Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

by Joshua Bennett

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize

“This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.”
―Ron Charles, Washington Post

For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself , prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal―the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark―in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people―all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.

Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

“A gripping work…Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.”
― LSE Review of Books

“These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.”
―Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog

“Tremendously illuminating…Refreshing and field-defining.”
―Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

Genres: Poetry, Race, Theory, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Grad School

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2020

About the author

Joshua Bennett received his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He also holds an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2010, he delivered the Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with the distinctions of Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.

Winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, Dr. Bennett has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, and the Ford Foundation. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He has recited his original work at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at The White House. He is currently a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Cana McGhee]

Bennett's strength as a poet shines through here, with his amazingly evocative descriptions of the texts at the center of each chapter. i appreciate the range of animals discussed throughout and love how he elucidates a "species thinking" about Blackness. i think i was missing a larger zoom-out, bigger picture perspective about how to consider Black studies and animality as a method, but the book sets out more to show how and where animals appear in Black literatures than develop a methodology per se. really good counterpart of Jackson's Becoming Human.

[Dan Slone]

A difficult, academic read. However, it rewards the work with insight on the depth of metaphors and symbols in several popular works. I was reading for insights on the current relationship of African Americans and non-humans, which is probably the weakest part of the book. It is much stronger in outlining the ways authors have explored the historic relationship of poverty and slavery to the animals that co-occupied that space. The strongest chapter was the first, on rats as simultanious pests and heroically strong survivors. The weakest was the chapter on dogs where the author seems to ignore some obvious but inconvenient symbolism and fails to acknowledge the cost of locating a narrative in the exploitive violence of dog fighting. I think this book is best for someone seeking insight into how great black authors have used animal symbols to provide nuance and depth to thinking about the roles and power of black men and black women present and past. The author does a good job of weaving together fragments of multiple works with each of the main books he is analyzing. This book met my test for four-stars, which is-it made me think and continue to expore after I put it down.

[Emily Drez]

Phew. 3 stars because at least I learned something. However, the language got quite muddled and inaccessible at points. After all those meandering sentences (which quite literally took up several lines of the page... several ), I often wondered, "what was the point?" I think the problem is Bennett didn't necessarily hammer down his thesis statements, but rather went off on long-winded side tangents (coupled with massive block quotes), which distracted from The Point. By the end, I couldn't help but feel frustrated, as the writing almost seemed intentionally convoluted in the name of sounding smart. It's an incredible pursuit of intersectional literary theory, but it could have benefitted from tying up of the loose ends, so to speak.

[Melvin]

Interesting analyses of Black literary texts. This book was useful for me to understand how Black writers have imagined alternative worlds through and with other-than-human animals. I would recommend reading this book alongside Alexis Pauline Gumbs's "Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals".

[Tasha]

I worked my way through this academic text (by a favorite poet) slowly and will return to reread and use parts in class. This complemented my year of reading Toni Morrison and added a depth to my understanding of her novels.

[Weckea]

?

[elizabeth]

dense and sometimes incongruent, but also brilliant and so cool

[Nessie]

Read the intro and “Mule.” Some interesting ideas, not all of which I agreed with, but that’s okay. The writing, however, seems like it’s intentionally opaque. I can excuse long sentences when they are clear, beautiful, and serve a purpose; Bennett’s were neither, and his sentences only served to further obfuscate his point. I am a firm believer that dense topics need not be difficultly to read, and, unfortunately, Bennett seems to have portrayed the dangers of doing so.