![]() Yet there is something a little paralysing about this detailed exposé of the obviously pernicious. ![]() And it would be nonsense to pretend that we all know better now. It is an ugly spectacle to see with what insufferable smugness and pseudoscientific justification these judgments have been repeatedly made by white western males. All the same, her well-made thesis is that this tendency has commonly pushed the oppressed group towards the realm of beasts, whether via the bird-like "twittering" of women or the "simian" countenance of African slaves. Rather, they erect hierarchies of human worth, development and supposed intellectual and spiritual capacity. When, for example, she remarks – apropos of slavery – that it questions "who is truly human and who is merely 'property'", only to follow with the suggestion that "the claim that some humans are property rather than true 'persons' is still rampant", the confusion muddies the point.Īlthough the forms of denigration that Bourke considers are certainly "dehumanising", they don't usually challenge biological or species identity. She would have helped her argument by keeping that distinction clear. ![]() ![]() As these cases illustrate, historian Joanna Bourke's survey is not so much about the boundaries of humankind as about the way in which some humans have systematically denied full personhood to others, particularly women, children and other (generally non-European) races and cultures. ![]()
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