UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rw8q9k9 Author Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies and the Designated Emphasis Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair Professor Darieck Scott Professor Brandi Catanese Professor Kristen Whissel Spring 2012 Copyright Zakiyyah Iman Jackson 2012 Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity Abstract Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair “Beyond the Limit” provides a crucial reexamination of African diasporic literature, performance, and visual culture’s philosophical interventions into Western legal, scientific, and philosophic definitions of the human. Frederick Douglass’s speeches, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Pet Negro System, Charles Burnett’s The Killer of Sheep and The Horse, Jean Michel- Basquiat’s Wolf Sausage and Monkey, Ezrom Legae’s Chicken Series, and the performance art of Grace Jones both critique and displace the racializing assumptive logic that has grounded these fields’ debates on how to distinguish human identity from that of the animal. In complementary but highly distinct ways, these literary, performance, and visual texts articulate humanity in a manner that neither relies on animal abjection nor reestablishes liberal humanism as the authority on being human. They creatively respond to the animalization of black gender and sexuality by generating conceptions of humanity, paradigms of relationality, and epistemologies that reject, alter, or expose not only the racialization of the human-animal border found in science, law, and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. Our interpretations of African diasporic cultural production tend to suggest, from the slave narrative until today, that writers were motivated by a desire for human recognition. Departing from this interpretation, Beyond the Limit argues African American and 1 diasporic culture is not a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into liberal humanist conceptions of the human, but rather, one that frequently alters the meaning of humanity from the perspective of being animalized. If we read Western law, philosophy, and science through the lens of African diasporic literature, performance, and visual culture, it reveals the limits of dominant conceptualizations of humanity. I demonstrate that African diasporic and transnational cultural production intervenes productively in rethinking the role of “the animal” or the “animalistic” in the construction of “the human.” 2 Contents INTRODUCTION On Becoming Human ii-xxix 1. Losing Manhood 1 Epistemology, Animality, and the Ethics of Uncertainty in Beloved 2. The Law is Your Mother 26 (Animal) Metaphor, Reproduction, and Dissimulative Acts in Law and the Literary Imagination of Zora Neale Hurston 3. A Question Mark Followed By An Exclamation Point 57 Grace Jones, Cannibal Consumption, and the Limits of Purrformance 4. Sacrificing Sacrifice 77 Racial Patriarchy and Animal Slaughter in Charles Burnett’s The Horse and Killer of Sheep Afterward 99 References 109 Bibliography 124 i On Becoming Human: An Introduction “Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity,” argues that key texts of 20th-century African diasporic literature, performance, and visual culture generate oppositional conceptions of humanity that creatively disrupt the human-animal dichotomy that undergirds the persistence of racialization. Historically, people of the African diaspora have been racialized as “the animal within the human.” In light of this history, African diasporic cultural production has often been interpreted as a plea for human recognition. In contrast, “Beyond the Limit” highlights African American, African, and Caribbean literature, performance, and visual culture’s critique and revision of dominant conceptions of the human found in Western law, science, and philosophy. I demonstrate that Frederick Douglass’s speeches, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Pet Negro System, Charles Burnett’s films The Killer of Sheep and The Horse, Jean Michel-Basquiat’s paintings Wolf Sausage and Monkey, Ezrom Legae’s Chicken Series drawings, and the performance art of Grace Jones expand critiques of the animalization of blackness found in established and recent accounts of racialization. Specifically, they not only challenge the racialized application of the term “animal” to humans but also question and displace the fundamental biopolitical presuppositions that define black animality in the fields of science, law, and philosophy. Using literature, film, visual art, and performance, my study achieves the double move of critique and displacement by identifying conceptions of humanity that do not rely on the animal’s negation, as repudiation of the animal has historically been essential to producing classes of marginalized humans. While we often isolate African diasporic literary studies from the disciplines of science, law, and philosophy, I contend that the African diasporic literature, performance, and visual culture in my study make crucial interventions into legal and scientific frameworks that dominate definitions of the human: evolution, gynecology, sexology, rights, property, and legal personhood. “Beyond the Limit” reveals that science and law share many characteristics with literature and visual art despite the espoused objectivity and procedural integrity of scientific and legal discourses. In debates concerning the specificity of human identity with respect to “the animal,” science and law both possess foundational and recursive investments in figurative, and arguably literary, narratives that conceptualize African gender as trope, metaphor, and symbol. Law, philosophy, and science are often treated as separate and unrelated sites of knowledge production, yet my study reveals their historical entanglement and shared assumptive logic with regard to black gender and sexuality. As conceived by evolutionary theory, legalistic conceptions of personhood, property, and rights, and much of Western Enlightenment philosophy, antiblack racism has sought to justify racialization by suggesting that black people are most representative of the animalistic dimensions of humanity. While many scholars have critiqued the conflation of black humans with animals found in Enlightenment discourses, I argue that prior scholarship has fundamentally misrecognized the logic behind the intersection of animality and racialization. I reinterpret Enlightenment thought not as black “exclusion” or “denied humanity” but rather as the violent appropriation—inclusion and recognition—of African humanity in the interest of animalizing that very humanity. It is perhaps prior ii scholarship’s interpretation of this tradition as “denied humanity” that has facilitated a call for greater inclusion, as a corrective to what they deem is a historical exclusion of blackness. One consequence of this orientation is that many scholars have essentially ignored alternative conceptions of humanity produced by black people. Breaking from the preoccupations and approaches found in prior scholarship, my project is an examination of how African diasporic literary, performance, and cultural texts generate conceptions of humanity that do not rely on the fundamental disparagement of “the animal.” The terms of African American art and literature’s canonization have suggested that African diasporic cultural production does little more than refute racism and petition for assimilation into the very definition of humanity that produces racial hierarchy. The texts in my study are better understood as providing both revisions of dominant constructions and generative conceptions of humanity, which are not always framed as a critique of the dominant—thereby refusing the terms of liberal multicultural recognition, which require either the evocation of animalized depictions of blackness and the suffering these images cause or the redirection of stereotype. The chapters in this dissertation explore how black critique and generative thought emerges from within the contradictions of competing conceptions of modernity’s crucible—the human. I argue that the cultural production examined in the pages that follow reveal a critical counter-discursive potential in afromodernism with regards to the human/animal distinction. My study generates new possibilities for defining humanity because the texts examined neither rely on animal abjection to define the human nor reestablish

Load more