In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs ([1861] 2001) submits a zoology of the Southern US plantation and its environs. As a recent fugitive, Linda Brent (Jacobs's pseudonym) hides from her pursuers behind bushes, where she is injured by “a reptile of some kind,” “something cold and slimy” (83). Days later, she and family friend Peter must wait in “Snake Swamp”; “hundreds of mosquitos . . . [poison their] flesh” as “snake after snake” crawls at their feet (94–95). “But,” she insists, “even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized” (95). For seven years, she shares an attic's crawl space with “rats and mice” as well as “hundreds of little red insects, fine as a needle's point, that [pierce] through [her] skin, and [produce] an intolerable burning” (95, 97). Even after she reaches New York, Linda fears being recognized by the Southerners “swarming” the city: “Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of venomous creatures as little as I do the other” (143).Jacobs animalizes the slaveholder, classifying him as the most dangerous, and most evil, of “venomous creatures.” In predicating a Black woman's freedom in the antebellum era on a negotiated proximity to some threatening creatures and not others, Jacobs shuffles the Enlightenment logic whereby “white men” secure their place “in that community called civilized” by exempting themselves from an animality they instead ascribe to Black and Indigenous people. I say shuffles because Jacobs does not collapse the human–animal hierarchy; she revises membership in each category by hinting at a notion of white animality. Jacobs's animalization of whiteness constitutes one rhetorical strategy—her condemnation of white Southerners’ failure to live up to Christian values being another—meant to bring Black humanity into sharp relief. If Jacobs maintains the human's primacy and integrity, it is because her abolitionist project is embedded in a sentimental tradition. Within this tradition, readers, such as the white, Northern, Christian women whom Jacobs explicitly addresses, are invited to express sympathy toward the enslaved—to recognize, that is, their humanity.Jacobs interferes with the legal and discursive management of Blackness's relation to nature undergirding the animalization and propertization of Black people.1 What would such interference look like if it did not happen in the name of Black humanity, either because Black animality and humanity were more symbiotic than they appeared or because being granted humanity within a white supremacist regime were simply not desirable? Recent monographs by Sarah Jane Cervenak, Andil Gosine, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson take up this question.The critique of humanization in the fields dedicated to race and sexuality has generally adopted, as its unit of analysis, sentiment, emotion, affect, or feeling. Breakthrough studies have inquired into a recognition of Black humanity that “[holds] out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one's suffering but rather intensifying it” (Hartman 1997: 5); the “culture of true feeling” that tends to “elevate the ethic of personal sacrifice, suffering, and mourning over a politically ‘interested’ will to socially transformative action” (Berlant 2008: 35, 55); the consolidation of nineteenth-century biopower as “a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter” (Schuller 2018: 7); and minoritarian practices of “unfeeling” that “signal skepticism and reluctance to signify the appropriate expressions of affect that are socially legible as human” (Yao 2021: 7). The contested terrain demarcated by Cervenak's, Gosine's, and Jackson's studies is not so much that of feeling as that of nature—specifically, the perceived and enforced contiguity to or alienation from nature of Black people and people deemed sexually deviant, two categories that overlap in the archive of coloniality.2 I read these three books, together, as marking an ecological turn in the radical critique of humanization. Their authors enter the natural world to reencounter humanization as a process of enclosure rather than liberation, and to find fugitive ontologies and epistemologies in the shadow of the human.The scholarship pairing Blackness and ecology in US and hemispheric contexts has proceeded along two main axes. The first concerns environmental racism, a significant configuration of environmental inequality. Dorceta E. Taylor (2014), for instance, models an environmental justice scholarship attuned to the disproportionate exposure of Black communities, communities of color, and low-income communities to environmental hazards like pollution. In the twenty-first century, such events as Hurricane Katrina (Hosbey 2018), the Flint water crisis (Pulido 2016), and the COVID-19 pandemic (Njoku 2021) have stressed the indissociability of anti-Blackness from the bio- and necropolitics of displacement, privatization, and infection.3 The second axis tells something of an origin story about the transformations that have fossilized into the industrial, then late-industrial, landscape of environmental racism. This story's framework, the “Plantationocene,” makes a prefixal adjustment to the now ubiquitous “Anthropocene,” which inscribes the present in an era when human activity amounts to a geological force.4 “The plantation,” Wendy Wolford (2021: 1623) explains, “has propelled colonial exploration, sustained an