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.
ContentsIntroduction: A Racial History of AnimalsOf Domestication and ViolenceThis Is a Thoroughbred Boy: Exploring the Lives of Slave Children and Animals | Rachael L. PasierowskaThe Double Standard: German Shepherds, Race, and Violence | Silke Hackenesch and Mieke RoscherSheep Trouble on Clifton Beach: Sacrificial Sheep Exorcising the Demon of Racism? | Benita de RobillardOf Menageries and EmpiresLlamas, Snakes, and Indigenous Colonial Equivalency in the Andes | Rachel Sarah O’TooleDisguise Hunting and Indian Otherness in Theodor de Bry’s Brief Narration of What Befell the French in Florida (1591) | Thomas BalfeReframing Whiteness in the Zoo: Snowflake the Gorilla in Modern Media | Elizabeth TavellaOf Prey, Sex, and GenderThe Miseducation of Henrietta Forge: Whiteness and the Equestrian Imagination in C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings | Angela HofstetterFrom Apes to Stags: Black Men, White Women, and the Animals That Code Them in Horror Cinema | Jonathan W. Thurston-TorresQueer Trouble at the Origin: Steven Cohen’s Cradle of Humankind (2012) | Ruth Lipschitz#RateASpecies: Reviewing Animal Commodities on the Internet | Soledad AltrudiOf Food and KinCivil Rats and the Human Exceptional: A Vegan-Historical Account of the Rat Extermination Act of 1967 | Thomas AielloThe Cry of the Wolf: Exposing the Peril of Racism Lurking in the White Sheep Complex | Rajesh K. ReddyContributorsIndex
