Course Description
The word “anthropocentrism” had evolved for three centuries after “anthropology,” defined as the “study of man as an animal” in OED, appeared. When human beings cannot completely get rid of human-centered views, it is necessary for human beings to explore the boundaries between the human and animals. This independent study course starts with Hegel’s discussion of self-consciousness to ask: “what does it mean to be a human being?” Many philosophers, including Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, and Agamben, offer us ways as human beings to think about animals. In addition, theorists since the 80s such as Haraway and Hayles focus on how the fixed boundaries between humans and animals (or non-humans) function as the ultimate principle of the human-centered worldview. The human-animal relationship should not be a fixed routine distinction, but a map of complexity showing that there is no difference between “the human” and “animals.” In the history of African American literature, the boundaries between humans and animals are rather stable when we reexamine the rupture before and after the twentieth century. Contemporary black writers actually have never distinguished themselves from the early slave narrators who called or described themselves as animals (or commodities). Instead, they found that they were still animals who makes the human human. They know that they would never be human, but this reflexivity is a vital philosophical motivation for Contemporary black writers.