The cover art for Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World is startling and alluring.1 A Black female human-animal defiantly meets one’s gaze. With bull-like horns and ears jutting out of both sides of the head, thick, matted hair (fur?) migrating from the crown of the head to the brow, this portrait of a hybrid species challenges the senses and the imaginary. Leaning into the spectator’s eyeline with shoulders angled and breasts partly obscured by the enveloping shadows out of which she emerges and seems to crouch into, this Black female human-animal provokes questions: What sort of being is this? What kind of being is the Black woman? Becoming Human is a complex, and at times dense, meditation on these and related queries into anti-Blackness, new materialism, and the roles that Black women’s bodies have played historically and contemporaneously in philosophical and biological discourses on the human. Recent studies interrogating the “genre” of “Man” range across literary studies, aesthetics, geography, Black studies, and animal studies. Jackson’s work thinks alongside and rebuts claims developed in these fields by centering “gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness” (4).Becoming Human is expansive and involves eclectic case studies: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” the mercurial artistry of Wangechi Mutu, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. What links these diverse aesthetic “objects” and artistic practices are their interventions into how we come to see, feel, and know the (non)being of Blackness and the ongoing reproduction of Blackened bodies. There is much to commend in Becoming Human—its explorations and critiques of the supposed binarism involved in positing human/culture divides, its explications of some foundational philosophies assembling the tenets of anti-Blackness, and its recognition of the significance of signification; that is, its mobilization of a mode of rhetorical thinking. Moreover, Jackson delivers some truly engaging and unique discussions of discursive forms, paying particular attention to “blackness’s abject generativity” (69), a phenomenon she also calls Blackness’s “natal function” (70). This ambitious project unfolds along three interdependent, yet distinct registers: (1) a philosophical questioning of the underpinnings of anti-Blackness, (2) a robust critique of aesthetic formations and their potentiality for altering the terms of (non)humanity, (3) an encounter with materiality’s discursivity—or, discourse’s materiality. This review delineates each register, keeping in mind that each register is deeply imbricated in the others.It has become relatively normative in thinking about anti-Blackness and racism to assert or proffer the notion that Blackness is barred from the ontological status of human (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). That is, to premise one’s intervention into racialization of diverse kinds on how technologies of slavery and colonialism (and their afterlives) deny Blackness ontological ground as a human being, indeed, to repudiate (Black) being as such. There is, of course, strong evidence of such an absolute exile operating as the condition of possibility for what counts as human life and the fungibility of Blackened bodies. But since Jackson seeks to trouble binarism itself, she asserts the “concept of plasticity, which maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously . . . being everything and nothing for an order . . . constructs black(ened) humanity as privation and exorbitance of form” (35). In this formulation, the essential question is no longer whether or not Blackness is animalistic, it’s what specific labors are accomplished through discursive practices of animalization? Jackson posits that there is a “selective recognition” of Black humanity alongside violent exclusion. And so, what logics govern the selection? In short, these logics go by the name anti-Blackness and generate historically contingent abjection, debility, and disposability. Jackson interrogates foundational Western philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger to show how treatises like the latter’s Introduction to Metaphysics worked to separate what counts as philosophy from “Hottentots” and primitivism writ large. Jackson asserts that Hegel’s perceptions of Africa and Africans as possessing no history or development, representing the antithesis of the fullness of Dasein as human essence, haunts Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, the philosophical capacity for human being to build worlds (utilizing the natural resources of earth) gets counterposed in Heidegger to those Black bodies that lack this human capacity—those bodies and populations that are locked permanently within the animal-earth relation, the Black (98–99). Becoming Human, then, seeks to disturb these foundations by reiterating “that blackness, and the abject fleshy figures that bear the weight of the world, is a being (something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything), and I aim to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest blackness is nothingness” (83).The more difficult challenge facing readers of this work is embedded within the relations among the various figurations of the Black female body as a sexuating, reproducing organism. Here the conceptualization relies on how the Black female body is treated in discourses of biology as capable of bringing new (male and female) bodies into the world and not capable of being truly feminine, a caesura that begets and preserves white femininity. Jackson relies on queer science fiction to illuminate and cast doubt upon these anti-Black operations. Chapter 2 features an analysis of the “postcolonial science fiction” (88) of Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and chapter 3 forwards the “insect poetics” (121) of Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Although each work offers very different versions of Black woman futurity, they allow for Jackson to think about Blackened female bodies and the biopolitical imperatives of reproduction. How might, Jackson asks, Blackened female bodies resist or transform the ongoing commands issued by biopolitics to make more bodies even as this reproduction diminishes the self? In the case of “Bloodchild,” Jackson contemplates how discourses of species are racialized to provide warrants for the domination of not only animals—like Blackened female bodies—but also “insects and microorganisms, such as parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi, and bacteria” (132). Jackson is, in short, attempting to illustrate how anti-Blackness invents multiple forms of organisms as the “‘enemy of man’” (136), thus proposing that (inter)planetary alliances among Blackened bodies (even microscopic ones) are possible and necessary for liberation.To offer plasticity as the mode of anti-Blackness is to conceive of racism as an exceptionally potent assemblage of aesthetic practices organized by and housed within biopolitical aesthetic regimes like the slave plantation. From this perspective, Becoming Human