“ Being Property Once Myself is destined to be an event. ” -Colin Dayan, author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life and The Law Is a White Dog These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics, and black feeling beyond the claims of property or propriety. Imagine a world of animals-rats, cocks, mules, and dogs-that prompt renewed ways of seeing, thinking, and living beyond cages or chains. “Bennett writes so beautifully that it hurts. ” -Maurice Wallace, S-USIH: Society for U.S. “By turns leading-edge and unaffected, revelatory and understated, Bennett appears much less concerned to prove that his chops as a critic and theorist are equal to his poetic abilities… By way of close readings of some well-established, and a few wholly unnoticed, scenes of black/Animal apposition or relationality, Bennett’s Being Property shares in the ensemblic turn toward black ecological criticism and theory exploring blackness, animality, ground-life, and philosophical posthumanism… Bennett stands to add many more fans to the crowd of us who’ve relished his poetic talents over many years. ” -Bénédicte Boisseron, American Literary History “Bennett makes an important contribution to the fields of Black studies and critical animal studies while offering a uniquely lyrical voice of literary criticism. ” -Lydia Ayame Hiraide, LSE Review of Books “A gripping work… Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read… Adds to a growing body of critical work that tackles social issues in relation to the realm of ‘nature,’ pushing back simultaneously against the whiteness of both literary studies and ecocriticism.

In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’… An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought. “This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways 20th- and 21st-century African American authors have written about animals.

Being property once myself