Race Matters, Animal Matters

This book challenges the grand narrative of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Taking an animal studies approach to texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and James Weldon Johnson, among others, Johnson argues instead that this literature, at pivotal moments, reconsiders and recuperates discourses of animality (and often animals themselves) weaponized against African Americans, thus undermining the binaries that produced racial—and animal—injustice.