Dangerous Crossings

Reviewed by: Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age by Claire Jean Kim Theresa A. Kulbaga (bio) Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, by Claire Jean Kim. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 346 pp. $29.99 paper. ISBN: 978-1-107-62293-7. In San Francisco’s Chinatown in the mid-1990s, animal activists took to the streets to protest live animal market vendors’ “cruel” practices and to convince the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare to ban the sale of live animals (including turtles, frogs, birds, and fish) for food. Chinatown’s vendors and political leaders—noting that the activists focused on Chinese markets specifically and not on elite French restaurants in the area or the popular tourist locale Fisherman’s Wharf—mobilized a powerful response, arguing that the animal activists were, knowingly or not, engaged in a form of cultural imperialism that had long targeted Chinese American cultural practices. At issue in the live animal market debate, which raged for more than a decade, are entangled questions about race, species, belonging, and who has the cultural authority to decide what constitutes “cruelty” and who counts as “human”—questions central to Claire Jean Kim’s book, Dangerous Crossings. Kim argues that disputes over how racially marginalized groups keep, use, and consume animals in their cultural traditions provide rich sites for considering how power operates within cultural communities and across species lines. In these disputes, racially marked cultural practices become hypervisible, perpetuating stereotypes linking nonwhite populations with cruelty and animality. As one Chinatown activist, Rose Tsai, put it, “Are we so sure that if cameras were free to roam the slaughterhouses and meat factories that produce and supply the neatly packaged meat we buy at super-markets that the conditions there would not offend the sensitivities of many of us? ... If San Francisco, as a city, wants to take on the issue of cruelty to animals, let it do so in a consistent manner” (118). In Dangerous Crossings, Kim argues that race, species, and nature are “taxonomies of power” that are culturally constructed and mutually constitutive. She examines three case studies that illuminate these taxonomies: the battle over Chinatown’s live animal markets; the controversy over the Makah [End Page 127] tribe’s decision in the mid-1990s to resume whale hunting after an interval of seventy years; and Michael Vick’s arrest and conviction for dogfighting in 2007. In each case, public outcry by animal and environmental activists focused on a discourse of cruelty and harm (what Kim calls “the optic of cruelty”), while cultural activists countered with a discourse of racism and cultural imperialism (what she calls “the optic of racism”). constructing a reimagined ‘we’ in resistance to the neoliberal elites waging war against racialized groups, animals, nature, and others” (20). Ultimately, Kim asks: How can we theorize multiple taxonomies of power and oppression ethically and complexly? What happens when animal rights and cultural rights clash? To get at these questions, Kim, a political scientist, provides an in-depth analysis including extensive interviews, archival research, media accounts, and detailed historical context. One strength of Kim’s approach is her careful attention to the local: individual activists and neighborhood dynamics are brought to life, situated within larger national and global histories of racialization and dehumanization but given its own distinctive detail and importance. San Francisco’s Chinatown thus becomes a site of complex, competing motives and investments, both “sides” of the live animal market debate revealed to be multidimensional. Kim suggests that both the optic of cruelty and the optic of racism are limited, bringing one set of issues (or one dynamic of power) into focus while obscuring others. For example, community activists in Chinatown dismissed animal activists’ claims about animal suffering as racially motivated, while animal activists cast Chinatown’s vendors as gratuitously cruel without regard for histories of racist representation linking Chinese immigrants with rats and other disease-spreading vermin, or with feline cunning and cruelty. In the case of Makah whaling, animal activists

Genealogy · Multiculturalism · Pedagogy · Race (biology · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · History of Science and Medicine

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