decolonIzIng mAstery 63Dehumanism against Mastery
If I am appearing at moments harsh in my readings of Fanon and Gandhi,
mine is a critique born of real indebtedness and driven by the profound
potentialities still embedded in their political writings. There is a beauti-
ful moment in “The Fact of Blackness” in which Fanon pauses to consider
his own character. He writes: “If I were asked for a definition of myself,
I would say that I am one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I in-
terpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive” (1967c,
120). I am entirely taken by Fanon’s “becoming sensitive” as a self- defining
quality, and I am interested in how sensitivity itself—especially within the
discourses of liberation that are grounded in love and the pursuit of less
violent human futures—can continue to refuse alliances with other dis-
crepant bodies that are cast as excessive to particular political aims.
While so much of my own attention to both Gandhi and Fanon em-
phasizes moments in which they appear quite insensitive to their own re-
hearsals of mastery, my aim has been to consider carefully how even the
most impassioned thinkers of liberation—thinkers driven by love and less
violent human futures—continuously refused alliances with certain bodies
that did not conform to the political aims of their movements. It is by re-
turning to these figures of decolonization, and by politicizing their knotty
contradictions, that we can begin to register those that are currently excised
from our own political moment—those others we continue to produce in
our ongoing practices of mastery and, paradoxically, through our struggles
for justice.
Fanon’s “becoming sensitive” as a quality of the self is instrumental to
vulnerable reading, to becoming porous to texts in ways that might reshape
our subjectivities and our political aspirations. Pairing Fanon’s sensitivity
with Gandhi’s always shifting experimental practices in search of truth, we
can begin to see the possibility for a dehumanist praxis in which the re-
mainders of anticolonial political thought—women, indigenous peoples,
animals, the disabled, and nature writ large—become sites that can cul-
tivate our own sensitivities to those we are currently (and often despite
ourselves) producing as remainders to our purportedly inclusive politics.
The decolonizing politics of our present moment might reach for sensitivi-
ties we ourselves cannot yet anticipate through experimental practices that
can lead us into radically other forms of feeling and acting. Such practices