Samantha Pergadia

SLAVERY'S SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Samantha Pergadia

During the Enlightenment’s era of scientific racism, racial difference was articulated as a difference of species, a linkage used to justify chattel slavery. When contemporary Black artists speak back to the comparison between racialized humans and nonhuman animals, they do not disavow the connection, but renew and reformulate it. Slavery’s Slaughterhouse argues that contemporary Black artists turn to the American slaughterhouse to historicize the connection between slavery and industrial farming and to reimagine the relationship between racial and animal liberation. Major artists – Toni Morrison, Jordan Peele, Kara Walker, Octavia Butler, Charles Burnett, Charles Johnson, Boots Riley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Jesmyn Ward – position the racialized human in proximity to the nonhuman animal for abolitionist ends – to end wage slavery, industrial agriculture, and carceral capitalism. This talk reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) as key works that reconfigure racial capitalism and animal capital in the age of industrial farming.

 

Last updated on May 5th, 2024

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