Blackness and Animality beyond Recognition

Increasingly, liberal humanist ideals and the modern regime of human rights seem at best ineffective and at worst positioned to facilitate the proliferation of contemporary forms of domination. On the one side, “new” systems of violence afflict the marginalized humans this human rights regime is supposed to protect, as evidenced by increasing carcerality in liberal democracies. On the other, placing humanity at the center of ethical concern has enabled the destruction of ecosystems around the world, runaway climate change, and the most horrifying system of animal slaughter the world has ever seen. Both lines of domination closely connect to the afterlives of colonial and plantation societies that structured both a racial order and nonhuman lives and ecologies.¹ In these times, then, the ethical and ontological value of the category of the human has come under scrutiny. What to do with this figure, one that conjoins so many systems of...