the lAnguAge of mAstery 67In U.S. mainstream media, these student organizers have been cast as
overly sensitive “cry- bullies” demanding “safe spaces” in place of a real
brass tacks education. This radically insufficient notion of education as a
practice that holds no room for “sensitivity” is at its root a colonizing ges-
ture that casts education as a practice of subjecting others to the exclusive
force of a firmly established hierarchy. Both the student protests and their
critiques draw attention to the linguistic and symbolic force of colonial
mastery that continues to resound in the ostensibly postcolonial present.
Like anticolonial discourse, student protests and the media attention that
has followed them have underscored mastery—most often implicitly—as
an enduring ethico- political problem. In support of student organizers in-
ternationally, and against the deeply problematic registers of education in
mainstream media, we might think toward a decolonized education that
would engage education as praxis, as a process of critical becoming that en-
tails various (and at times totally unanticipatable) forms of care and prac-
tices of unlearning that which we already “know.” Education in this sense
is a transformative act of becoming profoundly vulnerable to other lives,
other life forms, and other “things” that we have not yet accounted for or
that appear only marginally related to us. Nathan Snaza calls this a practice
of “bewildering education” (2013, 48), one that insists on our vital entangle-
ments with other forms of life and matter. Following Snaza, I would call for
a dehumanist education through which “subject matter” comes not merely
to describe a topic of study but to signal the physical matter that makes
study possible. Coming to “know” ourselves through education must also
be a radical renarration and reorientation of what it is that we are aspir-
ing to know. A dehumanist higher education would insist that knowledge
production itself become unpredictable, unanticipatable, unmasterful. Re-
calling my discussion of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in the preceding
chapter, coming to know ourselves in this way will require taking account
of “sociogeny,” and engaging new narrative inventions that bring into being
alternative modes of subjectivity. As Snaza proposes: “We must learn to
think of ourselves as something other than ‘human,’ and we have to imag-
ine and experiment with pedagogies that do not presuppose this ‘human’ as
their telos” (2013, 50). This education would have to take language seriously,
to interrogate how we name and what histories of conquest, erasure, and
profit are embedded in the words through which we come to “know”: Edu-
cation as ethics; education as a radically unmasterful act that requires that