International Cultural Studies Certificate Program 2020 Speaker Series presents: 

“‘South Africa is the Land of Pet Animals’: The Racializing Assemblages of Colonial Pet-Keeping”

This talk examines representations of pet-keeping in Victorian South Africa to show how the racializing logics of slavery and colonialism emerge within gendered animal-human relationships. I move beyond the tendency to group multiple dehumanizing practices under the catch-all term “animalization” in order to both nuance animality and locate moments of Black fugitivity, wherein blackness escapes the racializing logics of Western humanism. Through analyzing Achille Mbembe’s taxonomy of colonial animality, and two late-Victorian texts – a children’s book and a colonial memoir – this talk seeks to better understand the multiple layers of dehumanization taking place within colonial contexts and the afterlives of slavery.

Anna Feuerstein is an Associate Professor of English at UHM, and is the author of The Political Lives of Victorian Animals (Cambridge UP 2019).

Click here to download the PDF flier for this event.

International Cultural Studies Certificate Program 2020 Speaker Series presents: 

“‘South Africa is the Land of Pet Animals’: The Racializing Assemblages of Colonial Pet-Keeping”

This talk examines representations of pet-keeping in Victorian South Africa to show how the racializing logics of slavery and colonialism emerge within gendered animal-human relationships. I move beyond the tendency to group multiple dehumanizing practices under the catch-all term “animalization” in order to both nuance animality and locate moments of Black fugitivity, wherein blackness escapes the racializing logics of Western humanism. Through analyzing Achille Mbembe’s taxonomy of colonial animality, and two late-Victorian texts – a children’s book and a colonial memoir – this talk seeks to better understand the multiple layers of dehumanization taking place within colonial contexts and the afterlives of slavery.

Anna Feuerstein is an Associate Professor of English at UHM, and is the author of The Political Lives of Victorian Animals (Cambridge UP 2019).

Click here to download the PDF flier for this event.