12 IntroductIon
Similarly, the concept of dominion, which situates “man” in relation to
the natural world, has entailed an interpretive practice of mastery over the
earth. In Genesis, dominion becomes a particular human mode of relating
to the world—indeed of caring for it—through practices of management
and expertise that hinge on the human goal of mastering nature in order to
let it flourish, to cultivate it, to submit it with the aim of maximum prosper-
ity. When God gives Adam and Eve dominion “over the fish of the sea, over
the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”
(Genesis 1:28), their first task is to name all that they will have dominion
over. The question of language and naming recurs across Unthinking Mas-
tery, specifically in chapter 2, where I dwell on the anticolonial language
debates, and again in chapter 5, where the Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid
wades through the colonial stakes of naming and possession. The concept
of dominion clarifies how mastery is tied to language, and how in its power
to name the human also gains authorization to particular forms of master-
ful consumption: because I have named you, I can consume you. I take up
this relation between logic, mastery, and consumption in chapter 4 through
my analysis of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals
(1999). Dominion is, as Mick Smith (2011) reminds us, certainly a relation
where mastery plays out explicitly through the care of resources, land man-
agement, and animal husbandry. Both sovereignty as a state problematic
and dominion as an ecological one are iterations of mastery—ones that
reveal crucial aspects of mastery but without exhausting its machinations.
I have suggested that to define mastery would be a gesture toward mas-
tering it. It would also risk foreclosing mastery in such a way that disables
attention to the gaps and fissures of such a definition, where mastery may
leak out and take forms that are not contained within its definitive script.
I am concerned with instances in which mastery is reinscribed as another
kind of act, appearing untethered from its origin. I approach mastery, then,
not by defining the act but through tracing some of its enduring character-
istics. At least three features of mastery circulate throughout my readings,
offering us not a definition but qualities by which we can begin to think
with mastery and against it—in the sense not merely of opposition but of
dwelling alongside. First, mastery involves splitting in either the sense of
carving a boundary or an infliction of mutilation—or, often, both at the
same time. Consider the 1947 Partition of India, when the splitting of India
to create an independent Islamic nation- state in the form of Pakistan was