Unthinking Mastery by Julietta Singh-Presentation by Sara Niazi.pptx

Julietta Singh aspires for ‘utopian desires’ to surface out of the quagmire of the postcolonial, colonial and anticolonial narratives when the ‘mastery’ is released from the politics of language, culture, and technology– she believes that through adapting ‘dehumanism’ ‘mastery’ can be deconstructed to be fluid to shape or give meanings to the most dehumanized, or the queer inhumans.

1. Unthinking Mastery Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements A QUEER CASE of Utopian Desires in Julietta Singh’s Presented by Sara Niazi To Dr. Saiyma Aslam

2. About the Author A Professor of English at University of Richmond Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Richmond A uthor of three books:  Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements  (Duke UP, 2018),  No Archive Will Restore You  (Punctum Books, 2018), The Breaks (Coffee House Press, 2021) . AREAS OF EXPERTISE Postcolonial Studies Critical Theory Transnational Feminisms Queer Theory Environmental Humanities Dr. Julietta Singh: is a postcolonial scholar and nonfiction writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of Richmond. 2

3. Defining Mastery A “I have suggested that to define mastery would be a gesture toward mastering it. It would also risk foreclosing mastery in such a way that disables attention to the gaps and fissures of such a definition, where mastery may leak out and take forms that are not contained within its definitive script.” (Page 12- Introduction) Dr. Julietta Singh: is a postcolonial scholar and nonfiction writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of Richmond. 3

4. Introduction Julietta Singh aspires for ‘utopian desires’ to surface out of the quagmire of the postcolonial, colonial and anticolonial narratives when the ‘mastery’ is released from the politics of language, culture, and technology– she believes that through adapting ‘ dehumanism ’ ‘mastery’ can be deconstructed to be fluid to shape or give meanings to the most dehumanized, or the queer inhumans . Unthinking Mastery 4

5. Sections of the Book A 5

6. To Understan d Mastery Unthinking Mastery 6

7. Introduction– Reading Against Mastery

8. Introduction– Reading Against Mastery Unthinking Mastery 8 Thesis: “Mastery is everywhere” The entangled moments of decolonization: Anticolonials & the Postcolonials Aim: to trace the utopian desires: to find acceptance or legitimate status for the queer inhumans Dehumanism : Deconstruction of humanism, un-fleshing from subjectivities founded upon mastery to find new ‘ selfs ’ or ‘genres’ such as posthumans or queer inhumans Locating Mastery: In social structure, in language (of texts) and in beliefs of being decolonized Not to “Feel comfortable at home” The Particularities of Mastery The qualities of mastery explained: Being the best or the master Hegelian formulation of Master/Slave splitting (making a subject/subordinate) Man as a Master

9. Introduction– Reading Against Mastery Unthinking Mastery 9 Postcolonial Hegel Slave-Master Dialect Eurocentric and racist philosophy Narrative and Matter Narratives and their meanings produce mastery How inhumans can produce mastery through meanings generated from matter Anthropocentricism of mastery is displaced Vulnerable Reading A dehumanist methodology: Derrida’s insistence that binaries cannot be revered Spivak’s idea of ‘ antimasterful ’ reading The Form of Unthinking Mastery: Summary

10. Decolonizing Mastery Chapter 1

11. Chapter 1: Decolonizing Mastery Unthinking Mastery 11 Focuses on the gendered politics of decolonization and the discourse of mastery with a focus on Gandhian and Fanonian thought. Mohandas Gandhi, and Frantz Fanon, despite their inclusive aims, shared a belief that decolonization hinged on an anti-colonial self-mastery that excluded “colonized women, indigenous peoples, the ‘uncivilized’ groups of the emergent nation state, the animal, the cripple, and nature itself” Fanon’s political masculinism and universal male subject rendered feminine subjectivity both crucial and absent from his decolonization narratives. Singh thus argues that Fanon’s embodiment of an emergent decolonized subjectivity eschewed gendered and sexualized figures. Likewise, Gandhi propagated gendered oppression through the inclusive narrative of home rule. A new masterful governing Indian required a rearticulating of masculine gender– women: mothers and wives emerged as static (house) keepers of practices without agency.

12. Language of Mastery Chapter 2

13. Chapter 2: The Language of Mastery Unthinking Mastery 13 Singh challenges the language of mastery, showing how it is reinforced and replicated through our education systems, suggests that a dehumanist education would consist of “education as ethics; education as a radically unmasterful act that requires our ethical grounds are always aspiring, shifting, experimenting, failing—but striving, nevertheless, toward more ethical orientations” This dehumanist learning starts with a reorientation to the ways in which the language of mastery is understood and used. the problematic use of language in decolonial and anticolonial discussions and literatures returning to Fanon and Gandhi, as well as to Césaire , Glissant , Achebe and Ngugi. By tracing these writers’ complex relationships with the languages in which they write, create, and debate Singh ultimately suggests that “anticolonial thinkers tend to insist… on language mastery as a crucial practice aimed to undoing the force of colonial rule” while “postcolonial writers… share a desire for unmasterful ways of formulating the relation between language and the postcolonial imagination”. Here, Singh aligns herself with the oppositional and anticolonial writers Achebe and Ngugi, who suggest that we need to reimagine ways of resisting the language of mastery that permeates the work of writers such as Césaire and Glissant , even as they attempt to distance themselves from colonial entanglements.

