Aïcha Bouchelaghem

AnimalIZATION FOR CONSUMPTION AND nINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S. DISCOURSES ON SLAVERY

Aïcha Bouchelaghem (University of Geneva)

 

In the long nineteenth century, sustaining the consumption system of chattel slavery depended on the deployment of discursive animalization and dehumanization, i.e., of textual devices that characterized African Americans as consumable. To apply the theory of biopolitics of Giorgio Agamben and Achille M’Bembe, U.S. chattel slavery derived its authority to exploit African Americans by removing them from the republic’s moral-juridical order, which hinges on the notion of the “human.” Pro-slavery advocates rely on animalization in order to identify African Americans as available for management and use by Euro-American settlers. To condemn the way in which slavery treats African Americans as consumable, Abolitionist rhetoric reclaims the humanity of African Americans, for example by deploying human-animal comparisons that disavow the proximity of enslaved persons to (domesticated and farmed) animals. Despite the importance of the status of humanity to (formerly) enslaved African American authors, however, in some slave narratives derogatory human-animal similes co-exist with comparisons that complicate the signification of animality as inferior being and exploitable mass.

 

Last updated on May 8th, 2024

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