contemplates the shaping, constituting, and mutating forces acting on individual and social bodies and things. Importantly, among these “things” are Black female bodies and the artistic practices of those very bodies. Hence, Jackson understands anti-Blackness as a biopolitical and economic generative force through which one can witness how “the coordinates of the human body are forcefully altered into a different shape or form—bizarre and fantastic: human personality is made ‘wild’ under the weight of blackness’s production as seemingly pure potentiality” (70–71). In the case of chattel slavery, the slave body was made to become whatever it must become to serve the fickle and gratuitous interests of the slaver’s fears and desires—to bear the lash, to bear children, to bear unimaginable grief. The Black female human-animal is an object of an aesthetics that cannot be dissociated (in reality or in phantasy) from the conceits of the aesthetic values attributed to whiteness. Becoming Human, therefore, engages a variety of aesthetic forms as it maps the terrain of anti-Blackness. For the purposes of this review, there are two notable examples in addition to the Black female human-animal worth elaborating upon: the slave narrative and the novel’s unique status as a literary form.Prior to taking up Morrison’s Beloved as a neo–slave narrative, Jackson comments on the genre of slave narration and Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical performances. A genre is not simply an arrangement of elements that constrain artistic practices—although it is that—it constitutes and mobilizes affective logics governing systems of social relations. As such, the slave narrative depends on “sentimentality,” a “privileged rhetorical mode” that establishes “empathic identification” among speakers and audiences (56). Although this rhetorical mode may build “bonds of kindness” important to abolitionism, it also reifies racial hierarchies and social laws pertinent to anti-Blackness’s continuation and revision. Douglass’s “‘formal mastery’ of genres of masculine, republican elocution” (56) cannot disable the racist aesthetics of animalization. Nor can it transfer his conditional humanity onto other Black bodies. In this respect, the genre of the slave narrative has less to do with Black freedom; it solicits Black artistic practices as a “pretext for racial hierarchy in the form of a pedagogy in white ideality and the pathologization and criminalization of blackness” (58).Jackson’s critique of the racializing affects of Western aesthetics continues with a consideration of the historical context of the emergence of the novel as honored literary form. The prestige of the novel as a literary form is involved in the elevation of rational man and its forms of speech. Taken to be a reflection of immanent subjectivity and the transcendence of nature, the novel operates as a metaphor; it signifies the attainment of high culture and the vulgar existence of Black flesh that lacks the powers of self-reflection. The novel is also popularized through market economies constitutive of global colonialism and chattel slavery. Importantly, the novel participates in and furthers a “certain nationalist myth of language” engendering a reverence for its literary form as white-nation speech. This is the historical-aesthetical formulation into which Beloved and Brown Girl intervene—as counterstatements to this racist aesthetics and as ways to imagine worldly relations differently (90–99) (see also Bakhtin 1986).By centering the concept of plasticity in its analysis, Becoming Human produces an aperture through which one can appreciate the rhetorical character of anti-Blackness and the aesthetics of racism. Throughout the work Jackson reveals a sensitivity to discursivity. When discussing the genre of the slave narrative, she refers to the “rhetorical inheritance” passed down from the “literary cultural industry” regulating the form slave narratives can take (52). Genre, therefore, offers up and excludes from consideration specific topoi for rhetorical invention. But as Jackson works her way through this register involving the entanglement of genre, trope, and the Black female body, the “natal function” of Blackness ushers into view the idea that “the slave is the discursive-material site that must contend with the demand for seemingly infinite malleability, a demand whose limits are set merely by the tyrannies of will and imagination” (72). Plasticity is an effect of this discursive-material relation as it violently seizes and molds bodies, in part, by continuously enlisting various forms of biopolitical administration. The implications and limitations of this relation get teased out in the work’s final chapter, “Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde” (159–98). Rather than explore Jackson’s examination of Mutu and Lorde, the final stage of this review tries to clarify the stakes for rhetorical theory expressed by Jackson’s staging of her critique.Beginning with the traditional biocentric view that human beings are determined by biological processes, and that culture is subsidiary, Jackson utilizes the work of Sylvia Wynter to engage “sociogeny” as a refutation of biocentricity that has gained traction over the past two decades. Instead of privileging biology (forgetting that biology is itself discursive like metaphysics), Becoming Human questions the “and” posited in “discursivity and materiality” (160). Indeed, “antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-called biological sex is modulated by ‘culture’ . . . at the registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness produces differential biocultural effects of gender and sex” (159). In this sense, patterns and forms of discourse are biotropological—they are assemblages of biotropes (Daut 2015; Watts 2021). Such discourses habituate bodily (and subjective) responses, neurochemical processes that have values and feelings inscribed through them; they have the capacity to trigger ideas, preferences, ways of knowing, modes of visuality operating “as if it was instinctual.” This “as if” is paramount, for it elides the fact that the human subject is “semiotically defined” (162). Matter itself can be understood as an effect, at least in part, of the mechanics of discourse. Becoming Human understands this “as if” as a racist rhetorical strategy: it sponsors “mutations” in human-animal, calls them nature’s “monsters,” and “reasons” that they need to be studied, dissected, policed, and incarcerated or killed. To be sure, Jackson does not label the work as an investment in rhetorical theory one might suspect because her assessments and critiques of philosophy and metaphysics tend to treat rhetoric as a set of devices that “biological discourses” mobilize. From this reviewer’s point of view, this tendency is another effect of “as if”—as if biological discourses, especially when manufacturing the Black female human-animal, are not rhetorical through and through. Despite this quibble, Becoming Human offers provocative analyses of anti-Blackness and the multifaceted worlds it repetitively and distressingly (rhetorically) invents.