• No Country for Old White Men: Living at the Boundary of BlacknessA review of Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
• Sharon P. Holland (bio)

No one will dispute that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has set the stage for deeper engagements with our collective feelings about racial disparity and the natural world. Black scholars are at the forefront of thinking through these perilous times into a future that might, finally, be able to hold us. In Joshua Bennett's spare and gorgeously written Being Property Once Myself, we are asked to begin this journey through "a black aesthetic tradition" that "provides us with the tools needed to conceive of interspecies relationships" (4). He asks: what are the ethical concerns that come forward from negated personhood, legally and philosophically? The title of Bennett's book is taken from a Lucille Clifton poem in which kinship with the natural world produces black life. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson travels brilliantly in the same psychic life of blackness in Becoming Human, which shares similar objects and theoretical underpinnings; both texts explore the impactful nature of an antiblack world. As Jackson states in her "Introduction," she wants to take note of "our shared being with the nonhuman without suggesting that some members of humanity bear the burden of 'the animal'" (12). Her text strives to unmake the terms of the debate itself, offering up even its title as an oxymoron in black thought, as the works of African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual artists "displace the very terms of black(ened) animality as abjection" (1).

Bennett's work reads across the canon, and reimagines sociality, interiority, and feeling through the prism of black studies, ecocriticism, and affect theory as he engages in extensive and rewarding readings of literature, focusing on the ways in which these authors "render animal life" (9). His text is not interested in the "undertheorized plight of nonhuman animals." Rather, Bennett's analysis wants to draw attention to animal life as "a site of recognition and reckoning" (11). Each chapter is devoted to thinking with animal life as a figure for a remapping of black interiority. The first chapter, "Rat," explicates Richard Wright's attention to animal life as a mediation of black death. Beginning with Tara Betts's poem, "For Those Who Need a True Story," Bennett deftly navigates the complexity of non-human animal life and black life and the significance of the language of pests, infestation, and vermin that demonstrates the meaningful co-habitation of black human and animal life. Students of Wright's work will immediately understand the originality of Bennett's reading as he utilizes Wright's purposeful foreclosure of sympathy for Bigger as a way to understand what actually subtends an antiblack world. In this reading, Bennett is quick to remind us that we judge Bigger's actions as his "natural inclination toward cruelty" rather than as a "sociological problem." Wright wants to lay bare this problem in writing about Bigger's predicament: "Bigger is more violent than he is kind, and that is precisely the point. He is in the world and of it" (39). His reading of Wright's literary critics is nothing short of brilliant. Along the way, he exposes the flawed infrastructure obscured by a one-to-one correlation between Bigger and the rat: that the relationship between these two beings is one of contestation. That contest is at issue in Bennett's work. In this theatre, rat and human co-create—out of contestation, perhaps, but what then happens to that ethical life as a potentiality for the kind of kinship, rather than objectification, that Bennett seeks to engage? If Bigger's future might be bound with the symbol of the rat but the rat's future cannot be seen or told, does the consideration of non-human animal life still rest upon a contestation that produces a human...

• 老白人无国界：生活在黑暗的边界约书亚·贝内特的评论，曾经是我自己的财产：黑暗和人类的终结和扎基亚·伊曼·杰克逊，成为人类：反黑世界中的物质和意义
• Sharon P. Holland（生物）

没有人会质疑 SARS-CoV-2 病毒为更深入地接触我们对种族差异和自然世界的集体感受奠定了基础。黑色学者在通过这些危险倍思的前沿到未来可能，最后，能容纳我们。在约书亚·贝内特 (Joshua Bennett) 的闲散而华丽的写作《成为自己的财产》中，我们被要求通过“黑人审美传统”开始这段旅程，“黑人审美传统为我们提供了构想种间关系所需的工具”(4)。他问道：从法律上和哲学上，否定人格带来的伦理问题是什么？Bennett 的书名取自露西尔·克利夫顿 (Lucille Clifton) 的一首诗，其中亲属关系与自然界产生黑色生命。扎基亚·伊曼·杰克逊在《成为人类》中在同样黑暗的精神生活中精彩地旅行，它们有着相似的对象和理论基础；两篇文章都探讨了反黑世界的影响力。正如杰克逊在她的“介绍”中所说，她想注意到“我们与非人类共有的存在，而不是暗示某些人类成员承担着‘动物’的负担”（12）。她的文本努力打破辩论本身的条款，甚至提供其标题作为黑人思想中的矛盾，因为非裔美国人、非洲和加勒比地区的文学和视觉艺术家的作品“取代了黑色（化）动物性的术语”作为落伍”（1）。

Bennett 的作品通篇通读，并通过黑人研究、生态批评和影响理论的棱镜重新构想了社会性、内在性和情感，因为他从事广泛而有益的文学阅读，专注于这些作者“渲染动物生活的方式” ”（9）。他的文章对“非人类动物的理论不足的困境”不感兴趣。相反，Bennett 的分析希望引起人们对动物生命的关注，因为它是“识别和计算的场​​所”（11）。每一章都致力于将动物生命作为重新映射黑色内在的图形进行思考。第一章“老鼠”阐述了理查德·赖特 (Richard Wright) 对作为黑死病中介的动物生命的关注。从塔拉贝茨的诗开始，“对于那些需要真实故事的人，”有意义的黑人和动物生活的共同生活。赖特作品的学生将立即理解班尼特阅读的独创性，因为他利用赖特有目的地取消对 Bigger 的同情作为一种方式来理解实际上暗含反黑世界的东西。在这篇文章中，贝内特很快提醒我们，我们认为比格的行为是他“对残忍的自然倾向”，而不是“社会学问题”。赖特想在写下比格的困境时揭露这个问题：“比格更暴力，而不是善良，这正是重点。他在这个世界上，属于它”（39）。他对赖特文学批评家的阅读简直就是精彩绝伦。一路上，他揭露了被 Bigger 和老鼠之间的一对一关联所掩盖的有缺陷的基础设施：这两个生物之间的关系是一种争论。这场比赛在 Bennett 的作品中存在争议。在这个剧院里，老鼠和人类共同创造——也许是出于争论，但是作为一种潜在的亲属关系而不是对象化的伦理生活会发生什么，贝内特试图参与？如果Bigger的未来可能与老鼠的象征联系在一起，但老鼠的未来无法被看到或告诉，那么对非人类动物生命的考虑是否仍然依赖于产生人类的争论？但是，作为一种潜在的亲属关系而不是对象化，班尼特试图参与的伦理生活会发生什么？如果Bigger的未来可能与老鼠的象征联系在一起，但老鼠的未来无法被看到或告诉，那么对非人类动物生命的考虑是否仍然依赖于产生人类的争论？但是，作为一种潜在的亲属关系而不是对象化，班尼特试图参与的伦理生活会发生什么？如果Bigger的未来可能与老鼠的象征联系在一起，但老鼠的未来无法被看到或告诉，那么对非人类动物生命的考虑是否仍然依赖于产生人类的争论？