Alex Alston

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.