The Biopolitics of Species and Race in the Post-Civil War United States

Abstract

Human relationships with animals typically fall under the purview of scientists, ethicists, lawyers, and philosophers. The narrative has a relatively consistent historiography that involves tracking direct human contact with or advocacy for animals in various ways. What that narrative often ignores is the American historical and cultural context that emphasizes less idealistic questions and more pragmatic incidents of how humans in the United States have the notion of human superiority and speciesism reinforced for them, reinforcements that appear in economics, semiotics, literature, language, and news. Those incidents often interact with the other dominant form of American dispossession, that of racial bigotry, in surprising ways. “The Biopolitics of Species and Race in the Post-Civil War United States” tracks the assumption of human supremacy in the development of United States culture from the post-Reconstruction period to the present, emphasizing in particular its intersection with and reinforcement by white supremacy. It argues that both supremacy assumptions are unfounded and survive through a series of interactions and cultural constructions designed to validate, on one hand, anything human, and, on the other, anything white, always to the detriment of those who do not fit such categorizations. It describes such relationships in terms of biopower, the Foucauldian term describing an effort to control and order populations in decidedly human forms for decidedly human ends. The biopolitics that results from such orderings uses biological frameworks to keep certain groups of humans, the ones doing the ordering, in power, while a variety of dispossessed human groups face subjugation. Those human groups, then, are placed above nonhuman animals in a descending order of concern. As Cary Wolfe has explained, “you can’t talk about biopolitics without talking about race, and you can’t talk about race without talking about species, simply because both categories—as history well shows—are so notoriously pliable and unstable, constantly bleeding into and out of each other.” This thesis is an analysis of that bleeding.