{"product_id":"being-property-once-myself-9780674271166","title":"Being Property Once Myself","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons. Joshua Bennett explores the place of animality in works by Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and other black writers, delving into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that emerge from being viewed as a subgenre of the human.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways 20th- and 21st-century 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 *\u003cbr\u003eA gripping work…Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read…Adds to a growing body of critical work that tackles social issues in relation to the realm of ‘nature,’ pushing back simultaneously against the whiteness of both literary studies and ecocriticism. -- Lydia Ayame Hiraide * LSE Review of Books *\u003cbr\u003eBy turns leading-edge and unaffected, revelatory and understated, Bennett appears much less concerned to prove that his chops as a critic and theorist are equal to his poetic abilities…By way of close readings of some well-established, and a few wholly unnoticed, scenes of black\/Animal apposition or relationality, Bennett’s \u003ci\u003eBeing Property\u003c\/i\u003e shares in the ensemblic turn toward black ecological criticism and theory exploring blackness, animality, ground-life, and philosophical posthumanism…Bennett stands to add many more fans to the crowd of us who’ve relished his poetic talents over many years. -- Maurice Wallace * S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual History *\u003cbr\u003eA tremendously illuminating study of how black writers wrestle with black precarity. Bennett’s refreshing and field-defining approach shows how both classic and contemporary African American authors undo long-held assumptions of the animal–human divide. -- Salamishah Tillet, author of \u003ci\u003eSites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBennett writes so beautifully that it hurts. Imagine a world of animals—rats, cocks, mules, and dogs—that prompt renewed ways of seeing, thinking, and living beyond cages or chains. These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics, and black feeling beyond the claims of property or propriety. -- Colin Dayan, author of \u003ci\u003eWith Dogs at the Edge of Life\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Law Is a White Dog\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBeing Property Once Myself\u003c\/i\u003e is destined to be an event. Exhilarating and original, it is as much a work of literary history as it is of literary theory, as much a poetic invocation as it is critical intervention, and as much about animals as it is about people, elegantly uniting the many singularities that constitute, collectively, black literary culture. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of \u003ci\u003eElectric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBennett makes an important contribution to the fields of Black studies and critical animal studies while offering a uniquely lyrical voice of literary criticism. -- Bénédicte Boisseron * American Literary History *","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48865485062487,"sku":"9780674271166","price":16.1,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780674271166.jpg?v=1722274193","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/being-property-once-myself-9780674271166","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}