Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 10

The modern world that Jean-Paul Sartre encounters and describes phenomenologically (Sartre ([1943] 2003) is a world where the powerful and the privileged have ‘being’, and the powerless and oppressed have ‘nothingness’ and emptiness. For the racialised former slaves in the Americas, blacks in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and the poor at large, the combination of the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge produced in them senses of deficit and inadequacy as human beings. The lack of the wholeness that Fanon describes (Fanon 2008, 3) refers to the emptiness that is created in the oppressed by dehumanising oppression and exploitation such as they encountered in the experience of slavery and its aftermaths. The oppressed develop a ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois [1859] 1969, 45) whereby they judge themselves by the standards of their oppressors. Those whose full humanity has been doubted may develop self-doubt and self-hate. A veil of invisibility masks the oppressed by silencing and erasing their human agency, rendering their lives, as Judith Butler (2009, xix) argues, ‘ungrievable’, disposable and dispensable.

The formal end of slavery, colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, however, did not evaporate coloniality: its oppressions and exploitations remain stubbornly durable and haunting to its victims. Power and privilege are at their most forceful when they are concealed and invisible. It is in its invisibility and its power that Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2008) notes coloniality to be a metaphysical catastrophe that overwhelms former slaves and the former colonised of the Global South. Oppression, in the arguments of Maldonado-Torres and Dussel (1985), is a kind of war upon the being of all the dominated and oppressed. What Maldonado-Torres (2007) defines as the coloniality of being refers to the forms of slavish and colonial power relations that remain and are reproduced even after administrative slavery and juridical colonialism have been abolished. Slavery and colonisation in their full application became systems that gave birth to other, more toxic forms of power relations and orders of the distribution of privilege and division of labour. Aimé Césaire (1972) describes colonisation as an all-enveloping system that left no relations unaffected and uninfected by its violence. For that reason, in talking about the colonised and former colonised, Césaire is talking about metaphysically compromised communities and beings. Colonialism, as he describes it, did not end with the physical dispossession and displacement of the colonised but extended into psychological, sociological and theological punishment of all its victims, who were left emptied of all the content of being. Such victims became so enmeshed in coloniality itself that they began to reproduce and magnify it in a multiplicity of ways, including becoming oppressors in their own right. Once the oppressed assimilate oppressor consciousness, Paulo Freire (1993) argues, they begin to be accessories and functionaries of oppression, which they begin to imagine as normal and natural; they begin to fear the prospects of freedom and resist their own liberation.

Struggles for liberation from oppression and for rehumanisation of the dehumanised, therefore, have to reckon with the resistance that comes even from among the oppressed, who would have navigated and negotiated oppressive positions of their own within the system of domination and do not imagine a world outside forms of dominance and oppression. Oppression is in its fullest flight when the oppressed seek out their own pockets of privilege within the system of dominance, and cannot imagine inclusive liberation. The human, as an idea and an experience in the world, has become so troubled within the contestations that pit power against justice, that the storied debate between Noam Chomsky and Michael Foucault in 1972 (Elders 1974) dwelt on whether there are any qualities and values any more that can be called properties of the human, in a world where humans themselves seem so passionately invested in the negation of liberation and of the human. In the paradigm of war, of nihilist political and economic competition, the human is assailed by forms of physical and metaphysical violence that have rendered being itself scarce and to be distributed in troublingly asymmetrical terms.

In complex and interlocking ways, these constructions and reconstructions have taken being human away from some and given others the monopoly of it. Maldonado-Torres (2007, 245) notes that at play is an ‘imperial attitude’ that he calls ‘racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic scepticism’. Conquered and marginalised people become dehumanised through the characterisation and definition of certain deficits and lacks. Those whose histories and languages are denied importance and remain native and indigenous are, as of old, peripheralised as uncivilised rustics, bereft of reason and rationality. In such circumstances the task of liberation becomes an intellectual and political project of rehumanising the dehumanised. For Fanon (1963, 251), ‘Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence’ of power and knowledge that left the weak and dominated of the world ‘wretched’ and ‘damned’, in spite of the talk about man and humanity that European philosophy professes. A new model of the human is wanted. Fanons' decolonial resolution is not a simple one, but rather a proposition for creating another world in the same world where Europe made itself hegemonic and turned its values into common sense. Fanon proposes a radical departure from the Eurocentric paradigm of the human that loudly celebrated the human and human rights, but participated in genocides of conquest, enslavement and colonisation which killed human beings in their millions.

Power loses its legitimacy by indulging in the privilege of dehumanising the powerless. Oppression dehumanises both the oppressor and the oppressed, and one cannot ignore or suspend the humanity of the other without compromising ones' own (Freire 1993). A need has arisen for humanity to depart from the European and Western colonial example of power and knowledge, to champion other human directions in pursuit of liberated futures. Liberation from oppression, therefore, demands the rehumanisation of both the oppressor and the oppressed.