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 domination and simultaneously inspired so many liberation struggles? Hold fast to its emancipatory potential? Turn away and reject it entirely? Render it inoperative? Resignify and displace its meaning?Both Black studies and “posthumanism”—each of which traverses a variety of fields—have provided some of the most provocative responses to these questions, albeit through very different avenues.2 Black studies scholarship has shown how the modern category of the human and the attendant concept of liberal personhood emerged from transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism, which treated white men as the implicit model for proper humanity and enslaved black people as the paradigm of subhumanity.3 Similarly, posthumanist scholarship in animal studies has drawn attention to the European West’s consistent domination of and separation from nonhuman forms of life.4 If Black studies shows that blackness is the “inside-outside” of human civil society, to borrow Frank Wilderson’s description of the field,5 some forms of posthumanism also describe how non–Homo sapiens constitutes its inverse “outside-inside.” The trio of books under review—Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog, Lindgren Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters, and Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman—explore these tensions in the specific context of the relationship between anthropocentrism and slavery in the antebellum United States. These authors join a growing list of writers interested in the relationship between antiblackness and the domination of animals, including Zakiyyah Jackson, Syl and Aph Ko, Claire Jean Kim, Breeze Harper, Christopher Sebastian McJetters, Che Gossett, and Lori Gruen.6 The publication of three monographs on this subject, all within a year of each other, may signal the consolidation of an alternative, multidimensional approach to the question of humanism: one that posits the co-constitutive roles of anthropocentrism, slavery, and colonialism, beginning from the intertwined presences of marginalized humans and nonhumans in specific historical contexts. As such, these texts resist confinement to any one discipline and are relevant to a wide variety of fields.Despite similar objects of critique, antiracist and antianthropocentric scholarship have not always traveled well together. A central tension revolves around the post- in posthumanism. Some critics—especially those inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s work, which charts the colonial emergence of the Western figure of “Man”— charge that the attempt to go beyond or after “the human” moves too quickly over the plight of those never considered properly human in the first place. To throw out human-centered concern risks prematurely pulling in a life preserver for marginalized humans just when they may need it most. It risks treating humanity as a monolithic agent of violence, overlooking the multiple ways of being human concealed by hegemonic conceptions of the human. Zakiyyah Jackson, in a review of texts also examining the intersection of race and posthumanism, argues that instead of taking “‘the human’s’ colonial imposition as synonymous with all appearances of ‘the human,’ there is a need to “reimagine ‘the human’ as an index of a multiplicity of historical and ongoing contestations.”7Part of the problem stems from the way posthumanism has come to describe many diverse schools of thought—from cyborgs, to transhumanism, to new materialism, to animal studies, to object-oriented ontologies, to plant theory—even though one major critique of anthropocentrism has been precisely that “the” nonhuman is not singular but an incredible multitude of beings. Another problem is lexical: humanism is already a vexing and polysemous term, and the prefix post- only compounds the trouble. Cary Wolfe, prominently associated with posthumanism, has noted that the term is not about being posthuman at all, in that it does not seek to transcend human embodiment, but is rather posthumanist, in that it “opposes fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy” inherited from humanism. Moreover, it is not straightforwardly after humanism but also before it, in that it names humanity’s embeddedness in a material and technical world before the emergence of a historically specific concept of Man.8 Nonetheless, it is difficult to escape the semantic residue implied in post-, and critics are correct to note that any account of the emergence of humanism that omits the role of slavery and colonialism misses a crucial, transformative element. Perhaps, following Jackson’s call to attend to the multiple contested histories of the human, the way to think together critiques of the human that come from the situations of both marginalized humans and nonhumans is to attend to their relationships in specific, critical historical contexts rather than try to settle the question of “the human” from afar.Joining the debate, Boisseron’s, Johnson’s, and Ellis’s texts all respond to an impasse that often occurs when questions about animals and slavery arise. As Claire Jean Kim puts it, mainstream animal rights scholarship often deploys slavery analogies comparatively rather than relationally, in ways “symptomatic of an antiblack order that depends upon denying the singularity of racial slavery and confining it in the distant past.”9 Boisseron’s Afro-Dog draws on Che Gossett’s work to describe this move as the “sequential” idea that the animal is the “new black” (ad, xxi). Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters calls this move a politics of “extensionism” (rm, 4–5). On the other side of the analogical coin, the idea that slavery treats the enslaved “like animals” is one of the most common articulations of slavery’s essential violence. This description can be helpful if we consider the ways nonhumans too are “animalized,”10 but it raises further questions: What does it mean to be treated like “an animal”? Is that the same as how they should be treated, and does that make a difference? Is being treated like “a human” the opposite of being treated like “an animal”? At stake are fundamental questions about the precise character of humanism and liberal personhood’s violence and exclusions.Writing in the wake of a problematic history of comparison between animals and the enslaved, these authors do not treat slavery’s dehumanization of Homo sapiens as a mere symptom of anthropocentric violence. At the same time, they recognize and avoid the way that claims for liberation sometimes presume proximity to animals as an inherent