Their Spirits You Can't Digest: Race, Ritual, and the Return of the Animal

Abstract

Their Spirits You Can’t Digest: Race, Ritual, and the Return of the Animal reconstructs a literary and environmental history of human-animal relationships in the rural US South to demonstrate how figurations of animality shape, and are shaped by, the material embodied experiences of violence that engender racial identities across species. The dissertation moves from the theological registers of the symbolic to the legal and material questions of land, agriculture, and (dis)possession. This interplay of agrarian practice, religious narrative, and legal discourse positions live animals as props and the southern landscape as the stage for both performing and disrupting rituals of race-making. These rituals, I argue, persist into the present in the form of festivals of animal slaughter held annually across the South, a practice I ethnographically document. Analyzing African American literature alongside agrarian legal archives and visual ethnography, Their Spirits You Can’t Digest contests the violence of Enlightenment humanism, guiding readers in encounters with southern animals that reveal unexpected alliances and emancipatory possibilities. As my dissertation recovers alternative models of being and recognition that persist in spite of and against these violences, it also recasts the South from its role as the nation’s internal and deviant other to fertile ground for cultivating critical ecologies of place-making and trans-species engagement. I turn to the Black South—its writers and everyday people—to track encounters with animals that upset rituals of race-making as they reimagine interspecies relations anew. Indeed, Their Spirits You Can’t Digest uncovers a long environmental history where African American relationships with animals—on plantations with dogs, in courtrooms with hogs, and at festivals with snakes—present not just a shared state of vulnerability and precarity but rather redefine what it means to be or have a self. As I show, Black southerners crafted regional identities and communities through a praxis that neither relied on animal abjection nor sought inclusion into the political category of the human. Through these more-than-human engagements, I demonstrate how southerners often refused the terms of humanization altogether, creating their own spectacles that recast animals from living symbols of oppression to partners of co-liberation.