Wild Thing: reprint of my essay "Violences in Language"

For theory nerds, horror film fans, and activists curious about how anti-racist work intersects with animal liberation, this essay is for you. Originally published by VIDA Review in 2018.

From Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

For this month’s dig into my animal archives, I’m sharing an essay I wrote originally as an academic paper for graduate school in 2017, but then later presented the paper at Temple University’s Language, Linguistics, and Life Conference: “Language and Community” in April 2018.

Originally, the paper began as a pitch called “Perceptions of Consumption: anthropocentrism, othering, and sensuality.” I even found my original abstract when the essay was in a very nascent phase (told you this was for the theory nerds).

I also uncovered the original cat photo (of course) that I used to deliver my presentation.

As any maker knows, sometimes the seeds of ideas you plant take a shape you can’t expect, and sometimes they introduce ideas, concepts, or creations that will follow you for your entire creative life. This essay holds many of my dearest wishes, and I hope you enjoy reading them in full…

Recalling the days after Bush’s re-election, Toni Morrison wrote an article for The Nation outlining the strategies malicious forces use to take control of the collective imagination. They start with language, with using language to subjugate: “the first step of a despot whose instinctive acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil; they are also perceptive…their plan is simple: 1. Select a useful enemy—an ‘Other’—to convert rage into conflict, even war,” she writes. Isolating the self from “an Other” may be the primal first step in disassociation; the distinction between “us” and “them” where the death of connection begins. Examining the category of “an Other” as not just a place for violence, but as a locality for repair, Morrison complicates the us-them binary, suggesting that this relationship could be where we bridge the damage the despotic imagination does in separating us from others, and from ourselves.