state of ontological degradation. Boisseron and Johnson are wary of what Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman terms “a politics of recognition” (ap, 4), which aims to secure acknowledgment of a being’s humanity or other proper moral status. For them, slavery presents an important site for redefining the structure of human/animal opposition altogether. Speaking to this relationality, Boisseron’s text uses the figure of the “Afro-Dog” to give an account of animality and blackness in the black Atlantic. The “Afro-Dog” suggests the variety of relationships between black people, dogs, and other animals, as well as the system of domination that often pits them against each other. Boisseron explicitly contrasts her approach with a comparative, analogical one, but maintains that these connections cannot be ignored, “if only because [they reveal] a long-standing trend in American and transatlantic consciousness to associate blackness with animality” (ad, xi). Thus, the question should not be whether the once chattel slave should claim his humanity.... The question is rather how the once chattel slave may be in the best position to challenge this so-called humanity and, in the process, redefine the meaning of existence beyond the human-animal divide. In other words, how can the black diasporic subject in the Americas abide by a different set of identifications, one that would not consist of refuting a putative inhumanity, since such regulation validates the accepted (racially invested) norm of humanity’s signification? (ad, 90–91)The question, for Boisseron, is not whether to draw these connections but how to do so. The book thus aims to be relentlessly reciprocal in its engagement, a “counterbalance” to the instrumentalization of race for animal issues while mindful of the need not to “overcorrect” by diminishing animal suffering (ad, xiv).Boisseron constructs an impressive and provocative archive of black-animal encounters in literature, philosophy, political theory, and theater. The breadth of Boisseron’s concerns and source material is remarkable—especially her translation and deployment of French-language material, which allows her to present sources relatively unknown to many English-speaking audiences. Afro-Dog presents its source material less through propositional argument than through montage or recombination, in that Boisseron’s argument tends to emerge through juxtapositions of thematic clusters of material. Readers desiring a more consistent argumentative thread or propositional style may be disappointed, but this approach allows Boisseron to build an important tool kit for the text’s complicated concerns.Each chapter is woven around a different theme and set of issues, addressing, respectively, ways that dogs and black people often “become-against” each other under antiblack humanism (ad, 48), the impasses of sentient property and antiblackness’s proscription of certain forms of human-nonhuman intimacy, and the politics of supposedly mute human and nonhuman beings suddenly returning the gaze or speaking back. A particularly illuminating chapter on creolization begins from the forgotten fact that creolization in the Caribbean involved both humans and nonhumans. Meditating on creolized animals, Boisseron posits an ethos of commensalism as “a human-to-animal and human-to-human relationship that carries an anticolonial, antihegemonic, and anti-anthropocentric resistance” (ad, 107). Commensalism (com, “sharing”; mensa, “table”) denotes a relationship where two entities mutually benefit without adversely affecting each other, even if the benefit is not reciprocal. Liminally wild animals like stray dogs, pigeons, and rodents, typically seen as freeloading nuisances in the contract-debt economy that undergirds both anthropocentrism and colonialism, can “share the table” even if they do not reciprocally return the gift.Afro-Dog focuses on moments of defiance and conjoined struggles, sometimes consonant and sometimes dissonant, for human and nonhuman dignity. It does so because Boisseron worries about a tendency to connect animality and blackness primarily through abjection and humiliation (xix). While I share Boisseron’s concern about framing liberation solely in terms of victimhood and pain, I also have reservations about centering the sorts of capacity that underlie a primary focus on resistance and defiance. Focusing on capacities for resistance may too easily lend itself to a new politics of recognition, and it risks forgetting the everyday animals and enslaved humans who may not have defied their oppressors (at least in ways that we recognize) but who nonetheless mattered. Perhaps a different grammar of suffering, one that lends itself less to victimhood, is necessary.11Lindgren Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters extends the work done by Boisseron’s text, bringing little-known interspecies connections to light and building an archive of human-animal relations. Johnson examines vulnerabilities and intimacies between human and nonhuman animals in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature and political texts. These intimacies, she argues, displace “extensionist” political maps. As noted earlier, one version of extensionism presumes that racial violence has been overcome and that ending violence against animals is the logical next step. Another iteration suggests, inversely, that only white people can access the privilege to jump over thorny and unfinished racial issues to address violence toward animals. In both cases, animal liberation relates to black liberation only as an extension of the latter’s mission. The texts that Johnson analyzes overturn the “zero-sum” metanarrative that African Americans have sought their freedom only by distancing blackness from animality. The “fugitive humanism” of African American authors, the instances when they flip the script and embrace animality as a vector for liberation, offers resources beyond humanist violence.Race Matters, Animal Matters covers three moments in American history: slavery, via readings of Frederick Douglass’s and Moses Roper’s slave narratives; Reconstruction and its end, via Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman and the Supreme Court’s of the in the and via the and of both and These the African American a putative liberation from the of under slavery the under the Johnson the moments when being and through this liberal personhood and the toward other with and through animality. Thus, she less for of humanism than for in texts that In with Johnson’s to embodiment, this approach of animal in of when authors as animal that an ethos against human (rm, Matters, Animal Matters is at its when historical between and anthropocentric chapter on of African for shows how an of and on the of the and the these of the of black people as the of animality to human Johnson the multiple animal and histories at The of for a in the white and the to do not when we a to if it before of it, but that it (rm, with their white the of the black Moreover, the of on the of which as a that the also the in ways that of white The comparison to then, suggests not mere animality but a of that with and to be The history of in the United to the of to this together a diverse of in of her focus on embodiment, including the of and It have been to Johnson’s objects of with a of and in like and of both of which many of “the in Black of can all the relevant literature, but like these are and address questions at the of Johnson’s relevant is between and as well as of the of personhood and under slavery, and her against the or deployment of black Boisseron and Johnson a wide breadth of new interspecies Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman and political issues in the between and posthumanism via of three antebellum Frederick and and a model of and critique, Antebellum Posthuman antebellum not only of who to be in humanity but also of the meaning of “the human” as These she argues, have to about the contemporary relationship between contemporary and and of the human in the it just one by its It separation of the human from its and enabled a new that not always slavery and that not always how often a humanist to this as it to personhood for white men while the enslaved the of the in (ap, an in and not away from these new in of a of these writers them for their (ap, and also slavery in a which the of these authors as liberal humanist for these she does not the of but to the and questions they Douglass’s in the for about a that is the structure of that slavery, that it in that are not human at (ap, charts how this move questions of racial and Douglass’s concern for the value of human (ap, Similarly, on that as the of with the of material would this to the because their is to such a being’s value with its and with both human and rather than with a but as this it difficult to any being to be to what is human as to or or a (ap, tensions between racial and come to the more in antebellum argues that any to to race with these suggests that posthumanism is an that does not recognize itself as such (ap, and that what she calls for which Wynter’s work is her primary be considered posthumanism in that they seek to move beyond the present humanist order of (ap, these tensions in Ellis’s text because of in politics and from posthumanist ontologies, and to a between the idea of the human as Homo and as an a of the nonhuman and the non–Homo If posthumanism sometimes itself to nonhumans non–Homo its critics that it presumes a monolithic out this violence rather than to the ongoing violence against those Homo sapiens to an status. antiracist sometimes treat dehumanization as a category that the category is in that all Homo sapiens are human” (ap, both suggests that we the category of “the from Homo worries that her between the and of the human be too this very a and for through by the often While it may be to her implicit separation between the and too to at least that we not think about the of humanity as Homo sapiens at all but instead should address the category of the suggests that in Animal I argues that “the is in a but rather an way of is that while the human/animal concerns many beyond its is to in other words, the is by many and is not a Moreover, many other posthumanist with precisely that it is to the from the I this is consonant with Ellis’s may be to value to the Homo sapiens and to avoid it as an while taking not to treat it as or to the and of material It would be a of about of the human in different rather than the or the as the of Race Matters, Animal and Antebellum Posthuman the about the of antiblackness and anthropocentrism further and return to the question at the beginning of this What should we do with the human and with The texts but do not this question, which is than any text’s but they are helpful to think with and to of posthumanism, these three texts though Boisseron does not explicitly address the but she tends to the posthuman with a or Johnson and make of posthumanism. In with other Johnson argues that the idea of or the human the of marginalized people the human (rm, offers a different that the tendency of posthumanism, or at least a certain of it, to and lines of is not in itself an or a politics (ap, on the that posthumanism to by of all the that human It shows that of the world is a one, to the unknown in all... on the of (ap, and Ellis’s argument that politics cannot be from ontological I with the two implicit of politics or political these can be as they emerge out of and with politics and the It is to of a politics or that does not simultaneously make some ontological or and these for political The of animal studies this the question of how animals to be treated is to from about the of beings that they or whether the ontological grammar implied by of being is even in the first place. In the of of abjection such as and slave new ontological emerge not because they are but because the present is and a new be to borrow Wynter’s to with some critics instead call for and a “new” one that does not on offers an and account of human and is to the of the as has it is not always to what these once they a of human being not positioned over are What meaning the on that would it from the of human critique of posthumanism her to for a “fugitive as which to some the of new humanism is as it offers a of that for to humanist them It a humanism that is never one that is always on the Johnson’s focus on the of humanist between the between black and animal liberation is an essential but it also raises the question of what to do and how to these moments to the politics of the Moreover, the question To what is humanism a humanism at Johnson’s be that though these try to resist of they also seek its and (rm, the the writers she examines to on to of because there is not always but these moments rather than come to the humanism they emerge are to these questions, which more than rather than new Race Matters, Animal and Antebellum Posthuman can toward an of a human that simultaneously humanity because it is also interspecies and These three texts to these in such interspecies To to the human is to return to nonhumans without or or within to human being it at the same time, and to where it already would like to and the at for their in this