In declaring independence, the people of Haiti were the first to test the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen produced by the French Revolution in 1789. The main focus is on Anglo-American cultures with an illuminating triangulation point, looking at the Saint-Domingue slave riots in August 1791, which Frederick Douglass identified as evidence in the anti-slavery debate. The principal examples used here are cats, dogs and apes. 12), the book is structured around activities ordinarily associated with the human: speaking, feeling, recognising, seeing, eating and creating. Following Derrida in ‘deconstructing the human’ (p. Bourke proposes the Mobius strip as a means of conceptualising the fluid definitions of human/animal in order to ‘move beyond comparison based on similarities and dissimilarities and inject instability and indeterminacy into our discussions’ (p. References are made from the outset to Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida and Catharine MacKinnon. Here she takes the reader through some familiar terrain (Descartes, Bentham, Wollstonecraft) but selects some unexpected reference points to expand the field of study and set in motion other possible lines of enquiry.īourke reassesses ideas about the human, noting that the distinctions between the human and the animal tend to be both volatile and violent.
In juxtaposing often unexpected but illuminating examples, new questions emerge. Typical of Bourke's approach, previously seen in her books on Rape, Fear and Dismembering the Male, this book covers an impressive range of material, situating it in a broad cultural historical framework. The Earnest Englishwoman audaciously argued for women to be treated at least as favourably as animals.
Bourke takes as her starting point an argument for women's rights expressed in a letter from ‘An Earnest Englishwoman’ (1872) using a comparison between the treatment of animals and women. The three graces in Rubens’ painting appear in a collage: women above the waist and animal below. The book cover image harks back to the seventeenth century, foregrounding the human (specifically female)-animal categories. ‘What it means to be human’ is becoming increasingly uncertain in ways unimaginable at the beginning of the twentieth century. 16) and how definitions of the human have tended to deploy the language of rights in distinguishing the human from the animal. This book is concerned particularly with ‘the unknowability of all animals’ (p. In the face of rapid technological change, human identity is becoming increasingly uncertain. Joanna Bourke's new book engages with one of the most urgent questions facing contemporary culture.
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