the lAnguAge of mAstery 69one in which language both shapes and refuses to become the property of
the subject. The language Derrida speaks is neither historically nor on-
tologically his own; it belongs to another as Other. The intimate political
nexus of language, mastery, and colonization always summons the problem
of what language is. I engage in this chapter evocations of language and
mastery across anticolonial and postcolonial discourses, thinking alongside
those whose language relation has been overtly caught up in the political
and dehumanizing stakes of colonization. I illustrate how mastery surfaces
repeatedly in colonial and postcolonial language debates around the force
of the colonial language over colonized subjects, the desire to reclaim mas-
tery over native languages in decolonization efforts, and the advocacy of
language mastery as the aim of literary studies in the purportedly post-
colonial world. Across the complex and widely divergent formulations of
decolonization, language and mastery return us to the figures of women,
animals, adversaries, and weaponry that were at play in the preceding chap-
ter. Querying the figurative evocations of language in relation to colonial
mastery and decolonization, I turn at the end of the chapter to the con-
temporary discourse of “world” literature in an effort to reconsider the cur-
rent aims of literary practices. Current discourses that detail the aims of
ambitions of literary study, I argue, speak to a much wider tendency in aca-
demic thinking and aspiration today. Calling into question intellectual pro-
duction from the vantage point most intimate to me as a literary scholar,
I urge scholars away from intellectual mastery and toward the horizon of a
dehumanist education.
Decolonizing Languages: Fanon and Memmi
Across twentieth- century anticolonial discourses, language repeatedly
emerged as one of the most vital problems in the production and articula-
tion of decolonized subjectivities. If in Western thought language has been
understood as key in the shaping of human subjects, anticolonial think-
ers pressured and elaborated the crucial place of language for those de-
humanized by political formations of the proper human subject. Think-
ers like Frantz Fanon, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Tunisian writer Albert
Memmi charted the political function of humanization and dehumaniza-
tion through language use and acquisition. Because these thinkers insisted
on thinking the politics of language from the position of those excluded