When I was a doctoral student in historical musicology, I went to Paris to study postwar government budgets for music, but it was really boring. So I started hanging out listening to Parisian songbirds instead. The more I learned about birdsong, the more I realized it raised some really big questions, like why biologists and musicians have completely different standards of evidence. Those questions led me to write my book, which is about what it means to sing if you’re not considered fully human, and most of my work today is about how thinking about animals can help us understand what we value in those who are different.
I wrote
Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening
For me, this was the book that changed everything!
Haraway does an amazing job of showing how the private lives and experiences of primate specialists were an important part of science. There’s even a chapter that shows how one of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History has a taxidermy gorilla whose painted landscape depicts the gravesite of the guy who shot him (you still see it in person today if you are in New York City). This and other stories in the book transformed my thinking about the lines separating “animals” from other Others.
Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.
Butler is known for bringing a black, feminist, and queer perspective to science fiction, a genre of futuristic and outer-space storytelling that traditionally features white male protagonists.
But what really captivates me about this book, which is set in a post-apocalyptic future where human survivors are mated with their alien rescuers (really!), is the way it asks icky-yet-intensely-meaningful questions. What does it mean to “be human” in a future of genetic hybridity and gender fluidity? What does it mean to love a partner or children whose genetics and culture are radically different from your own? When is violence futile, and when is it the only way to be heard?
I’m pretty much obsessed with this book, and I promise that any reader who has thought deeply about what it means to be really different will love it too.
C’mon, doesn’t everybody need a book by a guy who explains that the Black-Billed Cuckoo is finally, finally a bird “who appreciates measured silence such as that which characterizes the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”?
This amazing, idiosyncratic, and beautiful book from 1904 has got pages of gorgeous colored illustrations of birds, musical scores that are a weird hybrid of actual birdsong and random additions the author thinks will “make clear” a bird’s connections to human music, and heartfelt statements like the one above extolling the musical abilities of various American birds.
True, this is not the book to address issues of gender, race, and power in the sensitive and thoughtful ways that Butler and Haraway do. But you won’t care, because you will be having so much fun reading about the Hermit Thrush’s deep connection to the Moonlight Sonata.
In this beautifully written and well-illustrated guide to birds' songs from 1904, Mathews describes 127 bird species, mostly of Eastern United States, and their songs. This fieldbook contains descriptions of the physical characteristics and habits of each, as well as detailed comments on their songs and calls. He includes musical scores of at least two songs for each species.
This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s got a lot of academic jargon, and it can be tough reading.
But it’s well worth the work, because it is also one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen, anywhere, of how and why widely accepted categories like “human” and “animal” come from a bigger story influenced by slavery and its aftermath. Jackson’s book also has lovely and subtle case studies that will introduce you to writers and artists you won’t forget, like the incredible paintings of Wangechi Mutu or the sensitive creativity of writer Nalo Hopkinson.
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association
Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association
Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies
Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human
Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia…
A friend gave me this when I was almost done writing my book.
I couldn’t figure out how to justify footnoting a science fiction novel written from the point of view of a one-thousand-year-old spaceship in my own book, which was mostly about theories of musical evolution, but I still wish I had. The spaceship-protagonist can’t tell genders apart and refers to every single character as “she,” and it loves (I mean loves) to sing.
The book tackles surprisingly relevant questions about the way power, gender, and difference circulate through a post-colonial society. It’s completely different from the kind of work I do as an academic, but I think it has something just as important to say about music, human identity, and modern science.
Once, she was the Justice of Toren -- a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
When you hear a bird sing, do you hear a voice or a sound? Music has long defined beliefs about who counts as “fully human,” serving as evidence of intelligence, soul, and humanity. Animal Musicalities traces forgotten ties between music, racial science, and claims to human identity from the late 1800s to the early 2000s. The book shows how unresolved histories of racial discrimination inform the postwar, postmodern constitution of nature.
Music sits at the center of this story about science, nature, and culture, challenging some of our most basic assumptions about the scope of inquiry we so tellingly term “the humanities.” In this history, the lines between song and sound have implications not just for scholars, but for all of us.
Plus, Carole's
10, and 12-year-old's favorite books.
What is my book about?
This is a multicultural epic fantasy with a diverse cast of characters. Sickly fifteen-year-old Prince Psal, the son of warrior-king Nahas, should have been named Crown Prince of all Wheel Clan lands. But his clan disdains the disabled.
When the mysterious self-moving towers that keep humans safe from the Creator's ancient curse rebel, Psal attempts to find the Constant Tower and break the power of the third moon. Psal must risk losing the little respect his father has for him and face the dangers of the unmaking night to find the Constant Tower and save all of humanity.
Sickly fifteen year old Prince Psal, the son of the nature-blessed warrior-king Nahas, should have been named Crown Prince of all Wheel Clan lands. A priest-physician like his friend Ephan, Psal lacks a warrior's heart, yet he desires to earn Nahas's respect and become a clan chief. If he cannot do this, he must escape his clan altogether. But his love for Cassia, the daughter of his father's enemy, and his own weaknesses work against him. When war comes, Psal defends Ktwala and her daughter Mahari, wronged by Nahas, and speaks out against the atrocities his clan commits, further jeopardizing…
