Table Of ContentBecoming Human
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers- Letson
Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Titles in the series include:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious
Samuel R. Delany Violence
Michael Cobb
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the
Culture of Social Relations Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the
Phillip Brian Harper Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid- Pharr
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer
Latino America The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in
José A. Quiroga American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lázaro Lima
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair
and the National Interest Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. in Nineteenth- Century America
Duggan Dana Luciano
Black Gay Man: Essays Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of
Robert F. Reid- Pharr Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the
Afterlife of Colonialism Another Country: Queer Anti- Urbanism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz- Malavé and Scott Herring
Martin F. Manalansan IV
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power,
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, and Sexuality in the African American
Discursive Spaces Literary Imagination
Juana María Rodríguez Darieck Scott
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Limits of Religious Tolerance Karen Tongson
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Literature and Queer Reading
Latinization of American Culture Martin Joseph Ponce
Frances Negrón- Muntaner
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in Michael Cobb
the Jim Crow Era
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding
Marlon B. Ross
Performance in the Asias
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Eng- Beng Lim
Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender
J. Jack Halberstam
Articulations of the Law
Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays Isaac West
on Race and Sexuality
Dwight A. McBride
The Delectable Negro: Human A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain
Consumption and Homoeroticism within Christina Crosby
US Slave Culture The Life and Death of Latisha King: A
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia
Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Gayle Salamon
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and
Latina Longings Serious Parody
Juana María Rodríguez Melissa M. Wilcox
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of
Masochism Color Life
Amber Jamilla Musser Joshua Chambers- Letson
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Brown Jouissance
Ecologies Amber Jamilla Musser
Rachel C. Lee
Afro- Fabulations: The Queer Drama of
Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men Black Life
Jane Ward Tavia Nyong’o
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Queer Times, Black Futures
Feminist Art and Performance Kara Keeling
Uri McMillan
Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity in the Secular Love Tradition
and Cosmopolitan Desire Melissa E. Sanchez
Hiram Pérez
Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Queer Chicanx Avant- Garde
Katherine Franke Robb Hernández
The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the
and Pornography Black Diaspora
Ariane Cruz Keguro Macharia
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in
and Post- Humanist Critique an Antiblack World
Robert F. Reid- Pharr Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the For a complete list of books in the series,
Left: A History of the Impossible see www.nyupress.org.
Malik Gaines
Becoming Human
Matter and Meaning in
an Antiblack World
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
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© 2020 by New York University
All rights reserved
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changed since the manuscript was prepared.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-9004-0 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-3037-4 (paperback)
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For Derrick, my cosmic love
Contents
On Becoming Human: An Introduction 1
1. Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the
(Neo)Slave Narrative 45
2. Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in
Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring 83
3. “Not Our Own”: Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of
Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” 121
4. Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of
Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu
and Audre Lorde 159
Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower 199
Acknowledgments 215
Notes 219
Works Cited 265
Index 293
About the Author 303
Color insert appears after page 118
