debate. She maintains that neither dehumanization nor exclusion are sufficient to explain antiblackness and its descending scale of life. In so doing, Jackson's ‘ontological plasticity’ reveals the controlled depletion that produces the liquidity of life and fleshly existence, and enables blackened life to be anything, which is also to say nothing at all. Jackson’s rigorous and sustained meditation is relentless in exploring the possibilities for a generative disordering of being, inhabiting other senses of the world, and imagining the field of relation in ceaseless flux and directionless becoming.

Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake:
The sheer beauty, force, and ingenuity of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's aesthetic strategies and gestures are on display as she performs the very risks and rewards she conjures. Offering a brilliant intervention into questions of the human, each of Jackson’s readings profoundly unsettle our presumed relations and prevailing ontologies. She reads western philosophy and science through African diasporic literatures, theories, and visual art to open us up to what is made—what might be made—in excess of the matrix of antiblackness and its constitutive forms of the human, animal, gender, and matter. In the book’s range of knowledges, reach, and scope, no field nor discipline would not benefit from a real and sustained engagement with the work that Jackson undertakes here.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
On Becoming Human An Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Losing Manhood Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
2 Sense of Things Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
3 “Not Our Own” Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
4 Organs of War Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303