A theoretical and methodological achievement, Bénédicte Boisseron's Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question is as pleasurable to read for its contributions to the practice of comparative literature as it is for the mature voice of its author. In Afro-Dog, Boisseron's roving analysis traverses an impressive array of textual sources drawn from the Americas, the black Atlantic, and the French Caribbean. Through these sources, she plucks out a dazzling web of connective tissue that binds blackness and animality together. More than addressing the cultural genetics of that connective tissue, Boisseron ultimately articulates a vision of commensal interspecies alliances between human and nonhuman animals that carries an anticolonial, antihegemonic, and anti-anthropocentric charge.The dense Introduction lays out the paradox that Boisseron confronts: the dominant current in Black Studies contends that the black condition cannot be analogized, due to the exceptional and irreversible history of slavery; meanwhile, “the animal” has no possibility of self-representation, at least not via means that humans can as of yet understand. “[O]ur perception of the animal is saturated with words,” Boisseron reminds us, deploying Jaques Derrida's animot. Black subjects' exceptional link with chattel slavery, and the animal's exceptional status as sentient yet silent, should render them uniquely beyond comparison. Nevertheless, the Black-to-animal comparison already operates in past and present discourses of blackness and of animality. Boisseron's tactic is thus one of corrective balance. Demonstrating that the black-animal comparison has so far been articulated via a shared subjugation that ultimately persists in the depersonalization of both subjectivities, her book aims to make the black subject and the animal subject, as well as Black Studies and Animal Studies “defiantly come together to form an interspecies alliance against the hegemonic (white, patriarchal), dominating voice” (xxv).The first chapter, “Is the Animal the New Black?,” addresses the tendency to see “the animal turn” as a phase of intersectional discourse that naturally follows the “post”-colonial turn in a “post”-slavery era. This temporal positioning instrumentalizes black suffering to condemn animal suffering. Rather than treating them as successions of thought, Boisseron insists, the metrics of black and animal oppression must be treated in combination. Afro-Dog first excavates the connection between animal rights and slavery via abolitionist texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With examples drawn from twentieth-century civil rights struggles in the United States, the chapter then elucidates the incomplete person status of the Black subject in the eyes of the law. Boisseron thus historicizes the animal question, and demonstrates the continuing legacy of black slavery. The limitation, however, of connecting the two subjectivities exclusively via a state of suffering, is that it “results in essentializing both and desensitizing us to the actual being” (22–23). To successfully address entangled oppressions, Boisseron identifies multiple forms of black and animal defiance despite historical and present-day silencing. As one example of this multi-optics vision, she ends the chapter by asking whether reclaiming animality for black persons can be a form of defiant auto-interpellation.The second chapter, “Blacks and Dogs in the Americas,” probes at the particularly dense mesh that connects black men and canines together, conjoined by a putative propensity to violence. The naturalization of this presumed viciousness, Boisseron argues, needs to be understood as a becoming-against where the dog's (threat of) viciousness has been discursively justified by the black man's (threat of) viciousness. A number of scholars of African American studies, such as Christina Sharpe and Michelle Alexander, have brilliantly explored various modalities of state violence enacted against unarmed black men, women, and transpersons. Yet, Boisseron charts new comparative territory by demonstrating how dogs have consistently been used as proxies for state violence across the black Atlantic, from the Haitian Revolution to the Ferguson riots. She argues that these canine performances are “a racially driven kind of cannibalism that uses fangs as a means of transference” (72). Boisseron's analysis of cinematic texts such as Cujo, White Dog, and Django Unchained greatly enriches her theorization of blacks' and dogs' becoming-against each other. However, her reading of Patrick Chamoiseau's The Old Slave and the Hound [L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse] provides the most complex example of a literary representation haunted by the history of racially invested canine-on-black violence. It is this story, paradoxically, that contains the germination of an interspecies rebellion against the white master.In the third chapter, Boisseron turns to a specific type of canine: the figure of the Creole dog, a non-domesticated species found throughout the global South that lives in close company of humans. The creole dog, like many Afro-descendants, owes its global presence to European colonists and slave traders that brought the dog to the New World. Though thinkers of créolité have tended to distance themselves from