Historians and cultural critics have extensively documented the enduring and abject association between raced subjects and animals: blacks as apes, Asians as pigs or rats or dogs, Jews as rats, and so forth.18 These animalized bodies are then consumed in a variety of ways for multiple purposes: for labor, for scapegoating, and in the service of national consolidation, just to name a few.19 This consumption, moreover, has been done in the name of desire and repulsion: what Eric Lott famously calls the “love and theft” enacted by American racial dynamics, which in turn has produced what Tompkins
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