14. Posthumanitarion Fictions Chapter 3

15. Chapter 3: Post Humanitarian Fictions Unthinking Mastery 15 Singh offers an alternative to reading for mastery: “vulnerable reading.” This chapter further claims about mastery and explain dehumanizing through “becoming vulnerable to the self-narrations of other subjects” Singh reads Coetzee’s  Life & Times of Michael K  (1983) and Devi’s short story “Little Ones” (1998), both of which complicate the practice of humanitarian work. Singh calls these texts “ posthumanitarian fictions” because they expose the fact that humanitarians “cannot be extracted from the unequal power relations they seek to redress” Singh uses these texts to pressure readers into loosening the holds they maintain on humanitarian liberal subjectivity, inviting us to “inhabit ourselves differently” The problem with the figure of the humanitarian, according to these texts, is that its “claims to goodness…. are ensnared in the production and enforcement of dehumanization” Singh suggests that we must acknowledge our involvement within this system. Once we do so, it will be possible to understand the source of our complicity and the effects of noncompliance, as well as to re-vision humanitarian ideologies.

16. Humanimal Dispossessions Chapter 4

17. Chapter 4: Humanimal Dispossessions Unthinking Mastery 17 The fourth chapter deals with the human as animal, as well as with violence toward the animal in Sinha’s  Animal’s People  (2007) and Coetzee’s lecture  The Lives of Animals  (1999). Singh reads Animal, the main character of Sinha’s novel, as a dehumanized subject whose disfigured body opens up potential paths of relationality. One such relationship is the one between Animal and his canine companion, Jara , who is introduced in the novel as Animal’s “friend”. By the end of the novel, Animal embraces his animality and arrives at a  humanimal   ethics that allows him to live with Jara and create a space for another dehumanized person, Anjali, in queer solidarity. Singh uses  The Lives of Animals  and her own experiences with her cat, Cassie, to embrace a queer solidarity through “active, unmasterful forms of self-dispossession”. Her discussion of the ailing of Cassie and the weakening of the humanimal bond between author and cat situates the realities of “being with/as animals”, while her reading of Coetzee highlights the complexities of “sympathetic imagination” which extends itself to “that which thought cannot foreclose” Key to this ability to imagine is the Halberstamian idea of failure. Failure is always a possibility in the humanimal relationship, as there is always a foundation of alterity in imagining the nonhuman. Humans should strive toward dispossession, a “ humanimal ethics” that encourages a revisioning of the structures of subjectivity and offer “new ways of becoming the creatures we are”. By examining the structures of our relationships to animals, and our own animality, Singh suggests that we can shift away from mastery into a queer relationality reliant on her idea of dehumanization.

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19. Cultivating Discomfort Chapter 5

20. Chapter 5: Cultivating Discomfort Unthinking Mastery 20 In the final chapter, Singh brings her discussion to a close with the idea of discomfort, using Sara Ahmed’s work on the feeling as “generative” and “transformative”. She examines discomfort by reading Jamaica Kincaid’s reflections on her work in her garden, and the questions of mastery that her language replicates and reworks. Singh writes that Kincaid’s “garden writing emphasizes a subject whose position in relation to the ‘natural’ remains haunted by…. the force of Enlightenment thought”. Kincaid is able to vanish the specter of the Enlightenment during moments in which she engages in dehumanization by aligning herself with animals in her garden and acknowledging her complicity in the erasure of the Nepalese people in recounting her own travels. By reading Kincaid’s work in the garden—her transplanting, flourishings , and failures—Singh ends this chapter, and the book, by returning to the idea of “vital ambivalence” as a way to uproot “masterful subjectivities” to create a better future.

21. Reflection on Theories & Personal Perspective “ ”

22. Personal Perspectives It seems that the whole narrative is build up to find traces of liberation or as Singh calls ‘exile’ from the ‘mastery to see at least some chances for the Utopian Desires to be accepted… The utopian desire is to aspire to have an equitable world where the ‘queer inhumans’ or posthumanism would get the due acceptance or rather more than acceptance (rights). Singh hints that only vulnerability and failure to read and understand, the queer refusal of mastery may be practiced. She refers to Jack Judith Halberstam who is a prominent scholar and cultural critic known for his work in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies. Unthinking Mastery 22

23. Theorists Singh has elaborated or critical extended on the works of Franz Fanon’s decolonization. Along with Fanon she has also critically rejected Gandhi’s anticoloniality and its linked ideas Moreover Singh has nuanced Gayatri Spivak and Sarah Wood ideas to ‘rearrange’ or ‘reframe’ literary texts to attain read ‘without mastery’. Suggested as the ideas of failure and vulnerable reading. The theory of Deconstruction given by Jacque Derrida, inevitably lies in the fundamentals of Unthinking Mastery, Jane Benett’s Vibrant Matter has also been referred to explain the ‘Posthumanism’s Julietta Singh has attempted to revive the theory/ ies of postcolonialism from a leftist perspective– to let the Queers coinhabit the world of theory with the ‘others’ not as ‘others’ Unthinking Mastery 23

24. Reflection Singh argues that the concept of mastery, particularly in the fields of technology, language, and culture, has been used to justify and perpetuate systems of oppression and exploitation. Singh explains how mastery has been used to dehumanize and subjugate marginalized communities, particularly through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the book, Singh draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary sources, including literature, philosophy, and critical theory, to illustrate the ways in which mastery has been used as a tool of domination and control. She also offers a critique of the ways in which contemporary society continues to prioritize mastery and control, often at the expense of human dignity and autonomy. Ultimately, Singh argues for a decolonial approach to understanding and challenging the concept of mastery, one that centers the voices and experiences of those who have been historically marginalized and oppressed. She calls for a reimagining of power and knowledge that is rooted in empathy, solidarity, and a commitment to social justice. Unthinking Mastery 24

25. Thank you