elite, perpetuated a core–periphery dualism within and between countries, organized a highly racialized labor force worldwide, and shaped both the cultures we consume and the cultural norms we inhabit and perform.” In trading the undifferentiated and unsituated position of anthropos—the human—for the plantation as birth site of a certain world order and a certain relation to the earth, Wolford and other researchers of the Plantationocene echo the insight, conveyed by Saidiya Hartman (2006), Jared Sexton (2018), Christina Sharpe (2016), and other Black studies scholars, that the Middle Passage represented nothing less than an epochal rupture.While traces of the above inquiries, including an attention to the uneven geographies of harm and the ecological disruption of colonialism and capitalism, can be found in their books, Cervenak, Gosine, and Jackson bring distinct methods and commitments to the study of Black ecologies. Several investigations of environmental racism and the Plantationocene have taken place under the umbrella of anthropology, sociology, geography, or public health. By contrast, Cervenak, Gosine, and Jackson favor an approach not social-scientific but philosophical and aesthetic. They risk bold, overarching claims about the dominant rationality of scientific and political modernity, positing as some of its tenets the alignment of “anti-Black and anti-earth” material and discursive practices, in Cervenak's (6) case, and the traffic between Black and Indigenous humanity and animality, in Jackson's and Gosine's. Moreover, all three authors zoom in on the ways Black visual, literary, and performed arts mediate this dominant rationality. They occupy the aesthetic as a register that exacerbates the contradictions animating anti-Black norms and laws, inasmuch as the colonial common sense that would otherwise stabilize the meaning of race, sex, nature, and property—all criteria for what counts as humanity and who counts as human—is upended.Of the three volumes foregrounded here, Jackson's Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World is philosophically the most ambitious. A mere two years out of the printer as of my writing this, Becoming Human has already secured a canonical status. Excerpts from the book previously published in article form are cited abundantly and favorably in Cervenak's Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (65–66) and Gosine's Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (10). Becoming Human builds on the premise that Black animality is not, nor was it ever, antithetical to Black humanity. Accordingly, Jackson “[reinterprets] Enlightenment thought not as black ‘exclusion’ or ‘denied humanity’ but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition—of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity, whereby ‘the animal’ is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass” (3). Humanization, then, shapes the matter and meaning of Blackness in ways that may concur with animalization.5In a chapter on, among other things, Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved (also discussed in Cervenak's Black Gathering), Jackson reckons with the “aporia” of “[slave] humanity” (45). Her assertion that humanization was “not an antidote to slavery's violence” but “a technology for producing a kind of human” (46) recalls Monique Allewaert's report on the advent of alternative humanities on the plantation.6 Yet, Jackson does not rely on a typology, like Allewaert's (2013: 85, 6), that distinguishes between the human, the animal, the object, the plant, and “the parahuman,” the latter category designating “the slave and maroon persons who seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-European colonists typically proposed were not legally or conceptually equivalent to human beings while at the same time not being precisely inhuman.” The absence from Jackson's book of such a historically informed typology is, I believe, worth noting. Whereas Allewaert's case studies revolve around documents from the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century American tropics, Jackson's, in majority though not in totality, revolve around contemporary African diasporic cultural production. That Becoming Human exceeds historicism in the strict sense does not mean that Jackson's claims are a- or transhistorical; they may be best labeled, like those of Plantationocene scholars, epochal.Jackson's equation between recognizing and plasticizing Black humanity is indicative of a broad, cross-disciplinary curiosity about plasticity, “the capacity of a given body or system to generate new form, whether internally or through external intervention” (Schuller and Gill-Peterson 2020: 1). Scholars in trans, queer, Black, and race and ethnic studies have exposed plasticity's operation as “a key logic underpinning the modern notion of racial difference” and “an enlisted feature of state power” (Schuller and Gill-Peterson 2020: 2). Per Jackson's nomenclature, plasticity names “a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially ‘everything and nothing’ at the level of ontology” (3). By this scheme, categories of race and sex owe their “world-wrecking capacities and death-dealing effects” to the modulation of the flesh's mobility and vitality (121). Against Kyla Schuller (2018), who argues that, within nineteenth-century biopolitics, Black people appeared inert, undifferentiated, and unoptimized, thus marking