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Association: Name: American Studies Association Annual Meeting URL: http://www.theasa.net
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p244646_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Chia, Christina. "Rereading the Slave Hunt: On the Trail of Dogs and Humans in Plantation Society" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Hyatt Regency, Albuquerque, New Mexico, <Not Available>. 2009-10-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p244646_index.html>

Chia, C. "Rereading the Slave Hunt: On the Trail of Dogs and Humans in Plantation Society" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Hyatt Regency, Albuquerque, New Mexico <Not Available>. 2009-10-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p244646_index.html

Publication Type: Invited Paper Abstract: With a ubiquity that has thus far escaped scholarly notice, dogs turn up again and again in the history of American slavery, from their well-documented use in slave patrols to the countless comparisons of slaves and dogs in writings about the “peculiar institution.” Informed by theoretical work on the “animal question” (e.g. Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, Jacques Derrida) along with African Americanist critiques of humanism (e.g. Saidiya Hartman), this paper comes out of a larger project that tracks the copresence of humans and dogs under slavery, in a social world where the “lives and deaths of differentially situated human beings and animals” are ensnared in what “unlivable knots” (Haraway) spun by racism and the systemic instrumentalization of non-human animals. I argue that recognizing dogs as a crucial part of the plantation social world can deepen our understanding of “humanity” under slavery, specifically how “humanity” is strategically, selectively deployed by whites to repress the enslaved (Hartman again), and how it is claimed and reimagined by the enslaved to create alternative possibilities of freedom. The archive of the larger project includes veterinary advice in agricultural publications, popular “Old Southwestern” hunting stories, post-bellum white plantation nostalgia literature, and other sources. This paper focuses specifically on representations of the slave hunt in slave narratives, particularly in Solomon Northup’s 1853 Twelve Years a Slave, a text set in the bayous of Louisiana and teeming with animal life (dogs, cattle, snakes, alligators). I begin by considering the instrumentalization of dogs in slavery’s regime of terror. The use of scent hounds and other dogs to track and capture fugitives simultaneously attacks the personhood of the enslaved (turning “men’s best friend” on humans, turning humans into quarry) and heightens their specifically human vulnerability (unlike prey animals who tree or burrow, human fugitives have no “natural” defenses). Yet I am also interested in instances in which such knots are, if not undone, at least loosened. Looking primarily to Northup again, I consider anecdotes of failed slave hunts that seem, mysteriously, to result from dogs “refusing” to track the scent of certain individuals, or from a fugitive’s managing to “charm” an otherwise fierce animals. An escaped slavewoman named Celeste tells Northup: “… Carey’s dogs won’t follow me. They have tried to set them on. There’s a secret between them and Celeste, and they won’t mind the devilish orders of the overseer…” (245). I read this articulation of dog-human communication, of a life-saving and slavery-defying interspecies “secret” as an instance of African American animal theorizing that unsettles Enlightenment humanist assumptions of species difference – held not only by Euro-American philosophers but also prominent African American intellectuals like Frederick Douglass - that divide “man” and “animal” along the putative chasms of language, reason, and moral action.

After Humanism: The Role of Humanism in Secular Liberal Societies

The Concept of Securitisation as a Tool for Analysing the Role of Human Rights-Related Civil Society in Ethno-Political Conflicts