Unthinking Mastery

(Rick Simeone) #1
CHAPTER 1

1 Decolonizing Mastery


Love can fight; often, it is obliged to.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1976)


I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967)


At a quick historical glance, it would be easy to cast two of the twentieth
century’s most radical anticolonial thinkers—Mohandas K. Gandhi and
Frantz Fanon—as politically antithetical. While indeed there is much to
distinguish their thinking, postcolonial theorists have pointed to the foun-
dational role that both thinkers have played in the emergence of postcolo-
nial theory as a mode of critical inquiry. Leela Gandhi, for instance, has
argued that Gandhi and Fanon are “united in their proposal of a radical
style of total resistance to the totalising political and cultural offensive of
the colonial civilizing mission” (1998, 19). She follows Gyan Prakash, who
positions Gandhian and Fanonian thought as “theoretical events” that
situate their work squarely within the emergence of postcolonial theory
(1995, 5). Against the common historicization of postcolonial theory’s
emergence in the 1980s when it swept the academic scene, these scholars
enable us to see postcolonial theory’s longer critical history. Returning to
Gandhi and Fanon as early iterations of postcolonial theory, then, is vital
to the task of revisiting the postcolonial project today in the efforts to rein-
vigorate and to mobilize it toward new world dynamics.
In this chapter, I dwell on the works of these two central figures of
twentieth- century decolonization in order to query their mappings of
thoroughly decolonized subjectivities. For both Gandhi and Fanon, decolo-
nization hinged on the necessity of a fundamental reconstitution of the
self in the shaping of a postcolonial world. And yet, to achieve this end,

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