Being Property Once Myself

Blackness and the End of Man

Being Property Once Myself
Joshua Bennett
RRP:
NZ$ 37.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 32.29
Paperback
h210 x 140mm - 224pg
25 Feb 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780674271166
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
"An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought. " -Ron Charles, Washington Post "A gripping work Bennett' s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read. " -LSE Review of Books "Tremendously illuminating 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 Sites of Slavery "These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics. " -Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog 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 prizewinning 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.
This 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 * A 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 * A 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 Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination Bennett 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 With Dogs at the Edge of Life and The Law Is a White Dog Being Property Once Myself 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 Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
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.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780674271166
Published: 25 Feb 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: The Belknap Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 210mm
Width: 140mm
Pages: 224

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information