The careful and artistic construction of the text makes it obvious that alongside his academic work, Bennett is also a poet by trade. At 189 pages excluding notes and acknowledgements, it is relatively short, and Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.
The book is framed through an interdisciplinary approach which embraces black studies, affect theory, ecocriticism and animality studies. Joshua Bennett’s debut book of literary criticism, Being Property Once Myself, is a gripping work which examines works of black authors from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. īeing Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man.
Carefully constructed with a lyrical lilt to its sharp analyses, this book is an important contribution to the emerging space in which black literary studies, animality studies and ecocriticism converge, writes Lydia Ayame Hiraide. In Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, Joshua Bennett explores how African American writers have forged a tradition that works through the figure of the non-human animal in order to assert and enact radical challenges to oppressive structures, contesting the violence of anthropocentrism and antiblackness and providing tools for conceiving of interspecies relationships anew.
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