Dangerous Crossings
Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age

Dangerous Crossings interprets disputes in the United States over the use of animals in the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples.

Claire Jean Kim (Author)

9781107622937, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 April 2015

356 pages, 12 b/w illus. 4 maps 3 tables
23.5 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'In this brilliant, original, and infinitely generative book, Claire Jean Kim shows how patterns of thought rounded in the human/animal binary shape ideas, assumptions, and attitudes about race. We will not be able to live better together unless we learn to think better together, and, fortunately, the fascinating case studies and sustained and sophisticated arguments in Dangerous Crossings teach us how this can be done.' George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of How Racism Takes Place

Dangerous Crossings offers an interpretation of the impassioned disputes that have arisen in the contemporary United States over the use of animals in the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples. It examines three controversies: the battle over the 'cruelty' of the live animal markets in San Francisco's Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over the Makah tribe's decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Claire Jean Kim shows that each dispute demonstrates how race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power. Analyzing each case as a conflict between single optics (the optic of cruelty and environmental harm vs the optic of racism and cultural imperialism), she argues for a multi-optic approach that takes different forms of domination seriously, and thus encourages an ethics of avowal among different struggles.

Part I. Taxonomies of Power: 1. Impassioned disputes
2. Animals, nature, and the races of man
Part II. The Battle over Live Animal Markets in San Francisco's Chinatown: 3. The optic of cruelty: challenging the markets
4. The optic of racism: mobilizing the Chinese community
5. The optic of ecological harm: protecting 'nature' in a neoliberal age
6. Vision/critique/avowal
Part III. Other Disputes: 7. Makah whaling and the (non)ecological Indian
8. Michael Vick, dogfighting, and the parable of black recalcitrance
Part IV. Conclusion: 9. We are all animals/we are not animals.

Subject Areas: Sociology [JHB], Sociology & anthropology [JH]