You have never read anything like Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: a
Guide to Getting Out, which draws on history, critical race theory and
pop culture to make compelling arguments about the impact of white supremacy
both on race and our treatment of animals, especially given the dehumanizing
nature of racism. Partially informed by Jordan Peele's Get Out, but drawing
on a wide variety of research, Aph Ko helps us envision a world beyond our
limited notions of 'intersectionality' to chart a course for a more humane
future.
- Tananarive Due, UCLA (The Sunken Place class), American Book Award winner
Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: a Guide to Getting Out is a
sophisticated throwdown about how we can re-think anti-racist and animal
rights activism(s) in a modality more nearly adequate to our profound
entanglement in white supremacy’s comprehensive and hydra-headed
monstrosity. Liquefying arcane academic theory in popular culture fluidity,
Aph Ko offers a voice at once critical, generous, and polysemous. Her
Afro-futurism relentlessly tracks the racialized animality of white
cannibalism that eludes “sighting” in discrete discourses and intersectional
advocacies. The multi-dimensional liberation she conjures demands a
political hearing from anyone laboring for a different future.
- James W. Perkinson, Professor of Social Ethics and Theology, Ecumenical
Theological Seminary
Aph Ko’s Racism as Zoological Witchcraft is a fascinating,
groundbreaking, thoughtful work that shows nuanced relationships between
systems that historically dehumanize people of color and the consumption of
animals as food. This transformative framework is as disturbing as it is
enlightening. Aph Ko steadfastly demonstrates that veganism can be more than
a matter of health and lifestyle - that plant based diets can be a radical
practice in valuing the aligned rights of all living beings on Earth as well
as a practice in dismantling systems on our planet that devalue humanity.
- Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi &
Fantasy Culture
Aph Ko’s Racism as Zoological Witchcraft is an exciting hands-on
theoretical guide to white supremacy’s grounding in “zoological racism,” a
violent devouring of the bodies, souls, and lives of all it deems “animal,”
both nonhuman and human. This “guide to getting out” also illustrates the
dangers of supposedly liberatory movements that do not recognize “the
animal” as the source of violence against animals as well as black people,
ultimately providing its readers with the intellectual tools to imagine and
enact “afro-zoological resistance” and liberation for all—what could be more
important or inspiring?!?
- Lindgren Johnson, author of Race Matters, Animal Matters: Fugitive
Humanism in African America, 1840-1930
“Aph Ko's brilliant analysis on zoological racism and movement politics is
transformative, challenging everything readers think they understand about
racism. By framing white supremacy as a zoological witchcraft practice, she
cuts across genres and offers something completely new, linking race and
animals in a powerful book that is sure to wake readers up.”
- lauren Ornelas, Executive Director, Food Empowerment Project
In Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: a Guide to Getting Out, Aph Ko
has written an accessible argument rooted in theory that is imminently
readable and will have broad appeal. In her argument for what she calls
“epistemic ruptures,” Ko has created a compelling treatise against making
current activist movements merge, arguing instead that our conception of
“the animal,” as a label for consumable and disposable bodies, is tied to
the legacy of racism that operates by virtue of zoological, white
supremacist witchcraft. Using examples from popular culture – including
Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out – Ko examines the tension that exists
between contemporary anti-racism and animal rights movements and argues for
an examination of “raw” oppressions that can move the conversation beyond
modern day liberation movements in ways that intersectionality has been
unable to achieve.
- Laura Wright, author of The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and
Gender in the Age of Terror
Aph Ko’s work is at the center of a conceptual Big Bang. Theorizing beyond
increasingly stale notions like diversity, speciesism, and
intersectionality, she takes us back to the “raw oppression” itself. She
guides our hands towards the one weapon that has characterized every true
movement against oppression: recognizing the incomplete nature of our
current justice movements. The scholarship is as rigorous as it is
accessible and refreshingly inspiring. Her insights not only challenge all
of us concerned with racial and animal oppression to imagine new pathways
forward, but to recognize that much of Black thought from Frederick Douglas
to Angela Davis already had gone beyond a vision of racial justice or human
dignity to open toward a vision of freedom for all life.
- Aaron S. Gross, Associate Professor, University of San Diego and the
founder of Farm Forward
Aph Ko is a writer and independent digital media producer. She is the founder of Black Vegans Rock and coauthor of Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Aph also served as the Associate Producer for the documentary Always in Season, which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury award for Moral Urgency at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019.
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