4 IntroductIon
from the domain of Man as “the master- subject.”^1 Alongside Sylvia Wynter,
he signals “different genres of the human” that require us to attend to the
always enfleshed alterities of being human (Weheliye 2014, 2– 3).
Dehumanism
I am eager to dwell alongside these other humanities, to explore as well
how such dwellings might enable us to become exiled from subjectivities
founded on and through mastery. This is a practice I call dehumanism: a
practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always
structural and ideological) of colonial and neocolonial mastery that con-
tinue to render some beings more human than others. Dehumanism re-
quires not an easy repudiation and renunciation of dehumanization but a
form of radical dwelling in and with dehumanization through the narrative
excesses and insufficiencies of the “good” human—a cohabitation that acts
on and through us in order to imagine other forms of political allegiance.
To read the human otherwise, I draw from the interdisciplinary discourses
of posthumanism and queer inhumanisms even while my dehumanist aims
depart in more and less crucial ways from these projects.
Within the broad reach of posthumanism, two intellectual branches are
essential to Unthinking Mastery. The first takes up questions of the animal,
including the animality of the human, which will come into sharp focus in
chapter 4.^2 The second falls under the heading of new materialisms, which,
as I elaborate in chapter 5, emphasizes how matter actively contributes to
and shapes environments, communities, and politics.^3 These trajectories of
posthumanism insist that “the dominant constructivist orientation to social
analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in
ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global
political economy” (Coole and Frost 2010, 6). They also call attention to
how humanism is structured by a separation between the ideological fan-
tasies of the human’s unique agency and the disavowed materialities that
underlie it. While I am drawn to these particular trajectories of posthu-
manism, little attention is paid in its discourses to the specificity of neoco-
lonial relations of power and materiality. Dehumanism, then, aims to bring
the posthuman into critical conversation with the decolonial.
Posthumanism begins with a querying of the human through its most
privileged points of departure, generally focusing on the philosophers and