Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World delivers a new and lucid view of antiblackness, reconsidered through the construction of the human’s apparent inferior, the animal. Plumbing the racial meaning contained in Western humanism’s animal-human caesura, Jackson reframes the historical “conflation of black humans with animals” (3) to expose the shared calculus of race-making and animal speciation, while retracing how “black female flesh” became the “limit case” between them (4). Building her argument from the study of key Enlightenment texts, Jackson orients readers toward ongoing formations of antiblackness, arguing that certain 20th- and 21st-century black cultural works have staged “alternative modes of being” through the animality of “black(ened) humanity” (17). Analyzing the fortification of antiblackness alongside instances of its undermining, Jackson shows the major returns of rethinking familiar terms — human, animal, matter, mother, and Man — and the relations between them. Striking her interventions at sites of epistemic impasse, Jackson offers black feminist and queer studies, animal studies, and critiques of the Enlightenment grounds for critical reorientation.

Jackson extends lines of black feminist critique in her assessment of the human while departing from them in the taxonomy she illuminates beneath it. Questioning the “assumption that the recognition of one as a human being” has “protect[ed]” against “ontologizing violence” (19–20), Jackson follows Sylvia Wynter and Saidiya Hartman in rejecting the premise that exclusion from humanity has been the harm of antiblackness, and inclusion, its salve. Instead, Jackson asserts that “the African’s humanity” has not been “denied but appropriated, inverted, and ultimately plasticized in the methodology of abjecting animality” (23). Conceptualizing blackness as elastic rather than fixed, Jackson names “ontologized plasticity” (10) as the “mode of domination” (11) that has confounded black people’s relationship to the human-animal dichotomy and its coeval racial technology, binary sex and gender. Here, Jackson asserts a stunning historical revision: that while “black femaleness, maternity, and sexuality” were made to demarcate the limit of the human, black female flesh was itself what “color[ed]” the terms of “nonhuman animal abjection” (14). Recasting the animal’s debasement as produced through black ungendering, Becoming Human’s chapters explicate this formation, inscribed by thinkers from David Hume to Ernst Haeckel, and disrupted by writers and artists from Toni Morrison to Wangechi Mutu.

Chapter 1 opens at the “aporia” of “slave humanity” (45), viewed through Morrison’s 1987 Beloved and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Tracing “universal humanity[’s]” perverse emergence from the “ledger system that placed black humans, horses, cattle, and household items all on the same bill of purchase” (45), Jackson apprehends the humanity that Douglass’s Narrative pursues through discourses of manhood, yet which his later remarks on “Kindness to Animals” (1873) reframe. Jackson then turns to consider Paul D and Mister’s “trans-species correspondence” in Beloved, arguing that the interrelation of man and rooster “rupture[s]” the “governing terms” (77) of the world that slavery made. World-making and world-devolution form the crucible of chapter 2, where Jackson pivots from manhood’s articulation toward the epistemic nonrepresentability of the black maternal, as read through Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). Following Hopkinson’s characters as they slip from postcolonial Canada into states of otherworldly vertigo, Jackson forges her own heuristic slippage at the site of their matrilineal dislocation. Reading between “matter” and the Latin “mater” (mother), Jackson names “black mater” as the humanist order’s foreclosed, yet “vivifying,” potential to disorder the known and governable world (89, 120). Extending the reach of speculative fiction to destabilize “the world as such” (120), chapter 3 charts the interplanetary relations of the Terran and Tlic in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984). Through a story where mutual survival and colonial violence tangle in acts of symbiotic reproduction, Jackson reads the uneasy accommodations between Butler’s contending species as upending the notions of proprietary autonomy that structure our earthly “(social) body” (158).

Spanning historical periods, genre divides, and binaries of real and fictive in her treatment of the human, Jackson’s monograph concludes by moving closer to the human’s body. Chapter 4 layers readings of Mutu’s 2005 Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and Audre Lorde’s 1980 The Cancer Journals, drawing readers into the “iterative, processual, interactional systematicity” (169) of antiblackness as it apportions life and kills the black body, while also uplifting what scholars have missed, or rejected, in Lorde’s invocation of her body’s “battle” (198). Becoming Human ends at the level of the human’s infinitesimal encoding, with the Coda’s dissection of the epigenetic discourses that are replacing genetic determinism yet that, in Jackson’s view, merely reform “the necropolitical” into a new grammar (199).

Naming no direct tactics for combatting antiblackness, nor offering reprieve from it, Jackson’s work is resolute in its attention to the complex and protean mechanisms that reproduce antiblackness, and to the myriad and subtle forms it takes. For this reason, Becoming Human is an exacting read that rewards close engagement, its insights gaining depth and refinement in the space between Jackson’s opening argument and its inflections in each chapter. As Jackson writes, “[u]ltimately, (anti)blackness appears to be a matrix: a mold, a womb, a binding substance, a network of intersections, functioning as an encoder or decoder” (69). Such an encompassing and adaptive ontology is the basis for pessimism, as indeed the black studies scholarship with which Jackson’s work dialogues lays bare. And yet, Jackson’s perceptive exposure of the historical and philosophical levers of antiblackness is critically galvanizing. Embarking on new inquiries through humanism’s sedimented layers, Becoming Human offers a compass that, if not straightforward, guides by what it destabilizes.