Animal Quintet: A Southern Memoir

(Paperback)

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Colin Dayan meditates on the connection between her personal and family history and her relationship with animals in this lyrical memoir about her upbringing in the South. Unraveling memories alongside family documents and photographs, Animal Quintet takes a raw look at racial tensions and relations in a region struggling to change while providing

Reviews

Colin Dayan brings a rare combination to her work: a strong mind and an expansive heart. -- Mark Edmundson * author of Why Read and The Death of Sigmund Freud. *
Colin Dayans Animal Quintet explores the complexity of race, class, gender and region with relation to animality and history. What is it that we remember of pasts that have receded What prompts such remembrance How is the past always made present Perhaps through feeling, through mood, through song. Focusing on animals and the relations they share with humans, the distinctions between are interrogated and considered and wrestled with and thought about. -- Ashon T. Crawley * Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies, University of Virginia *
Colin Dayans lyrical prose is haunting, it oozes through the hot, humid, and putrid air of the deep South calling her back as if to ask her to finish her thought after all these years. This memoir feels like a lucid dream dipped in magic realism. The languid posture of the mother melts into the bulls body distorted with pain, meanwhile the crickets are noisily rubbing their legs in anticipation of sex. A mesmerizing tableau. -- Benedicte Boisseron * Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor *
Colin Dayans stories of mournful intimacy with animals bring the entanglement of our flesh and bodies to light, a light that seeps through her sweaty, lyrical, Southern memories. Hauntingly beautiful, these musings warn us of our profound precarity. -- Lori Gruen * author of Entangled Empathy *
Growing up in an atmosphere of violent sociality and unnamed desires, Dayan gravitates toward nonhuman beingshorses, chickens, possums, dogs--watching their every movement, their acts of survival, and their eventual death, often at the hands of humans. Dayan writes, The horses keep dying. The humans keep watching. In exquisite prose that recounts her mothers passions and demise, the gatherings of humans around husbandry and slaughter, and the dense psychic weight of racial caste systems and anti-black violence, Dayan brings to the fore an enmeshment that tethers her grief and memories to animals that inhabit the south. She writes of how memory flows through the blood and circulates in interspecies relations. I am left with her words: there is no story about humans that is not also a story about animals. I love love love this text. -- Nicole R. Fleetwood * Professor of American Studies and Art History, Rutgers University *
We are mistaken to set ourselves above animalsour pets, our domesticated resources, our wild dangers, our preywhich we only understand in terms of our ability or failure to control or possess them. Dayans poignant lyrical journal shows that they are conduits to our deepest memories. Seeing history through them, we may learn to yield our claims to dominion and mourn the present that our power has made. -- Vincent Brown * author of The Reapers Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery *
Through her evocative and lyrical writing Colin Dayan once again demonstrates the interconnections between the natural world and human life. She takes a familiar narrative form of an adult remembering her childhood, but weaves a brilliant southern quilt filled with cold and warm terror, spurned love, the ubiquity of cruelty and the astonishing indifference that often accompanies it. Animal Quintet reckons with the inscrutable, letting us know, too, that mysteries remain. Dayan asks us to think harder about what we do to animals. If we are as lucky as she, we can locate the vast untapped and unexpressed parts of our own humanity. -- Gayle Pemberton * Professor of English and African American Studies Emerita, Wesleyan University *

Author Bio

Colin Dayan is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Law. She studies American literature, Haitian historiography, and American legal scholarshipthe focus of her two most recent books. In her 2007 book, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, she exposes the paradox of the eighth amendment to the constitution, showing that in the United States, cycles of jurisprudence safeguard rights and then justify their revocation. Her 2011 book, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, examines how the fictions and language of law turn personsand other legal non-entities, such as slaves, felons, terror suspects and dogsinto rightless objects. The Law Is a White Dog was selected by Choice as one of the top 25 outstanding academic books for 2011. In her other work, she introduces an English-speaking audience to Haitian poet Ren Depestres early epic poem about the vodou gods and their journey to the American South. In Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poes Fiction (1987), she discusses Edgar Allen Poes fictional works as complicated critiques of the traditions of romance and the gothic. Professor Dayan is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.