An(im)alogical Thinking: Contemporary Black Literature and the Dreaded Comparison

Abstract

Claire Jean Kim and Bénédicte Boisseron have demonstrated the dreaded comparison has become such an entrenched strategy that it continues to inform the ways we envision animal and human liberation alike. Yet, as Spiegel acknowledges, “many people might feel that it is insulting to compare the suffering of non-human animals to that of humans” because it “[implies] that the oppressions experienced by blacks and animals have taken identical forms.” That is, what makes this comparison “dreaded,” is its potential to trivializeblack suffering, even as it amplifies the material ties between human and animal oppression. Indeed, while animal rights advocates like PETA have contributed significantly to animal welfare debates, they have also embraced the post-Reconstruction assumption that the comprehensive emancipation of black communities was a fait accompli. The dreaded comparison, as Alexander Weheliye notes in Habeas Viscus, too often “[presumes] that we have now entered a stage in human development where all subjects have been granted equal access to western humanity.” In this light, I ask: how do our understandings of the animal and the human shift if we approach the dreaded comparison through the lens of black literature rather than the conventional assumptions of animal rights discourse? By engaging the Afrofuturist novels of Kiese Laymon and Nalo Hopkinson, this essay investigates some of the ways that contemporary writers of the African diaspora restage the moral, philosophical, and political coordinates of the dreaded comparison. In doing so, I track the emergence of an alternative mode of comparison and relationality, an an(im)alogical thinking, that reveals how the slave serves as an organizing principle for the animal-human divide.