the deer reminds Chris of the trick-ster tales, that it suggests he must use his wiles to escape

Wright makes the rat an emblemof “black suffering as well as black persistence” because of “its hunger andspirited refusal to be captured.”

Like the trickster tales discussed above, the films we are lookingat here do not make animals the focal point, but use them as a means of“thinking with” humans.

The trickster is an animal low on the peckingorder (like a rabbit) who finds himself in a jam and must use his wits, charms,and other skill sets to outfox his more powerful enemies. He is an animalsurrogate that speaks softly of strategies for resistance

qualities of vermin also make thema ripe symbol for resistance. To be like vermin is to be tenacious and to refusethe spatial exclusions that people like Dean would enforce

Wagner emphasizes thatsuch animal tales often provided coded ways of imparting strategies forresistance and that this story has historical connections not only to the tropeof the speaking animal from African trickster mythologies like the spiderAnansi, but also perhaps, to Aesop’s animal fable

recall the plantation fables that spoke backto power, cloaking human issues under the guise of entertaining tales aboutcrafty creatures. These creatures may also operate as revolutionary symbols,whereby one thing is made to stand in for another so as to seem innoc-uous to outsiders.

As metaphoric operations, plantation animal tales andthe films under discussion here work by pointing out a false equivalency:whereas, under slavery, Black life was set on a par with the animal, whichcould be bought and sold, traded away from family members like chattel, thisequation is rerouted in Black storytellers’ uses of the symbolic animal. Theequivalence of the slave with the animal is reanimated, but now the harm-less animal tale becomes the mechanism for delivering resistive strategies.

Rather than viewing fables as operating with a purely substitutivelogic, where the animal stands in for the human, recent criticism explores thepossibility that the fable can imagine relationality and even allyship amongspecies

Any resistance must be sanitized soas to be tolerable” for the general audience. 5 But resistance also works not bybeing sanitized, but by being hidden in plain sight, coded as symbols legibleto some but not to all. The use of animal fables has a long-standing historydating back to slavery as providing such a coded language of resistance

Wagner notes that theweaker animals use their wits as a means of overcoming the unequal powerdistribution in the world they navigated

he “speaking animal,” which acknowledgesthe dialectic capacity of the symbolic animal of fables to stage a conversationabout subjugation and resistance, but simultaneously, to point beyond itselfto the reality of animal life.