인종과 동물 2: 전용의 정치학과 탈전용의 윤리학

Race and Animal 2: The Politics of Appropriation and the Ethics of Post-Appropriation

The topic of race and animal is among few issues that go unexplored, because the two are too sensitive to bring together on the same discursive space, even though one is so easily linked with the other on the daily basis in America. Recently, animal studies reach a consensus on the need for a zoē-based bioegalitarian turn. As the Ferguson unrest and Childish Gambino music video indicate, race returns in the so-called post-racial era. Under the critical rubric of race and animal, my discussion starts from a question of why the baboons do not appear as named characters in the movie Planet of the Apes, both its original series and its reboot trilogy. And I explain why this question matters by comparing how humans have appropriated animals with how white people have appropriated black people and their images in the antebellum America and now. To break the vicious circle of the morphological normativity which affects our sense of race and animals, I offer a way of post-appropriation. By post-appropriation, I mean any efforts to liberate ourselves from the view that refers to otherness within ourselves as otherness itself. For this purpose, I argue that the post-appropriation should go hand in hand with anti-anthropocentrism and post-Eurocentrism.