reAdIng AgAInst mAstery 5techno- scientific innovations that allow us to trouble the category of the
human as such. Following Wynter’s insistence on the difference between
the human and Man, we can say that Man has been the subject/object of
posthumanist inquiry. Departing from posthumanism, queer inhumanisms
aim to query the human from the position of some of its least privileged
forms and designations of life.^4 Tavia Nyong’o, for instance, calls attention
to the “continued liberal enchantment” in intellectual discourse with a sub-
ject that remains “transparent,” unmarked by various categories of differ-
ence. He argues that in collusion with this liberalism, “posthumanist theory
has tended to present the decentering of the human as both salutary and
largely innocent of history” (2015, 266). Drawing on black studies, Nyong’o
queries how such subjects can then work to decenter the human while re-
maining committed to the political projects articulated from these posi-
tions of (in)human exclusion. How, in other words, might the project of
remaking the human happen from its outside?
In the hopeful spirit of queer inhumanisms, dehumanism begins with
the dehumanized—“humans” and their others—as its critical point of de-
parture. José Esteban Muñoz has summoned us toward the necessary labor
of “attempting to touch inhumanity” (2015, 209), and Nyong’o insists that
we pressure history in the making and unmaking of the subject. Indebted
to queer inhumanism’s ethical reach, I modify the concept of inhumanism,
which (despite the desires of those committed to its potentialities) loses
track in its own grammatical formulation of the histories, practices, and
narratives that make some human and cast others outside its orbit. The
prefix “in” of inhumanism points to a privation that does not intuitively
signal the history of the making of nonhuman subjects and forms of being.
Shifting inhumanism to dehumanism, I move away from a seemingly onto-
logical formulation of Man and its others toward a more pointed formula-
tion that implicates in its very utterance the processes of dehumanization
through a term that signals clearly the imperial work of making humans
and worlds. Dehumanism, then, is united with queer inhumanisms as it
presses us toward an overtly global, imperial critique of the making and
mapping of Man and its proliferating remnants.
The “de” of dehumanism also and vitally articulates the “de” of de-
construction, crucially foregrounding the particular force of narrative in
the making and unmaking of subjects, and the “de” of decolonial ethico-
politics. Dehumanism is driven by the promises of vulnerability with the