# Becoming Human [[Zakiyyah Iman Jackson]] [Citation Link](https://academic.oup.com/nyu-press-scholarship-online/book/40737) *Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. NYU Press, 2020.* ## Description Jackson rethinks the boundary between "the human" and "the animal" through Black feminist theory, arguing that antiblackness has structured Western taxonomies of both categories at once — rendering Black being "plastic," made to bear any and every form, human and animal, on demand — and that Black cultural production has long contested those taxonomies. ## Key Tags #black-study #posthumanism ## Key Passages %% quoted excerpts pending a full pass against the text %% ## Notes by Chapter %% Reading notes pending a full pass against the text; chapter structure confirmed via NYU Press Scholarship Online. %% ### On Becoming Human: An Introduction Introduces "plasticity" as the operative logic of antiblackness — Black being made to occupy, indistinctly, the categories of both "human" and "animal" as needed — against accounts of the human/animal boundary that assume Black exclusion from "the human" outright. ### Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative [[Visibility and Opticality]] Reads Frederick Douglass's oratory and Toni Morrison's *Beloved* — including the relation between Paul D and the rooster Mister — for the racialized entanglement of manhood, animality, and opacity. ### Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson's *Brown Girl in the Ring* Reads Hopkinson's novel for an alternative empiricism and world-sense unsettling Enlightenment taxonomies of matter and being. ### Not Our Own: Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild" Reads Butler's novella's insect/human reproductive entanglement for its sex and genre politics. ### Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde Reads Mutu's visual art and Lorde's writing for how measurement and "dematerialization" operate as ecologies of antiblack violence. ### Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower Closes toward a somatic theory of necropower. ## Details %% none yet %% ### Concepts and Theories - [[Visibility and Opticality]] - argues antiblackness holds Black being in an unstable position between "human" and "animal" categories of visual recognition - [[Black Studies]] - central contemporary statement of Black feminist posthumanist critique - [[The Body]] - centrally concerned with embodiment, animality, and the racialized construction of "the human" ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Related Individuals - [[Zakiyyah Iman Jackson]] - author ## References ### Cited In - [[Visibility and Opticality]] - [[Zakiyyah Iman Jackson]]