Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of
Since one of the most consistent discourses in animal studies is feminist inquiry, the book attempts to move through feminist contributions to the discourse on hum:animal, from Donna Haraway and Vicki Hearne to Jane Bennett, reimagining the place of work and/or training in the focus on becoming with in animal studies. The concentration on work, on dressage, takes readers into a genre of fiction called “the equestrian novel,” and in explications of Jaimy Gordon's Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue and Lord of Misrule and C. E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings, the chapter thinks through their engagement with Black and animal life in a sport (racing) that rehearses the codes and modes of the slavocracy. That insurgent Black female subject appears across a range of texts, and her embodiment is not always beholden to the frame of the human.
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