Dangerous Crossings
Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age

Dangerous Crossings offers an interpretation of the impassioned disputes that have arisen in the contemporary United States over the use of animals in the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples. It examines three controversies: the battle over the 'cruelty' of the live animal markets in San Francisco's Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over the Makah tribe's decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Claire Jean Kim shows that each dispute demonstrates how race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power. Analyzing each case as a conflict between single optics (the optic of cruelty and environmental harm vs the optic of racism and cultural imperialism), she argues for a multi-optic approach that takes different forms of domination seriously, and thus encourages an ethics of avowal among different struggles.

Part I. Taxonomies of Power: 1. Impassioned disputes; 2. Animals, nature, and the races of man; Part II. The Battle over Live Animal Markets in San Francisco's Chinatown: 3. The optic of cruelty: challenging the markets; 4. The optic of racism: mobilizing the Chinese community; 5. The optic of ecological harm: protecting 'nature' in a neoliberal age; 6. Vision/critique/avowal; Part III. Other Disputes: 7. Makah whaling and the (non)ecological Indian; 8. Michael Vick, dogfighting, and the parable of black recalcitrance; Part IV. Conclusion: 9. We are all animals/we are not animals.

Claire Jean Kim is a Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative ethnic studies, minority politics, intersectionality, and human-animal studies. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000) won two awards from the American Political Science Association – the Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. Dr Kim has also written numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is an associate editor of American Quarterly and a guest editor, with Carla Freccero, of a special issue of American Quarterly entitled Species/Race/Sex (2013). She is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.