Animals and Race

✍ Scribed by Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres (editor)

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 228
• Series: The Animal Turn
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The intersection of race and species has a long and problematic history. Western thinking specifically has demonstrated a societal need to try to conceive of race as a purely biological fact rather than a social construct. This book is an academic-activist challenge to that instinct, prioritizing anti-racism in its observation of the animal–race intersection. Too often, as Bénédicte Boisseron has indicated, this intersection typically appears in the form of animal activists instrumentalizing racial discrimination as a vehicle to approach animal rights. But why does this intersection exist, and, perhaps more importantly, how can we challenge it moving forward? This volume examines those two critical questions, taking an interdisciplinary approach in moving across subjects including art history, film studies, American history, and digital media analysis. Our interpretation of animals has, for centuries, been fundamental in the development of Western race thinking. This collection of essays looks at how this perspective contributes to the construction of racial discrimination, prioritizing ways to read the animal in our culture as a means for working to dismantle this conception.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction: A Racial History of Animals
Of Domestication and Violence
This Is a Thoroughbred Boy: Exploring the Lives of Slave Children and Animals | Rachael L. Pasierowska
The Double Standard: German Shepherds, Race, and Violence | Silke Hackenesch and Mieke Roscher
Sheep Trouble on Clifton Beach: Sacrificial Sheep Exorcising the Demon of Racism? | Benita de Robillard
Of Menageries and Empires
Llamas, Snakes, and Indigenous Colonial Equivalency in the Andes | Rachel Sarah O’Toole
Disguise Hunting and Indian Otherness in Theodor de Bry’s Brief Narration of What Befell the French in Florida (1591) | Thomas Balfe
Reframing Whiteness in the Zoo: Snowflake the Gorilla in Modern Media | Elizabeth Tavella
Of Prey, Sex, and Gender
The Miseducation of Henrietta Forge: Whiteness and the Equestrian Imagination in C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings | Angela Hofstetter
From Apes to Stags: Black Men, White Women, and the Animals That Code Them in Horror Cinema | Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres
Queer Trouble at the Origin: Steven Cohen’s Cradle of Humankind (2012) | Ruth Lipschitz
#RateASpecies: Reviewing Animal Commodities on the Internet | Soledad Altrudi
Of Food and Kin
Civil Rats and the Human Exceptional: A Vegan-Historical Account of the Rat Extermination Act of 1967 | Thomas Aiello
The Cry of the Wolf: Exposing the Peril of Racism Lurking in the White Sheep Complex | Rajesh K. Reddy
Contributors
Index