Living with Others

Michelle C. Neely, "Living with Others"Over the last five years, a contentious debate over the nature of community has unfolded between radical justice groups such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More—whose vision of... [ view full abstract ]

Michelle C. Neely, "Living with Others"

Over the last five years, a contentious debate over the nature of community has unfolded between radical justice groups such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More—whose vision of community embraces difference and particularity—and "all lives matter," "I don’t see race" white liberals who insist that a false universalism must ever be the precondition for real community and kinship. My paper argues that this debate is prefigured in the work of a cluster of nineteenth-century black authors who use nonhuman animals to imagine the flourishing of difference within community. Drawing on examples from Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative (c. 1853-61) and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859), among other texts, I suggest that Crafts and Wilson theorize an intersectional and multispecies ethic of care. Byrejecting abjection, unidirectional use, and disposability as consequences of difference, Crafts and Wilson deliver timely analyses of the persistence of violent inequality in communities grounded in universal rights discourses.