Scholarly. Postcolonial, feminist, invested in dismantling our current oppressive formation of “the human.” In particular, its focus is “mastery,” which it understands as a sort of shared logic that links and informs many different scales of phenomena, contexts, practices, and experiences, including those that are easily legible as instances of oppression and domination but lots of others that we have to look at harder to understand as sharing in the same harmful logic. Though it shies away from a clear definition, the logic of mastery includes the creation of rigid boundaries, the placing of one side of that boundary as dominant over the other side, and the sustaining of that relationship over time. The book in particular traces logics of mastery through various contexts that we usually think of as opposing domination or at least as irrelevant to domination – the work of major anti-colonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi, through postcolonial debates about language, and via literary texts through our relationships with animals and with nature more broadly.
Following on those last elements, it expands on ideas from Sylvia Wynter and others in which liberation requires the cultivation of new genres of (and beyond) ‘the human.’ To do that, we can’t just decide to end our reproduction of logics of mastery – they are too deeply baked into us and our practices and our social world. But we can attend to those logics and stay with the discomfort that close attention produces and we can cultivate encounters with texts and beings and experiences that, all together, will contribute to unsettling our stability as masterful subjects and creating possibilities for new logics of self and new social logics of ‘we’ that can open up other possibilities for life that are not dependent on domination and exclusion.
I have mixed feelings in general about this kind of scholarly work and its deep attention to the cultivation of new selves in how it thinks about transforming the world. I don’t disagree with that connection – I think it is inevitable that substantive change can only happen simultaneously (though highly unevenly and unpredictably) across scales, and it is not a bad thing to be grounded in the scale of the self. In the case of this book, I think it really does have illuminating things to say about the ways in which colonial and authoritarian logics permeate our lives and our collective projects, and subvert what we hope to accomplish through them – in that sense, it is very much related to impulses found in non-scholarly anti-authoritarian contexts, and I think can be used to inform such impulses. I agree that these are things that we need to pay attention to and develop strategies to navigate, and that work will often not look like left stereotypes of what ‘political work’ should be. And I’ve always been in favour of engaging with scholarly work for what it is, recognizing that it follows its own logics and imperatives, and those of us who try to function at least a little bit in both worlds can contirubte to the work of translating it into more movement-legible terms. But I still wish books like this did more to situate their insights in the context not only of being a self encountering texts or a self listening across difference or whatever, but a self working in a group of other selves to push our institution to respond better to sexual assault or racism, or a self working a lousy job while going to school and trying to work on the local minimum wage campaign, or whatever.
Anyway, an interesting book if you like this kind of thing, at a remove from movements but not irrelevant to them, and a source of a few things I’ll be happy to think about as I work on my current project.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.