posthumAnItArIAn fIctIons 103and enforcing one’s own power in the humanitarian effort, by upholding
the narrative of humanitarian benevolence and disavowing material com-
plicities, humanitarian characters come to reproduce the very structures
of power they desire to dismantle. The humanitarian ego becomes the be-
nevolent master of someone else’s house. Singh’s and the medical officer’s
work turns out to humanize themselves but does little to uphold the hu-
manity of those they seek to uplift. Critically, this process of humanization
that looks to the other but ultimately turns back toward oneself echoes the
historical justification for the humanities, which has sought expressly to
humanize its students. Humanitarian fetishism allows these characters, like
those engaged in the humanities, to fantasize about becoming more fully
human precisely by repressing their participation in the constitutive dehu-
manization of aid recipients. Put simply, humanitarians can only come to
understand themselves as the kinds of subjects that do good in the world by
ignoring the masterful material relations that enable their work. Humani-
tarian fetishism applies not strictly to those who work in explicit spaces of
aid but is also a critical compulsion of liberal subjectivity itself. Focusing
on the figure of the humanitarian throws humanitarian fetishism into re-
lief by turning readers toward our own relations to mastery, whether we
pretend to be unmasterful in order to prop up the ideal of our benevolent
subjectivities or we believe in “good” forms of mastery as necessary to the
elevation of all humans.
In her work on the politics of humanitarian aid, Lisa Smirl argues that
“the practices involved in post- crisis reconstruction by the international
humanitarian aid community are inseparable from the production and re-
construction of global relations and identities” (2008, 237). Smirl illustrates
how humanitarian aid practices, and in particular the spatio- material poli-
tics that enable such practices, ultimately confirm and “reconstruct” the
disparities between aid workers and those they seek to assist. The aim of
Smirl’s work is to intervene in what she calls the “humanitarian imaginary,”
a mode of intervention that is based on “idealized assumptions regarding
social organization and community” (2015, 2). The practices of humani-
tarianism reproduce, often devastatingly, the divides between the Global
North and South. Indeed, as Costas Douzinas (2007) and Elizabeth Bern-
stein (2010) have argued from quite different vantage points, humanitar-
ianism can easily couple with the military objectives of imperial power.
Both Life & Times of Michael K and “Little Ones” pressure the “humani-