Other

Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press.

“With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume.” - Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of (Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century) “Sharon Patricia Holland’s an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland’s enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book.” - Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of (Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life) "Holland’s pointed questions and remarks, the sheer breadth of topics, and easy, conversational prose, provide for an enriching and quite fascinating literary analysis. . . . An Other provides new takes on well-known texts (e.g., Twelve Years a Slave and Toni Morrison’s Beloved), and an engaging and provocative introduction to lesser-known novels and social movement history that deserve a wider audience." - Maneesha Deckha (Hypatia) "Holland’s argument stands out for its attention to insurgency, ethical action, and justice in the intersections of Blackness, femaleness, Indigeneity, and animality. . . . Ultimately, Holland’s contribution to Black, feminist, animal, and posthuman studies offers an ethical reconsidering of human/animal being and possibilities of opening hum:animal relations." - Pamela B. June (American Literary History) "This book is speculative and academic at the same time. Therefore, it appeals to both general and scholarly audiences. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of Black studies and the environmental humanities, exploring such issues as just futures, racial and environmental justice, the more-than-human world and the relationship between humans and more-than-humans (in particular, animals). It is a complex read, but one that will make everyone rethink the relationship between humans and animals from an ethical perspective, reconsider Blackness, ponder the consequences of racial oppression and the ongoing environmental crisis, and fight for equality." - Tatiana Conrad (European Journal of American Studies)

• How to Read This Book  xiPrimer: What the Animal Said  xv1. Vocabularies : Possibility  12. Companionate : Species  513. Diversity : A Scarcity  904. Love : Livestock  1395. Horse : Flesh  1656. Sovereignty : A Mercy  222The Open : . . .  254Acknowledgments  257Abbreviations  261Notes  263Bibliography  303Index  317