TY - BOOK AU - Jackson,Zakiyyah Iman TI - Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World T2 - Sexual Cultures SN - 9781479834556 AV - PN841 U1 - 809.8896 23 PY - 2020///] CY - New York, NY PB - New York University Press KW - African diaspora in literature KW - Africans in literature KW - Black people in literature KW - Black people KW - Race identity KW - Humanism in literature KW - Identity (Psychology) in literature KW - Literature KW - Black authors KW - History and criticism KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African-American KW - bisacsh KW - Achille Mbembe KW - Animality KW - Audre Lorde KW - Biomedicine KW - Biopolitics KW - Blackness KW - Catherine Malabou KW - Collage KW - Denise Ferriera da Silva KW - Ecology KW - Empiricism KW - Epigenetics KW - Ernst Haeckel KW - Evolution KW - Female Body KW - Frederick Douglass KW - Gender KW - Gynecology KW - Humanism KW - Insect Poetics KW - John Locke KW - Martin Heidegger KW - Masculinity KW - Materiality KW - Metaphysics KW - Nalo Hopkinson KW - Necropolitics KW - Nonhuman KW - Octavia Butler KW - Photography KW - Plasticity KW - Posthumanism KW - Race KW - Reproductive Justice KW - Sexuality KW - Slave Narrative KW - Slavery KW - Symbiosis KW - Wangechi Mutu KW - Worlding N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; On Becoming Human --; 1 Losing Manhood --; 2 Sense of Things --; 3 “Not Our Own” --; 4 Organs of War --; Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower --; Acknowledgments --; Notes --; Works Cited --; Index --; About the Author; restricted access N2 - Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies AssociationWinner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature AssociationWinner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesArgues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the humanRewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human." UR - https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479890040.001.0001 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781479834556 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781479834556/original ER -