the constitutive outside to binary sex differentiation as civilizational achievement, Jackson insists that “the fluidification of ‘life’ and fleshy existence” on sites like the plantation yielded hegemonic notions of “woman,” “mother,” and “female body” (11). It is from the vantage point of Blackness's fluidification qua bestialization or thingification that the literary and visual artifacts compiled in Becoming Human—from Audre Lorde's 1980 Cancer Journals to Octavia E. Butler's 1984 short story “Bloodchild,” to Wangechi Mutu's mid-2000s artworks—further Sylvia Wynter's (2003) project of rupturing the human.Gosine pursues an analogous objective in a volume that blends colonial history, art criticism, and anecdotes about his upbringing in a Trinidadian Catholic all-boys school (see esp. 1–3, 12–16, 103–4). To do so, Gosine tracks, first, the introduction, throughout the expansion of European colonization in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, of “legal statutes that set out ‘civil’ parameters of sex, including laws forbidding interracial and homosexual sex,” and, second, the disciplining of sexuality by postcolonial states since the retreat of European powers (4, 31). Gosine's search for traces of unruly bodies’ animalization takes him to the narratives alleging cannibalistic practices by Indigenous peoples and the artistic responses they have elicited. Gosine demonstrates a penchant for subversive art and art criticism; his book truly lives up to its titular wild.7 For instance, Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, whose paintings feature prominently in Nature's Wild and on its cover, refuses the onus of distancing colonized people from animals. Instead, she collapses that distance through representations of human–animal hybrids. Sinnapah Mary's art, as Gosine interprets it, trades the affirmation of Caribbean humanity and its associated “politics of respectability” for a concession and a rhetorical question: “We are animal; so what?” (129). I decipher nothing prescriptive in Gosine's verbalization of Sinnapah Mary's glorious nonchalance—no call, say, to cultivate a disidentificatory (Muñoz 1999) attachment to Caribbean hybridity. Something more pragmatic is on offer: the setup for a thought experiment that consists in imagining oneself “freed from proving [oneself] not animal” (150).Nature's Wild makes an important contribution to queer studies by decoding the sodomy legislation implemented in the British colonies in the context of “a general anxiety about the Pandora's box of competing norms and behaviors potentially opened by the Europeans’ metaphorical and literal penetration of ‘new worlds,’ which held threatening examples of alternative versions of how humans might live outside the patriarchal, hierarchical Christian model” (23). Criminal codes, Gosine explains, drew clear lines between acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior and, by extension, between human and animal. While “animals have sex, . . . humans have sexual cultures,” he sums up, and cultures are prone to regulation (73). In many ways, Nature's Wild and Christopher Chitty's (2020) Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System function as companion pieces. They provide, as a pair, a remarkably far-reaching history of nonreproductive sex amid the rise and consolidation of the colonial and capitalist order.Becoming Human and Black Gathering, too, make convincing cases for sexuality studies as an intuitive home for the study of Black ecologies. They do so by extending a Black feminist theoretical and political lineage. When Jackson states that “antiblackness produces differential biocultural effects of both gender and sex” (9), for instance, we hear echo Hortense Spillers's (1987: 67, 66) claim that the “theft of the body” enacted in the Middle Passage and its legal and discursive ripple effect has frustrated the “symbolic integrity” of male and female, patriarchy and matriarchy. Whereas Jackson evaluates slavery's impact on the sex/gender system, Cervenak draws on a more utopian Black feminist tradition, one that summons “other ‘worlds’ engendered by the absence of weight and measure” (82).Black Gathering's utopianism bespeaks an investment, inherited from performance studies, in what artworks are as well as what they do. Cervenak approaches Black ecologies not from the perspective of animality but from that of property, cataloging the ways Black artists and writers have “aestheticized and poeticized a relation between togetherness and ungivable living,” or life that is not, and cannot be, subsumed into property relations (3). She opens the book with an attentive account of the African American visual artist Xaviera Simmons's Harvest, a 2010 installation made of 231 wood panels on which are painted various words and phrases (1–4). In Harvest, Cervenak observes, “[social] life . . . orbits into and out of view as verbs disappear and reappear from and without their proper subjects and half-indicated socialities bloom as an earth without enclosure” (3). The installation's “deregulated togetherness” eschews a model of Black freedom as “propertied self-possession” to conjure a life that is not “given over to propertied regulation and inscription” (1, 6, 7). Art, for Cervenak, generates a commons of sorts: it holds space for Black life, unenclosed.What most fundamentally distinguishes Black Gathering from Becoming Human and Nature's Wild is the