94 chApter two
over vast or miniscule, human or inhuman terrains—pushes us toward
different forms of scholarship and different relations to our practices—in-
deed, toward different relations to the worlds we engage.
The writings of activists, political theorists, and literary scholars that I
have engaged in the first half of this book form an archive of resistance to
and engagements with mastery in anticolonial contexts. These thinkers pas-
sionately sought to resist colonial mastery while remaining entangled with
other iterations of masterful practice and thought. While a majority of my
attention has been centered on the ways in which “alternate” forms of mas-
tery are unthinkingly reproduced in efforts to disengage colonial mastery,
I have also gleaned from their writings the crucial seeds of a dehumanist
practice. For the remainder of this book, I am going to be illustrating how
postcolonial literature opens us toward dehumanist subjectivities, prac-
tices, and politics. My aim will be to approach literature with an unmaster-
ful method of engagement, reading vulnerably the ensnarements of mas-
tery in figures who, like me, desire and fail to resist it. My abiding interest
in the postcolonial literary archive rhymes with Wynter’s assertion that we,
as humans, are products of narrative (1984, 50). For Wynter, literature pro-
duces the humans we understand and feel ourselves to be, and it may well
be that through literature, through the narratives it casts and questions, we
can begin to produce ourselves otherwise. What kinds of subjects—and
what kinds of objects—can we be for ourselves and for others if we loosen
the hold of mastery?