Feminist Studies

Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism ZakiyyahImanJackson In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order ... only one ... has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance ... was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared... one can cer tainly wager that man would be erased. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongo ing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethno class (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of secur ing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Sylvia Wynter,"Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/ Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument" FeministStudies39, no. 3. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 669 670 ZakiyyahImanJackson As Michel Foucault observes in the quotation above, the con cept of "man" is a relatively recent production—a mutation. In US academe, Foucault's observation that "man" is a historically contin gent formation is often credited with establishing what has become a scholarly imperative: namely, that the question of "man" be a cen tral object of humanistic inquiry, interrogation, and critique. It is commonly held that Foucault's work set the stage such that any later attempt to naturalize "man" or depict this formation as inevitable would typically be met with skepticism. Many fields, including post humanism, have been inspired by the legacy of Foucault's generative critique. Yet, I worry that to suggest a seamless, patrilineal link between poststructuralist criticism and posthumanist theory could poten tially display a Eurocentric tendency to erase the parallel genealogies of thought that have anticipated, constituted, and disrupted these fields' categories of analysis. For instance, fifteen years before Foucault's publication of The OrderofThings,Aimé Césaire, in DiscourseonColonialism, set before us an urgent task: Flow might we resignify and revaluehuman ity such that it breaks with the imperialist ontology and metaphysical essentialism of Enlightenment man? Césaire's groundbreaking cri tique was hastened by a wave of decolonial resistance that arguably provided the historical conditions of possibility for Foucault's subse quent analysis. Like Césaire, critics commonly associated with the theorization of race and colonialism, such as Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, anticipated and broadened the interrogation and critique of "man" by placing Western humanism in a broader field of gendered, sexual, racial, and colonial relations. Their work, like that of Foucault, is similarly invested in challenging the epistemological authority of "man," but they also stress that "man's" attempts to colonize the field of knowledge was, and continues to be, inextricably linked to the his tory ofWestern imperialism. They maintain that the figure "man" is not synonymous with "the human," but rather is a technology of slavery and colonialism that imposes its authority over "the univer sal" through a racialized deployment of force. With the full-fledged arrival of posthumanist theory in the 1990s, the epistemological integrity of "man" was subject to a heretical critique, as posthumanists challenged a range of conceptual pieties rooted in Enlightenment thought. Posthumanists attempted to reorient our ZakiyyahImanJackson 671 Books Discussed in This Essay HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. By Kalpana Rahita Seshadri. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. The Birth of a Jungle: Ammaltty in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. By Michael Lundblad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. By Mel Y. Chen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. understanding of human agency by underscoring human subjectiv ity's interdependency and porosity with respect to a world Enlight enment humanists...