Filling Up the Space between Mankind and Ape: Racism, Speciesism and the Androphilic Ape

Abstract

I believe it will be very diffi cult, or rather, impossible, for a man, who is accustomed to divide things according to specifi c marks, not individual diff erences, to draw the line betwixt the Orang Outang and the dumb persons among us.(Monboddo I, 297) As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal off ers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.(Derrida 381) Race and culture have been analyzed and critiqued as "highly im proper" fi ctions and metaphors during the past few decades of critical race theory and postcolonial theory (Young 53-54, Hall 443).In this article I want to turn to the production of two other contested notions, the "human" and the "animal," with a focus on their various signifi cations during the eras of slavery and Abolition.ese terms predate the category of race as it is now used in critical race theory; indeed, they lay the ground for the deployment of race as concept and construct during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Numerous natural histories of the period are concerned with the taxonomization of human and animal, either in order to produce clear distinctions between these two contested categories, or to blur those distinctions.My discussion will centre on selected key works of the period, including Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buff on's voluminous Natural History, published between 1748 and 1804, and Edward Long's now notorious History of Jamaica, published in 1774.I want to focus on these two texts because of their enduring

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.