A Black Feminist Reconsideration of Animal Life
A Black Feminist Reconsideration of Animal Life
What would a Black feminist approach to animal studies look like?
What are the vocabularies that already circulate to make the difference between hum:animal? How might a Black feminist inquiry put pressure on this fundamental difference? And, if it did or does, what beings would then be taken as its object.
This talk explores some of the stakes of my decade’s long research in animal studies. Using histories of hum:animal relation with and through blackness, I attempt to unmake the distinction (hum/animal) and in the process, unfetter our discussions of certain forms of (female) insurgency along the way.
Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association (2022-2025) and the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. She is a graduate of Princeton University (1986) and holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992). Professor Holland’s third monograph, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, is an investigation of the hum/animal distinction, hum:animal relation, and the place of discourse on blackness within those theoretical discussions.
Professor Holland is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2002 and The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory. She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, Harvard) entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Holland is also responsible for bringing a feminist classic, The Queen is in the Garbage by Lila Karp to the attention of The Feminist Press for publication (2007).
Professor Holland is the past convener and co-founder of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective (fall 2019-spring 2021) and she is the co-founder of the QTIPOC Survival Fund (2020-23), a partnership with community organizers to redistribute wealth and foster self-determination among our most vulnerable members of the community. She is also the founder of QTIPOC Forever Home (2022), a land-based project to produce sustainable, self-determining community for QTIPOC elders, organizers, and activists which houses “The Cauldron,” a food justice project dedicated to moving the work of QTIPOC chefs, cooks and culinary artists into the communities that need them.
You can see her work on food, writing and all things equestrian on her blog, The Professor's Table. Professor Holland’s next book project, Those Who Eat comes out of her decades-long work in Food Studies and is a meditation on the work of famed food writer, MFK Fisher (1908-1992). To keep up with her recent projects, request a CV and more, you can visit her website at www.sharonpholland.com.
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This talk is part of 2024 WGSS Speaker Series, which celebrates the breadth of the interdisciplinary field of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies through book talks with experts from across the country.
What would a Black feminist approach to animal studies look like?
What are the vocabularies that already circulate to make the difference between hum:animal? How might a Black feminist inquiry put pressure on this fundamental difference? And, if it did or does, what beings would then be taken as its object.
This talk explores some of the stakes of my decade’s long research in animal studies. Using histories of hum:animal relation with and through blackness, I attempt to unmake the distinction (hum/animal) and in the process, unfetter our discussions of certain forms of (female) insurgency along the way.
Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association (2022-2025) and the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. She is a graduate of Princeton University (1986) and holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992). Professor Holland’s third monograph, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, is an investigation of the hum/animal distinction, hum:animal relation, and the place of discourse on blackness within those theoretical discussions.
Professor Holland is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2002 and The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory. She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, Harvard) entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Holland is also responsible for bringing a feminist classic, The Queen is in the Garbage by Lila Karp to the attention of The Feminist Press for publication (2007).
Professor Holland is the past convener and co-founder of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective (fall 2019-spring 2021) and she is the co-founder of the QTIPOC Survival Fund (2020-23), a partnership with community organizers to redistribute wealth and foster self-determination among our most vulnerable members of the community. She is also the founder of QTIPOC Forever Home (2022), a land-based project to produce sustainable, self-determining community for QTIPOC elders, organizers, and activists which houses “The Cauldron,” a food justice project dedicated to moving the work of QTIPOC chefs, cooks and culinary artists into the communities that need them.
You can see her work on food, writing and all things equestrian on her blog, The Professor's Table. Professor Holland’s next book project, Those Who Eat comes out of her decades-long work in Food Studies and is a meditation on the work of famed food writer, MFK Fisher (1908-1992). To keep up with her recent projects, request a CV and more, you can visit her website at www.sharonpholland.com.
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This talk is part of 2024 WGSS Speaker Series, which celebrates the breadth of the interdisciplinary field of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies through book talks with experts from across the country.
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