Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism

Abstract

As nineteenth-century scientific theories of racism sought to justify slavery and oppression by dehumanizing black people, popular abolitionist arguments often emphasized the humanity of enslaved black people by likening them to free white people, most popularly in the figure of the mixed-race hero(ine). Other abolitionist arguments, however, employed animals as points of familiar reference, in cross-species comparisons that did not simply repeat racist ideologies but solicited interracial sympathy. This essay reads abolitionist children’s literature that deployed a strategy of “animal humanism,” using domesticated animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people. Focusing on the parallel rhetorics of species and race in children’s literature, the essay centers its discussion on the abolitionist revision of Maria Susanna Cummins’s novel The Lamplighter (1854) in The Lamplighter Picture Book (1855), other abolitionist literature for children, and political cartoons in which species and racial difference figure. As pets are construed as both domesticated and domestic in these texts, the possibility of cross-species kinship presents a more proximate familiar relation than cross-racial kinship. Attention to these uses of domesticated animals reveals the limitations of sympathy that is more easily mediated through species rather than race. However, readings of the animal as not only familiar but familial open new possibilities for an abolitionist sympathy that has antiracist potential in its ability to be mediated through acknowledged positions of difference rather than a dependence on sameness.

Antebellum Posthuman

“…95 Along related lines, Brigitte Fielder demonstrates how frequently abolitionist texts deploy "domesticated animals to mediate their readers' sympathy for enslaved people," a substitution that allows them to frame an "alternative model of sympathy that deprioritizes notions of sameness, acknowledging that even humanist sympathy can function across relations of alterity." 96 Like Boggs and Fielder, I find that Douglass's animals respond to the prob lem that racial (or, as polygenism codifies it, speciological) difference seems to pose to interracial sympathy and recognition. But if, like Boggs, I find that Douglass's defiant animals draw our attention to the shared vulnerability of all embodied beings, unlike Boggs I am particularly interested in how Douglass invokes that vulnerability not in order to engender a sympathetic connection across speciological differences but to convey a timely reminder of the vio lence that suffering unleashes, lighting up the precariousness of proximity and the necessity of mutual accommodation with or without intersubjective sympathy or recognition.…”

“…In contrast to war's "bluntly truncated" temporal timeframe, the enlarged horizon of passive re sis tance allows us to discern the operation of far more subtle methods and pro cesses of po liti cal change. 96 From this perspective, Dimock suggests, Brown's posthumous agency now becomes vis i ble in the legacy he has "given over to the care of others . .…”

The Politics of Equivalence

“…Much of this project took shape through educational eff orts that, from the very beginning, were viewed to be as important as the free veterinary care that animal groups provided. Early American animal welfarists in fact sometimes referred to themselves as 'animal humanitarians' and, drawing on tenets of Protestant care and abolitionist values (Fielder 2013), viewed their work as promoting a 'gospel of kindness' towards all living creatures (Davis 2016: 19). But the tenor of animal humanitarianism also mimicked that of imperialism: animal welfare advocates working overseas 'oft en tacitly embraced notions of the white man's burden as part of their call to educate and enlighten their brethren of color abroad' (Davis 2016: 118).…”

Becoming ‘pet slaves’ in urban China: Transspecies urban theory, single professional women and their companion animals

“…In contrast, harried workers mock themselves as their ‘company’s cattle’ ( shechu ). This animalisation of socio-economically marginalised people and its accompanying humanisation of certain valued animals form key themes in critical animal studies (Barua, 2020; Fielder, 2013).…”