the interspecies entanglement inherent to the history of slavery, Boisseron resurrects the latent animal dimension of their poetics—the animal rhizome that Édouard Glissant left untouched. Boisseron analyses the relationship between humans and liminal animals to develop a theory of cross-species commensal living: an act of sharing the table with no strings attached. Demonstrating that “Gratitude, debt, and the pressure to return the gesture are the premises of colonization, husbandry, and domestication,” Boisseron contends that escaping colonial dehumanization “requires positioning oneself not in relation to—or in opposition to—the white gaze, but rather living and thinking outside of the human-versus-animal box” (100, 107). In many ways, the third chapter is the hinge of the entire book, containing the most sustained development of Boisseron's vision of interspecies alliances, and situates the Anthropocene within colonial hauntologies. Linking interspecies entanglements to decolonial practices rather than to a postcolonial turn, she keeps alive the urgency and the relevance for the human in the animal question.In chapter 4, Boisseron expands the black-dog entanglement outward by analyzing how issues of ownership and ownability have historically marked other marginalized groups, notably French Arabs and Jews. She reads the Code Noir through the lines of a recent constitutional amendment in France's Civil Code that now distinguishes animals from other moveable property. “In a chiasmic term of events,” Boisseron insists, “animals are still property but no longer meuble, whereas blacks are still meuble (as former slaves) yet no longer property […] since the designation cannot be amended in the now obsolete Code Noir” (128). Though violence, surveillance, and segregation are well-documented manifestations of structural racism, Boisseron weaves in other, less often studied legacies of chattel slavery, such as the restrictions on animal ownership. She analyzes the dog ownership bans in plantation era United States, traces their relationship to breed-specific bans in contemporary U.S. cities, and finally ties such regulations to the pet ownership bans placed on Jewish communities in twentieth-century Europe. Ultimately, she contends, “In a colonially-impacted system of thought, the white man alone claims the right to animal companionship, because he alone claims the right to be fully human” (155).Chapter 5 departs from the Afro-Dog's overarching canine focus in order to consider the interspecies relation between (black) humans and feline silence. Though the previous chapters proposed ways of speaking to (rather than about) the animal, this chapter posits that the apparent lack of animal response is knowledgeable silence rather than voiceless ignorance. At stake in her readings is the subaltern (human or animal) subject's voice. Boisseron interleaves Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks, Gayatri Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Emmanual Levinas' On Escape, the biblical story of Ham's curse, and slave narratives of the Black Atlantic with a consideration of animal nudity (being à poil), knowledge, and shame. Her wildly original readings open more questions than they provide answers. In contrast to her earlier chapters that sought to listen to animal voices through thick descriptions of historical animals and literary or cinematic representations of individual animals, this chapter used the feline primarily as a rhetorical figure. Nevertheless, her analysis disrupts the extensively theorized gaze between human Self and Other by triangulating it with the silent animal gaze. In doing so, Boisseron demonstrates how becoming aware of animal sentience reveals the unmarked whiteness in the discourse on human exceptionalism.Boisseron's creative and nuanced readings break ground that allows animal studies and critical race studies to meet. Yet as an exemplar of method, Afro-Dog will be of interest to any comparatist, regardless of their engagement with those particular fields. The analytical moves in Afro-Dog required a capacious thinking on the part of Boisseron, a capacious thinking that is supported at every turn with rigorous historical documentation and finely honed claims. In essence, Boisseron's book works through the questions at the core of comparative literature: when (not) to compare, and by what modes? Confronted with a historically charged and potentially demeaning comparison—blackness and animality—Boisseron's book artfully demonstrates how to posit connections without posing analogies. In Afro-Dog, the relation between blackness and animality is varyingly one of pursuit, of companionship, of owning, of eating, of becoming, of living with … yet each variant is treated in the distinctiveness of its textual source and sociohistorical context. The “blackness” in question, it must be noted, is a New World blackness, as the examples analyzed are primarily of representations of Africans and Afro-descendant peoples outside of the African continent. This is not a criticism, but rather a suggestion that, given an equally long history of the animalization of Africans in cultural representations, Afro-Dog makes a compelling case for exploring the African Studies–Animal Studies relation, and of extending the scope of analysis to include pre-modern texts.