Becoming Human

Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies AssociationWinner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature AssociationWinner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesArgues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the humanRewriting 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 anti-Blackness, 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 not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge 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."

This is a demanding, complex, and highly significant contribution to the literature on the nature of the moral and philosophical distinctions between human and nonhuman creatures...The implications for theological anthropology are, undoubtedly, shattering., Within Western philosophy, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson shows, Black people historically have been 'animalized.' In examining these limitations of Western philosophy, Becoming Human shows that the fundamental idea of 'humanity' that has gained widespread credence in the West is flawed … Jackson makes an intervention by firmly placing Black literary and visual culture into philosophy., Jackson’s scholarship has been critical to my recent curatorial work. This groundbreaking book considers how Blackness can coincide with notions of the nonhuman and animality through imaginative and emancipatory modes of being, invoking a future that breaches contemporary ideas of humanism through thoughtful research and cultural references that center Black women as a site of origin., 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 [...] What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of 'the human., Jackson states that real change will require “revolutionizing” the human body, and her prescription for freeing oneself from the limitations of gender and species requires the same “plasticity" by which Blackness and anti-Blackness continue to be defined.

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.