How to Read This Book  xi
Primer: What the Animal Said  xv
1. Vocabularies : Possibility  1
2. Companionate : Species  51
3. Diversity : A Scarcity  90
4. Love : Livestock  139
5. Horse : Flesh  165
6. Sovereignty : A Mercy  222
The Open : . . .  254
Acknowledgments  257
Abbreviations  261
Notes  263
Bibliography  303
Index  317

Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press.