Black Flesh Female: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Abstract

Black Flesh Female:Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World Kennan Ferguson (bio) Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 302 pp. $30.00 (pb). ISBN: 9781479830374. You are a capacious theorist. Rather than embedding yourself in a particular historical period, or the life of a great thinker, you track nascent concepts, new discoveries, developments in the field. You peruse the future catalogs from university presses, paying special attention to Minnesota, Duke, and a few select others. You follow and investigate conceptual approaches which challenge your own thinking, debating and adopting their critiques and insights into your own work. You have watched, followed, and applauded the emergence of serious attention to speculative fiction, afropessimism and Black feminism, empire and settler colonialism, new materialisms, animal (and other non-human) studies. Each of these fields seems to you, a careful reader, separate from the others. Trained to theorize grandly, you struggle to apply the insights from one theoretical formulation to another: the insights gathered from thinking of non-human politics not only don't map neatly on afropessimism, they don't even seem to be addressing the same political world. So each of your areas of interest continue on their own paths, seemingly unrelated to other, just as fascinating, conceptual developments. You, however, continue to search for connections; you might not need a grand synthesis, but are still searching for a way of theorizing horizontally at least. Reader, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has written a book for you. Becoming Human spans these and other theoretical terrains, combing through a wide and diverse set of subjects and conceptual questions to support its intriguing and counter-intuitive synthesis. Influenced by, and indebted to, theorists such as Alexander Weheliye, Catharine Malabou, and (especially) Saidiya Hartman, this book opens up materialist and representational categories and connections. Its attention to history, art, and literature repeatedly trace the ways that Blackness has been folded into dehumanization, as animality and racialization overlapped. The breadth of subject and scope, while occasionally overwhelming, proves breathtaking and––for the subject matter and thesis––appropriate. About that thesis. Jackson upends the common expectations of scholarship along these lines, which almost universally decries the connection of blackness and animality. When historians delineate the connections created between (to take an obvious example) Africans and monkeys, either by anthropologists or Haeckelian evolutionary biologists, the presumption is that the goal of the project is a solely a critique of the anti-Black racism embedded in science and social sciences. This book, however, takes such analytics as given, then moves beyond: what, it asks, do these slippages and overlays encourage [End Page 1150] us to comprehend about the relationships between humanity, superhumanity, and inhumanity? How do they illuminate the inability of "philosophical reason" to account for the material transformative aspects of physical being? In other words, Jackson does not denounce but gingerly embraces the animalization of blackness and the Blackness of dehumanization. In lesser hands, this reconnection could have the aura of apologia. These are, obviously, the waters of white supremacy and antiblackness. But Jackson's argument is careful and specific. Her interest is less in recuperating "humanity" for Black people than in investigating the plastic and porous nature of the category itself. For humans are already animals, already brute matter, the question is why and how (what counts as) "Western" culture has managed to displace its own recognition of these obvious truths onto Black bodies. If the generation of "blackened life" is the process of this displacement, then the history of antiblack non-humanity serves as the archive of these truths. Take the example of maternity; Jackson's work converses with the critical political insights of Black feminist thought to center reproduction as an overlooked (or more likely suppressed) aspect of being. In her reading, such repression is only partially about blackness as such. It is, moreso, about humanity's animal nature: our reproduction, embodiments, and mammality. Western scientific discourse's embrace of civilizational hierarchies not only attempts to ignore human materiality and embodiment, Jackson points out, but also displaces that attempt onto racialized and gendered loci, specifically onto the...