reAdIng AgAInst mAstery 27in the production of her American garden, in which we discover a sub-
ject that is at times blatantly contradictory, at times violent in her desires
to master her garden, at others projecting on postcolonial subjects of the
Himalayan region the same kinds of Orientalist configurations that she
disavows explicitly in her critique of colonial mastery. These contradictory,
disturbing, and provocative ways of writing the postcolonial subject are,
I argue, a most promising gesture toward an earthing of human subjectivity
in the wake of ecological disaster. Precisely by exposing the radical incon-
gruities and “seedy” underbelly of the subject, Kincaid compels us to tend
to our less masterful potentialities.
While mastery emerges somewhat differently across each chapter of
this book, it does so in ways that are essential to think together. My read-
ings of revolutionary discourse and literary prose repeatedly confront the
ways that “coherent” narratives of self and mastery are always based on far
more fragile materialities and psychic displacements than their narratives
enable. In so doing, they urge us toward dehumanism as a political prac-
tice that can produce profound psychic and material effects. These texts,
as though anticipating Halberstam, recuperate failure as a necessary con-
dition of resistance, collectivity, and utopian promise in unmasterful rela-
tions among life forms. In the coda, I begin to think expressly about what
it might mean to survive mastery, to live with mastery in such a way that
lets other worldly forms of engagement resound. Through a brief reading
of the final scene in Aimé Césaire’s A Te m p e s t (2002), the anticolonial
rewriting of Shakespeare’s Th e Te m p e s t, I dwell on listening as a critical
mode of becoming vulnerable to the voices—human and nonhuman, au-
dible and muted—that are always sounding even when we have not been
trained or allowed ourselves to listen: Listening, as opposed to voicing that
which we “know.” Listening, as an act that might let each other in—psy-
chically, physically—to another’s ways of inhabiting the world; to being
entities that are always touching and being touched by others, even when
we are not aware of this touching, even when this touching is entirely un-
predictable.
I once shied away from the critical charge of being “utopian,” as though
utopia had nothing to do with the politics of the present. In fact, utopic
desire materializes in tactile and corporeal ways, and it does so in par-
ticular places—even while it reaches toward an elsewhere that is not yet
at hand. The desire for utopia is always and already a failed desire, but the