6 IntroductIon
aim of forming other less masterful subjectivities. As I argue across Un-
thinking Mastery, the act of reading is vital to this process of imagining
otherwise and dwelling elsewhere, to the relentless exercise of unearthing
and envisioning new human forms and conceptualizations of agency. Read-
ing becomes not a humanizing process that rehearses the largely anthro-
pocentric discourses of decolonization but a much more radical process
of opening us to the possibility of becoming ourselves promisingly dehu-
manized. What possibilities live in these other “modalities” of the human?
What vital hope is (still) lingering in exile when we are ready to open our
borders? Even to become, ourselves, hopefully dispossessed of mastery?
Locating Mastery
Existing critiques of postcolonial studies have thus far not taken seriously
enough the position of mastery at its foundations. Since its inception in
the 1980s, subaltern studies (which holds a foundational role in the more
diffuse intellectual body known as postcolonial studies) has been taken to
task from within and by scholars outside its project. A central critique of
postcolonial studies charges it with being an elitist intellectual fantasy re-
moved from the Realpolitik of capital.^5 This critique accuses postcolonial
theory of a blindness toward or a misrecognition of Marxism and calls for a
turn from bourgeois nationalism toward a true proletarian nationalism (or
internationalism). This turn necessarily requires a pruning back of the “ex-
cesses” of poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial history and political
theory. My concern with this line of critique is that, while it attempts to
become grounded in the facts of class struggle, it advocates a return to He-
gelian Marxism and implicitly concedes to an ongoing dialectic of “master-
ing mastery.” In effect, it returns us to a formulation of the master and slave
in which the only way to undo their relation is through an overcoming, a
mastering of that which masters. This logic of mastery superseding mas-
tery remains continuous across Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx, and, as
I argue in chapters 1 and 2, resonates in anticolonial thinking through revo-
lutionary figures such as Fanon and Gandhi. Mastery has likewise made
its way, often unthinkingly, into the discourse of postcolonial studies and
its critiques. It is the task of this book to signal this inheritance of mastery
and to illustrate that, by continuing to abide by the formulation of “mas-
tering mastery,” we remain bound to relations founded on and through