Race Matters, Animal Matters : Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840-1930.

Intro -- Half Title -- Series Information -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Fugitive Humanism in African America -- Notes -- 1 Scenes of Slave Breaking and Making in Moses Roper's and Frederick Douglass' Slave Narratives -- Notes -- 2 "To Admit All Cattle without Distinction": Reconstructing Slaughter in the Slaughterhouse Cases and the New Orleans Crescent City Slaughterhouse -- Notes -- 3 Strange Fruits: Conjure, Slaughter, and The Politics of Disembodiment in Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and Related Tales -- Notes -- 4 Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: Hunting and Domestication in Spectacle Lynchings -- Notes -- 5 Interspecies Welfare and Justice: Animal Welfare and the Anti-Lynching Movement -- Notes -- Epilogue: Sanctuary and Asylum -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.

This book challenges the grand narrative of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Taking an animal studies approach to texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and James Weldon Johnson, among others, Johnson argues instead that this literature, at pivotal moments, reconsiders and recuperates discourses of animality (and often animals themselves) weaponized against African Americans, thus undermining the binaries that produced racial--and animal--injustice.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.