Introduction: A Dialogue

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue of American Quarterly , “Species/Race/Sex,” Claire Jean Kim and Carla Freccero hold a conversation based on a set of questions about the fields they work in and the interdisciplinary and political challenges to thinking intersectionally about species, race, and sex. They discuss their field formations; the need for interdisciplinary approaches to address the full complexity of categories of identity, being, and belonging; and the challenges and resistances that arise when working across these divides. They also talk about what motivates them to do this work, what work they hope to see in the future, and the diversity and range of the essays included in the volume, which they introduce by briefly describing each. The collection begins with a work of fiction and is divided into sections: “History and Empire,” “Intersections,” and “Becoming,” followed by “Afterword: Moving Ahead.”

Actually existing intersectionality: The place-based and embodied politics of animal and human rights activism

“…It is important then, that in earlier reflections on intersectional justice, Kim wonders ‘how to make the leap from explicating co-constitution on the pages of an academic journal to challenging actually existing forms of domination in the real world?’ (Kim and Freccero, 2013: 471) Invoking a boundary between ideas and the real world, Kim opens the door to political change as an uncertain event, without time or place. However, more intriguing for us is the conceptual prompt towards ‘actually existing’ geographies.…”

In/On the Bones: species meanings and the racialising discourse of animality in the Homo naledi controversy

“…The question of race had not always received the attention that was warranted within these critical formations. Kim and Freccero (2013) and Jackson (2013Jackson ( & 2015 delineate the causes and effects of this oversight. Scholars including, but not limited to, Boisseron (2018), Chen (2012), Kim (2010Kim ( , 2015Kim ( , 2016 and Lundblad (2013) are redefining these fields, and the terms within which they should relate to one another, with scholarship that puts race at the heart of matters.…”

“…This is not to say that different humans do not have genetic profiles that are even more humans have produced classificatory systems that have 'read momentous political and moral meaning into these differences' by putting 'humans and chimpanzees into discontinuous, unequal categories of beings' (Kim 2015:16). To put it differently, the taxonomical separation of the "human", particularly the "white human", from the "nonhuman", or "animal", is a naturalised product of a complex western history through which species differences have been racialised and race has been animalised (See Haraway 1991;Haraway & Wolfe 2016;Wolfe 2010;Chen 2012;Jackson 2013;Deckha 2012, Kim 2010Kim & Freccero 2013;Lundblad 2013;de Robillard & Lipschitz 2017). Race, as Kim notes, 'has been articulated in part as a metric of animality, as a classification system that orders human bodies according to how animal they are -and how human they are not with all the entailments that follow (Kim 2015:18, emphasis in original).…”

“…does not extend to everyone; the 'we' in this frame is persistently exclusionary (Haraway 1991;Kim 2013Kim , 2015Kim , 2016Deckha 2012Deckha , 2013Wolfe 2010;Mbembe 2017). It is well-known that there are humans who have been made to fall below 'the baseline'…”

Does meat come from animals? A multispecies approach to classification and belonging in highland Guatemala

“…Recent years have seen a proliferation of articles on species within the humanities and social sciences. For introductions to just a few of the many special journal issues that have emerged on this topic, see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, Fernández Bravo et al 2013, and Kim and Freccero 2013 3. See also Garciá 2005 for a nuanced elaboration of multiculturalism elsewhere in Latin America.…”