108 chApter three
ate officers are needed. Such officers will be able to convert these people
to agriculture. He decides to submit a note the moment he gets to Ran-
chi. It’s not possible for so many people to survive only on relief year after
year” (15). The language of “conversion” in this passage emphasizes the split
between Singh’s desire to help those in need and the simultaneous desire to
bring them into the fold of his own ideology. This profound desire to help
becomes folded into an ideology of conquest in which Singh—imbued with
rights as a humanitarian citizen and with a degree of state authority—is
the exceptional figure who can enact radical change simply by persuading
the tribals to act differently and by submitting a simple note to the authori-
ties informing them of his solution. Singh cannot see that couched within
his own purported claims to goodness is a desire for conquest. Precisely
because he refuses to see his own complicity at work, he is able to set aside
the haunting legacies of both state- employed and ghostly thieves and to
fall calmly into “untroubled sleep” (15). What “Little Ones” illustrates is
how Singh’s desire, through its fetishistic play, refuses the ecological and
political realities that not only give rise to the abject lives of the tribals but
also, perversely, enable his own humanitarian ego- ideal to flourish.
Sociogeny and Narrative Force
Literature, I am arguing, is a crucial site through which to explore how
narratives instantiate subjectivities. For Fanon, as we saw in chapter 1,
narrative has a sociogenetic function, producing and sustaining humans
in ways both material and ideological. Although Fanon’s attention is toward
black male embodiment in the colonies, his formulation of sociogenesis
extends to all modern embodied subjectivities. Reading literature can be a
crucial vantage point from which to rethink the human as a product shaped
and enforced through narratives that are historically, socially, politically,
and filially produced. Shaped through narrative, subjects are always also
(and often unthinkingly) engaged in the ongoing narrative productions
and enforcements of themselves—and of others. Posthumanitarian fictions
emphasize how even those of us deeply invested in the labor and ethics of
human care remain active in the creation of “human” subjectivity and in
the enforcements of its abject alterities. Put concisely, these fictions show
us how claims to goodness (signaled through humanitarian action) are en-
snared in the production and enforcement of dehumanization.