2022
Alex Alston
- Doctoral Candidate
- Columbia University
![Picture of Alex Alston](https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/9EE8D261-E3AA-EC11-9840-0022480A09DA.jpg)
Abstract
Animal Ambivalence: Black Literature and the Discourse of Species explores the ways that Afro-American and Afro-diasporic authors have theorized and represented nonhuman animals and the concept of nonhuman animality from the slave narrative genre through the late twentieth century novel. The project emphasizes a range of textual configurations by which Black creative intellectuals have confronted, integrated, and even repurposed the technologies of antiblack animalization as they alternatively reproduce, modify, reject, evade, and/or radically reorganize the West’s profoundly racialized and gendered concept of the Human and its attendant human-animal hierarchies.