Speaking Animals: Fables of Resistance in Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, and Atlanta

Abstract

This essay examines animal iconography in recent examples from film and television, situating it against the history of the plantation fable. In Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You (2018), and the "Alligator Man" episode of Donald Glover's Atlanta (dir. Hiro Murai, 2018), animals symbolize Black resistance to white supremacy, as well as signifying their own resistance to human control; these layers of meaning form a category we call the "speaking animal." Reading animals in these texts, the essay makes two critical interventions. First, it joins a new but growing body of scholarship in bringing critical race studies and animal studies, two approaches that have mostly existed at cross-purposes, into conversation with each other. Second, while both approaches have traditionally been suspicious of animal metaphors (and for good reason), this essay theorizes the speaking animal as a way that Black storytellers reclaim animal symbols from dehumanizing rhetoric and redeploy them as icons of defiance.