Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements

Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements is concerned with unpacking the ways mastery underpins much of contemporary thought. Mastery is pervasive in philosophical conceptions of human relations with perceived Others. It helps uphold oppressive racist and colonial power structures, yet, at the same time, it persists in discourses aimed at resisting and dismantling these power structures. Singh begins her argument by identifying the manifold ways mastery permeates anticolonial and postcolonial thought, and then goes on to argue that this discursive reliance on mastery fundamentally shapes the project of decolonization from within. Decolonization and decolonial thought, Singh insists, could gain significantly from a reorientation away from mastery and toward what she calls “dehumanist solidarity” – a posthuman decolonial mode of “relational being” that does not hinge on impulses to master, control, or subjugate (1). Moving from engagements with theory to close-readings of contemporary postcolonial texts, Singh suggests that narrative might help us to better imagine how this alternate mode of relational being might look. Importantly, she does not seek to master any of the texts she draws on. Instead, she asserts the critical importance of failing to master them – of becoming vulnerable to them in order to open oneself up to alternate forms of being in common that may emerge there.