To think the concept of the "animal" is to move beyond its zoological meaning. It entails considering the political and ontological potency that emerges when the animal is situated at the intersection of anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and carcerality. I have found in the work of Machado de Assis a compelling and critical framework for interpreting the condition of the animal within human society. Taking the fiction of this nineteenth-century Brazilian author as a diagnostic lens, the term refers to the operation through which power renders certain lives disposable by positioning them outside the category of the "human." Anthropocentrism and anti-Blackness are co-constitutive: the human / animal and white / black binaries are mutually reinforcing technologies of domination that emerged together in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade.
In his celebrated essay, critic Roberto Schwarz identified Machado's diagnosis of the "ideas out of place" among the Brazilian elite of the late nineteenth century, who were at once slaveholders and fervent devotees of the French revolutionary ideals of fraternity, equality, and liberty.
Machado dramatizes this disjuncture in works such as A Causa Secreta / The Secret Heart (1885), Conto Alexandrino / The Alexandrian Tale (1883), Crônica dos Burros / Chronicle of the Donkeys (1892), Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas / The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) and Quincas Borba (1891), where a zoocritical reading reveals the cross-pollination of slavocratic and anthropocentric structures of power. The violence inflicted upon enslaved bodies and the violence inflicted upon animal bodies emerge as two expressions of the same logic of domination. "Ideas out of place" thus describes not only the dissonance between democracy and slavery but also the duplicitous logic intrinsic to animalization: the rhetorical mechanisms through which the social, political, and economic power of elites justifies violence as reason, care, or even liberation, emptying language of stable meaning.
Animalization is tied to the Enlightenment epistemology criticized by Michel Foucault, for whom the modern clinic and the discourse of scientific objectivity emerged alongside revolutionary ideals of social improvement. Here, "animal" names the epistemic field upon which both liberal humanism and its violence are constructed. According to Dinesh Wadiwel, Foucault recognized "animalization" as a political strategy for rationalizing violence against marginalized humans — those called mad, criminal, abnormal — but never extended his critique to the speciesism that makes such violence possible. Machado precociously diagnoses liberalism's amalgamation with violence — a violence that is inherently racialized and connected, in ways that are neither consistent nor chronological, to the creation of a category of animalized enemies. Central to this concept is the entanglement of animalization with criminalization and incarceration. The prison and the experimentation laboratory function as complementary carceral spaces; the reduction of criminals to a subhuman "animal" status has historically relied upon representations of racialized populations as vermin. The Nazi depiction of Jews as rats finds continuity in U.S. governmental and media rhetoric framing Muslims as a "plague," and, in the contemporary context, in the U.S. / Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran.
The interface of slave, prisoner, and animal in Machado's work speaks further to Frank Wilderson's identification of the Middle Passage as the world-making moment wherein the Human — white, male, non-animal and constituted by culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East — emerges in contradistinction to the Black slave. For Wilderson, the Black slave represents a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere: "The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage." In other words, “No slave, no world.”
Moreover, as Orlando Patterson argues, "No slave is in the world." This new ontological category of life, constituted by subjection to unlimited violence, intersects in complex and non-linear ways with the figure of the animal — an antagonism that, as Wadiwel observes, is grounded in the same liberal, Enlightenment epistemology whose complicity with slavery is a crucial facet of Machado’s critique.
Animalization, therefore, is never a metaphor superimposed upon race but part of the same ontological machinery described by Wilderson, one in which animality intersects with slavery, incarceration, and, in the extension proposed here to Palestine, genocide.
Reflecting on the U.S.-Israeli devastation of Gaza, I find a critical resonance in Frantz Fanon's description of the "zoological terms" of colonialism. One example is the statement by Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian regarding Israel's intention to render Gaza uninhabitable: "Human animals must be treated as such." Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reinforced this logic by declaring that "We are fighting human animals." Thomas Friedman likewise joined in in a New York Times column wherein he likened Arabs and Iranians to wasps, caterpillars, and spiders. The entanglement of race, species, and criminality is underscored by the transformation of Gaza from what has long been termed the world’s largest open-air prison into what Jeremy Scahill calls an “ever-shrinking killing cage.”
Further, along with "pinkwashing" and "queerwashing," part of Israel’s hasbara (public relations campaign) is “veganwashing.” Following Hiroshi Yasui's revision of Gayatri Spivak (via Wadiwel), Israeli animal-rights discourse reformulates the colonial rescue narrative — "white humans save white animals from brown humans" — into "white humans save white animals from brown animals (so-called terrorists)," replacing animals’ suffering with animals’ innocence and contrasting it with Palestinian guilt.
Anticolonialism as an anti-anthropocentric project could not be more evident, for nonwhiteness and animality are always intrinsically intertwined. As Syl Ko observes, “By human, everybody just means white.” It is in this sense that "animal" also names a site of potential solidarity rather than subjugation. Anticolonial and multispecies resistance in Palestine —exemplified by organizations such as the Palestinian Animal League, the Animal and Environment Association, and Sulala Animal Society — approach nonhuman animal liberation as a fundamental component of decolonization, rejecting the violent carceral logic that binds together the oppression of humans and animals.
Alexandra Aryana Isfahani-Hammond