A Change of Heart: Animality, Power, and Black Posthuman Enhancement in Malorie Blackman’s Pig-Heart Boy

Abstract

As cardiac xenotransplantation moves from labs into hospitals, this chapter asks what Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel Pig-Heart Boy reveals about power, race, and identity in relation to the experimental therapy. Common heart metaphors are analyzed to ask how the xenograft shapes the teenage protagonist’s developing selfhood, challenges species boundaries, and conceptualizes a move to the posthuman. While a greater appreciation of biological correspondences between creatures has the potential to challenge anthropocentrism, this can be disrupted by power imbalance, producing not empathy but the development of bioresources. Pig-Heart Boy’s protagonist is a Black British boy who understands that power is inherent to ethical debates about xenotransplantation, and he draws parallels between racism and speciesism. While the novel’s opportunities to fully critique shared power structures are not taken, this chapter suggests that this Black child’s agency in choosing to be the first to receive cutting-edge treatment reimagines histories of abusive experiments on Black bodies and positively speculates on a society without structural health inequities. Acknowledging the complexities in Black posthumanism, this chapter argues that Pig-Heart Boy shows the potential for Black enhancement within posthumanist futures.