Che Gossett: Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign

In “Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign,” a recent essay published to the VersoBooks Blog, BCRW’s very own Che Gossett explores the connection between “Blackness and animalization,” arguing that racialization is often enacted as animalization. Che, in engaging the writings of Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Mel Chen and more, proposes an expanded understanding of abolitionism that considers Blackness in its relation to animality:

Black radical imaginings of abolition as a relation provide a way to think about how the caging and mass killing of animal life, the caging and mass killing of Black life, and the racial capitalism that propels premature death are all connected in a deadlock.

Che also points out that animal studies often fail to configure an interrogation of Blackness in its project of animal liberation, a conspicuous absence considering that “Black people have historically been portrayed through scientific racism as animal-like, and [that] this anti-black discourse has overlapped with the ways that the animal has been depicted throughout the course of Western philosophy as the desolate ground upon and against which the human, as a colonial and racial construct, has been defined.” Radical visions of abolition, including those visions of animal liberationists, must confront the devaluation of Black life, racialization as animalization, and the prison industrial complex if abolition is to be “an ongoing aspiration for human-animal-life liberation.” Ultimately, abolition, Che insists, is an expansive and ever-expanding project; indeed, that it is the “unfinished project of ending anti-Black racism, racial capitalism, anti-trans, anti-queer, patriarchal policing, colonialism, animal killing and caging.”

Read more at http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign

Che Gossett is a Black genderqueer archivist and activist who works to excavate queer of color AIDS activist and trans archives, and the Community Archivist and Student Coordinator at BCRW. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association Women’s Committee, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York. Che was a member of the 2013 Archivists and Librarians Delegation to Palestine and recently presented about legacies of black queer solidarity with Palestinian struggle at the Bodies in Public conference at the American University of Beirut. Che also was a presenter at the Black liberation workshop at the 2014 National Students for Justice in Palestine conference. http://www.tb-credit.ru/ http://www.tb-credit.ru/our-company.html