Becoming Human

Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

By: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Narrated by: Diana Blue

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.

Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness - the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero - and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human".

©2020 New York University (P)2021 Tantor

Food for thought

Becoming Human is a thought provocking piece challenging what is means to be human. By providing a detailed history of how this definition of human came to be (through colonization and antiblackness) and how it fuels popular knowledge through policy, research, and medicine today