Sunday, April 28, 2013
Animal Humanism
In the antebellum United States, attempts to exclude non-white people from the category of the human illustrated why humanist arguments, such as the iconic antislavery question “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” became necessary to combat racism and slavery. However, the iconic emphasis of enslaved people’s humanity and their distinction from nonhuman animals was not abolitionism’s only way of referring to animals, and not all abolitionist arguments depended upon a model of sympathy that necessitated the sympathizer’s similarity to the enslaved. Abolitionist children’s literature published between the 1830s and the 1860s often employed animals in comparison with – rather than in distinction from – enslaved black people, with an effect distinctly different from the comparisons of scientific racism. Some of these texts used domesticated animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people. As I will argue, this model of sympathy which is not dependent upon articulations of sameness is a more progressive model for affective sympathy and kinship in that (unlike other, more prominent models of abolitionist sympathy, such as the employment of mixed-race characters to garner white sympathy) it has the potential for promoting such affective relationships across acknowledged positions of difference.
In my longer essay, I read abolitionist children’s literature in which such affective relationships are possible despite differences in race and species in order to show how this more progressive difference-based model of sympathy worked against the more prominent sameness-based model of abolitionist sympathy. Unlike the prioritization of sympathy for mixed-race people that is so prominent in abolitionist literature, the model of sympathy present in these animal-focused abolitionist stories and poems for children is more in line with progressive notions of antiracism which appreciate difference, rather than calling for its erasure.
A model of sympathy that has the potential to be conveyed across positions of difference opens up possibilities for both antiracist discourse and human-animal studies. When we ask for whom one can have sympathy, we must look beyond comparisons between beings, and the hierarchies that accompany them. My allusion to humanism connotes “humaneness,” or the particular valuation of human life, as the term sometimes signified in the nineteenth century. The abolitionist arguments I discuss depend upon the category of humanity – a category linked to notions of freedom, property, self-valuation, and Christianity. I present abolitionism as one version of humanism, in its dependence upon the category of the human for an ethics of interracial relations, but I argue that these literary comparisons of humans and other animals – primarily pets – have the potential for a more productive discussion of sympathy. Despite their failings, the texts I discuss present a model of sympathy that, by refusing to view difference as foil to sympathy, has the potential to resist the hierarchies of both race and species that were common to nineteenth-century discourses of scientific racism.
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This project seems terrific Brigitte and I'm really interested in what you're doing with sympathy. I'd like to know whether the particular form of humanism in the situations you're looking at is also troubled by these sorts of affective relations, that is whether there's some aspect of posthuman subjectivity at play (posthuman insofar as it resists human exceptionalism or a clear ontological gap between human and nonhuman). I guess I'm wondering whether sympathy, in addition to supporting a sense of humaneness or humanity, might also risk blurring the boundaries of normative humaneness.
ReplyDeleteI'd also be interested to know how this plays out with non-domesticated animals. I'm thinking specifically of birds, who are sometimes depicted as loving freedom in a manner that echoes the sort of humanism that you reference here, as well as wild animals which are distinctly not human and who serve to enforce the human / nonhuman divide and which, I would assume, are rendered so as to elicit fear rather than sympathy from children.
Hi Brigitte -- It's so great to hear how your project has developed since we were at the AAS in 2011. Perhaps expectedly, I love the way that you are thinking about this animal, difference-based sympathy as a model that challenges, or is different from the models of race and species in racist scientific discourse in the period. I wonder if you could also look at the Liberator and other anti-slavery newspapers see how the animal question is dealt with when they explicitly discuss and counter the science, especially ethnology and comparative anatomy. I also wonder what type of animal-slave discourse you might find in Lydia Maria Child's _Appeal_, which is in part an ethnological text.
ReplyDeleteFinally, have you seen Mel Y. Chen's new book, _Animacies_? I've only had a chance to read the introduction, but she has a chapter called "Queer Animality" that looks at queer, racialized kinship formations between humans and animals in both 19th and 20th c. contexts and visual culture. She also has this really interesting take on the relationship between objectification and dehumanization -- she argues that the *act* of dehumanization through objectification always, paradoxically, acknowledges the humanity and human status of the objectified. Anyway, I thought this might present a new and interesting way to think about both 19th c. racist science and models of cross-racial sympathy in the Abolitionist movement.
Thanks, James. My project is mostly interested in domesticated animals, and pets, specifically. There are major differences between how other kinds of animals (animals that work, animals that are eaten, etc.m- the birds I'm reading about appear rather explicitly in the context of their domestication) function in c19 texts, and I stress acknowledging the differences between different types of animals here. I can definitely talk more about the specificities of how different kinds of animals (cats, dogs, squirrels, rabbits, and birds) appear in the literature I'm discussing. In that respect, I'm not interested in the figure of "the animal" in my project, but in individual, specific animals. The texts in this part of the project are definitely grounded in human exceptionalism, and I want to make no mistake of that, while also acknowledging the kinds of affective relationships that become possible here.
ReplyDeleteBritt - Thanks, too. I've been focusing mostly on how literary abolitionist texts respond to this (mostly through attempts to humanize enslaved people) but thinking about how animals appear in scientific discourse in abolitionist periodicals seems like a good idea. I've done more work with texts like Child's and Sigourney's childhood instruction manuals, which deal with both race and species difference in interesting ways, but revisiting the Appeal is a good idea! I've read Animacies, though I'm less interested in objectification than Chen is, mostly because this isn't what's going on in the texts that interest me most, and I'm invested in prioritizing the potentially antiracist and antispeciesist possibilities for thinking about race and species. (Reading scientific racist texts has been more emotionally draining than reading other forms of c19 racism, I've found, and frankly, I've been putting off the part of this project that takes this up most clearly in light of that fact. That said, I do have a chapter planned and partly-drafted that deals more explicitly with a scientific/materialist approach to racism, though I'm not sure Chen's argument would hold for the text I'm writing about. I'll think more on this!)