external position its author occupies relative to the communities she addresses. As someone who, like me, “benefits from whiteness,” Cervenak is after an abolitionist engagement with Black studies, one whose interpretive strategies do not reproduce “the very propertizing and extraction otherwise critiqued” (11). The key to such an engagement, as she sees it, is to refrain, in chapters on such works as Gayl Jones's experimental writings and Leonardo Drew's sculptures, from “attempting some false analytic resolution of Black gatherings’ indeterminate meanings and ambulation” (11). I notice in this engagement an anti-sentimental stance: a refusal to make the white gaze the guarantor of Black expression's meaning.At the same time, I wonder whether Jackson would warn of a threat of fluidification. Is it indeed possible to shield the material and semiotic flux that guarantees Blackness's ungivability from the flux that denotes its plasticity? The juxtaposition of Cervenak's, Gosine's, and Jackson's books thus locates, at the heart of Black ecologies, the question of which indeterminacies and hybridities are desirable and which are not—which activate imaginaries of liberation and which are tethered to apparatuses of capture.I end as I began: with an aesthetic vignette, and one set in New York City, where Jacobs found freedom. The vignette's focus, Tourmaline's short film Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones (2017), occupies a tension I have associated with Black ecologies between two modes of fluidification: the first functioning as a dispositif of capture (slavery and its afterlives, such as segregation, incarceration, and policing), and the second encompassing fugitive practices (aesthetic and social forms that induce glitches in the logic of propertization). Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones inhabits aquatic ecologies on multiple scales. One ecology is domestic: cast members plunge into and arise from a bathtub filled with water or milk in gestures of cleansing and rebirth. Another is fluvial: the Hudson River, into which the bathwater may be discharged, is home to Manhattan's West Side Piers, where trans and queer people congregated en masse in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet another is marine: the Hudson drains into the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved people were forcibly transported and, as the film's title reminds us, into which some were thrown during the Middle Passage.Tourmaline's film begins at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which in 2015 moved into a Renzo Piano–designed building with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the piers. Ballroom legend Egyptt LaBeija enjoys the elevated viewpoint and reminisces, “I literally lived on that pier that's no longer there. I lived there, in a hut. I lived on there, and I slept on this thing right under there, because I was homeless. I had to make money, and I had nowhere to go. And then one day, I just snapped out. I said, ‘This can't work no more.’ And I started reaching for better things. Oh my god! I've never seen it from this angle before, so, it's a lot. I don't want to cry. Well, I can cry now, I don't got no make-up on.” LaBeija lets out a bittersweet giggle and pauses before solemnly announcing, “The times of the Village, from 14th Street to Christopher Street. The memories. People should never forget where they came from.”Geo Wyeth's electronic score guides us through a surrealist sequence: LaBeija, Jamal Lewis, and other performers walk, dance, and pose in sets saturated by ultraviolet light. The sequence relays Afro-fabulations, Tavia Nyong'o's (2018: 1–5) term for queer practices of speculation that rearrange Black time and temporality.8 Multi-scalar ecological dwelling in Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones reactivates Black trans and queer pasts that resist idealization—“This can't work no more,” LaBeija remembers thinking of life on the pier—but culminate in a present that is not that of a corporate museum situated at the edge of a gentrified West Village where Black trans and queer life has been policed out of existence. The closing shot features a femme-presenting individual dressed in a red sequined gown. The performer stands on a balcony, their back to the camera and their face to the Hudson, and strikes a pose (fig. 1). A magic trick has been performed. The Whitney now out of frame, the elevated viewpoint that so fascinated LaBeija is salvaged from institutionality. The vanishing of the museum as arbiter of art and humanity, American or otherwise, makes room for something new, or old. Something else. By raising their hand, the performer raises the dead: life returns to the pier, its enduring stilts now looking like a bustling crowd reborn and gathered.Somewhere between Jackson's, Gosine's, and Cervenak's Black ecologies, Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones exemplifies a speculative, though not romanticizing, relation to indeterminacies and hybridities. In Tourmaline's film, histories of enslavement are intercut with performances of rebirth out of bondage, and histories of housing insecurity with performances of property abolition. Fluidification, as a locus of aesthetic experimentation, accommodates neither strictly a chronology of capture nor one of liberation; it instead points to the traffic between these processes, their ecological copresence.