Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog

by Lewis R. Gordon

Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia UP, 2018) addresses a fundamental feature of racism—namely, the idea of the not-human (though some, as she points out, argue the “not-person”) in a body that appears human.  The human body devoid of the human is, in other words, only an animal, which makes the lurking animal always an element of racism.

I must say, I reject the personhood argument, since there are non-human things ranging from corporations to pets that are treated as persons yet do not suffer or, as in the case of abstract entities, experience the notion of degradation of nonpersonhood or even nonhuman status.

Although the focus is antiblack racism, the reality is that all forms of racism inevitably collapse into theriomorphism. Boisseron’s aim is to take on the analogy itself, and she does so through advancing, with intentional irony, an analogy of double consciousness wherein “Afro-dog” stands for this claim—of being both black and something else (for example, “American” or “European”)—with regard to blacks.

The complicated element, however, is that it differs in important respects since “African American” does not necessarily mean the American in the African, whereas “Afro-dog” is, in phenomenological terms, appresentational of the animal in the African. There is a deeper resonance and expansion to consider in this argument since the white human is, after all, an advancement of a form of Cartesian logic in which the animal is squarely located in the body whereas the humanness and by extension whiteness is located in the mind of whites as substance.

To mess up these dichotomies, Boisseron asks us not only to rethink what it means to be human but also what it means to be an animal through advancing the concept of the creolized animal, the animal that transcends the category of “pet” and has acquired the human-dominated environment as its habitat (such as rats, squirrels, bears, bobcats, raccoons, and the many animals moving through urban environments, suburbs, and ex-urbs). The analysis of the creolized animal is the main contribution of this book. It earns Boisseron a place at metatheoretical and transdisciplinary levels of analysis through bridging Africana Studies with animal studies. This makes the work itself also an exemplar of creolization beyond the sphere of the uniquely human form of discourse.

Boisseron also makes a contribution through her discussion of the use of animals as weapons against blacks and the fears whites have of blacks having animals as weapons; think, for example, of the hypocritical deployment of the 2^nd Amendment, where whites can openly carry weapons in states where the mere belief of blacks possessing guns, however legal, often leads to their demise at the pull of trigger from police officers supposedly gripped with fear for their lives.

While this is a wonderful book, I do have some criticisms. Boisseron goes to great lengths to indulge the animal studies theorists even in places where their discourse borders on the ridiculous. For instance, how does the term “innocence” work when there is an effort to attribute agency to German Shepherds unleashed on blacks and Indigenous populations? Across South Africa and the United States, for example, there is a vast literature on the production of “racist” dogs, just as there are studies of the production of racist children. How does “innocence” work here? Of course, “guilt” is also out of place where for the animal there may be a sphere of unhindered pursuit of meat versus other possibilities.

One major problem in animal studies—beyond the array of critical points that Boisseron makes about slippery semiological slopes (why is it that people of color instead of whites are almost exclusively placed in comparison to animals or animals compared to them?)—is the caricaturing and romanticizing of animals. It is as if no animals are predators.

Beyond the need for more critique of how animal studies builds its analogies, the text could benefit from an elaboration of how race, as the philosophical anthropology of the Euromodern age, has become the basis through which political appearance becomes analogical and in which blacks are metonymic. This makes “like the blacks” the call for recognition in schemas of victimization. In other words, the point is to make “X,” whatever X may be, properly victims through analogized blackness.

All this, of course, raises additional questions, some of which are discussed in Afro-Dog, such as the debate about whites (actually “people of the Global North”) loving animals while hating black and Indigenous people.  I have argued that actually something more is at work, which is the production of new kinds of “wild,” in which actually animals are considered natural allies of whites against those who resist “domestication” and hence truly “wild”: blacks and “natives.”

Still, despite these concerns, the overall argument of the book is bold, original, and deserves the attention it has been receiving.  It is blazing a trail of a set of rich debates to come.

For more on this book, click on Bridget Fielder’s conversation with Boisseron here.

Lewis R. Gordon is Executive Editor of Black Issues in Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; the 2018–2019 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal; and Chair of Global Collaborations for the Caribbean Philosophical Association. His public Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/LewisGordonPhilosopher/ and he is on Twitter @lewgord.