Care and control: Black Philadelphians and the animal city after World War II
Date
2024
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation examines how Black Philadelphians and companion animals occupied, traversed, and shared the city in the decades following the Second World War. Using Philadelphia as a case study, “Care and Control” locates a dearth of narratives in the intersecting histories of Black American life and histories of pet keeping that privilege how animals have improved and enriched Black lives. Although the prevailing scholarship importantly addresses the ways in which concepts of “human” and “animal,” racial discrimination, and killability have impacted Black lives—casting Black Americans as either victims or perpetrators of animal violence—this is not the only story. Likewise, histories of pet keeping tend to focus on white Europeans and Americans, with people of color appearing as an afterthought, if at all. This study builds on and diverges from these histories by starting from the perspectives of Black subjects who have woven companion animals into their lives. ☐ “Care and Control” identifies and examines pet practices and animal management in Black life within an urban context. After detailing how the logics of the city impacted animals (coded out of the city or managed within its limits) and Black Philadelphians (subject to carcerality, surveillance, and limited mobility via redlining), each following chapter organizes around Black subjects who contributed to specific nodes of animal care, control, and circulation in the city. I begin with Black Philadelphians’ bonds with their pets, around which the city’s animal-related services and businesses organized themselves. These pet owners claimed time and space for their animal companions, from impoverished neighborhoods, to parks situated among the city’s most affluent, to pet shops. Following, I highlight the work of Pennsylvania’s first generation of practicing Black veterinarians. In spite of racist threats and structural inequalities, Tuskegee-trained Doctors Cousins, Hodges, and Walls changed the city’s animal and racial geographies, using their status to serve their local communities. The next chapter details the roles Black Philadelphians took in guarding against the encroachment of unruly and disease-carrying animals in the city. Traversing the city in their animal ambulances, wielding police authority, and caring for creatures in their kennels, the city’s “animal control men” managed Philadelphia’s nonhuman leftovers, while negotiating the careful social balance between the police, office workers, veterinarians, and the community. Finally, I close in the 1970s–80s with MOVE, a Black-majority and Black-led revolutionary group that counted animals among their brothers and sisters. Allowing their animals to roam freely and refusing to kill “pests” like rats and cockroaches, MOVE reversed decades of work that went into creating the modern, controlled animal city. While past histories have noted the group’s animal liberation praxis, none has contextualized their work within the carceral logics of the animal city. ☐ Building on past scholarship of race, pet keeping, and posthumanism, this dissertation challenges past narratives of Black people’s interactions with animals, which so often fall into the weathered stereotypes of victim or perpetrator. In this layering of Black, urban, and animal histories, I identify the ways that the transformative experience of urbanism in the latter half of the twentieth century changed the lives of Philadelphia’s multi-species population. As Black Americans agitated for a more equal form of citizenship, they brought animals along with them—as companions, patients, charges in their care, and fellow beings in the cause of collective liberation.
Description
Keywords
Animal shelters, Animal studies, Philadelphia, Urban History, Veterinarians