Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 11

This volume begins with the present chapter that demonstrates how, through social and political constructions, some human beings were disqualified and removed from the human family. Power and the privilege that accompanies it have worked to instrumentalise knowledge, including the scientific and the theological, to construct and produce the oppressed and the exploited. Their struggles for social justice and liberation start with defending their basic belonging to the human family. Life is experienced daily as a social and political war waged upon those who have lost their human equality. This chapter unfolds the canvas of a multivocal conversation that will take place in this book, one that is troubled by imaginations and constructions of the other while seeking to trouble dominant and hegemonic inventions of this oppressed and exploited other. William Mpofu and Melissa Steyn, in this chapter, provide a vocabulary, critical accent and tone that initiate an engaged exploration of the human in a dehumanising world.

In chapter two, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Patricia Pinky Ndlovu treat the issue of ‘blackness’ − which, just like that of ‘whiteness’, is a sociogenic question – as that which emerges from the invented modern Euro-North American-centric world system and its ever shifting global orders. This examination of blackness at a world scale makes possible the revelation of how blackness was constructed as the social, ideological and political inferiorisation and infantilisation of enslaved and colonised Africans. The authors use Maldonado-Torress' (2007) concept of the coloniality of being to unmask the dismemberment of the human at a world scale, and to gesture towards decolonial technologies of rehumanisation and re-membering as forms of liberation. In as much as blackness and whiteness are constructions of the modern colonial world system, this chapter argues for a decolonial re-membering and reconstruction of the human at a world scale, and suggests that decoloniality, as a deconstruction of the toxic constructions of coloniality, is a move towards human liberation.

Writing from a critical perspective that is sensitive to human bodies that have been disqualified from the human family because of their sexual orientation, and indeed their non-gender conformity, Olayinka Akanle, Gbenga S. Adejare and Jojolola Fasuyi ask the troubling question, ‘to what extent are we all humans?’ in chapter three. The case study of the chapter is Nigeria, where through expressions of hatred and violence, backed by state power and machinery, some human beings are discriminated against and persecuted, and thus expelled from the category of the human because of their sexual orientation. The ways in which the dehumanising structure of systematic heteronormativity in the Nigerian setting uses the cover of religion, law and morality to minimise the humanity of those that do not conform to its dictates are highlighted. Same-sex intimate relationships in Nigeria and in many other countries are banned by law, and penalties that range from social ostracisation to imprisonment are levied against offenders. Like the blackness examined in chapter two, homosexuality is used to exclude, marginalise and dehumanise the other, who is rendered punishable and dispensable. This chapter highlights exactly how social and mental constructions such as gender are weaponised against the human, especially against those people who have been constructed and produced as inferior, in the world.

In chapter four, Sibonokuhle Ndlovu delves into the important, but often neglected, question of how disability is socially constructed, and with critical insight illuminates how it can be deconstructed. This chapter forcefully insists on the humanity of people who live with disabilities in a world that erects prejudices and hatred against them, and uses bodily functions to deny dignity and human recognition to the differently abled. Normalcy itself is a construction and confabulation, used by those whom it empowers and privileges to suppress and exclude their others from mainstream and dignified life. This chapter contributes to the growing number of scholarly and critical voices that seek to dismantle hierarchies of ableism and to recover the denied humanity of people living with disabilities of the body and the mind. In its intellectually rigorous critical approach, the chapter contributes to a social justice vision for the recovery of the lost common humanity of all human beings.

Cary Burnett, in chapter five, engages with ageism as an othering tool. She artistically and critically explores the important question of what it means to be old, female, alone and out of step with the technological world around one. Using the narrative of her screenplay, When Granny Went on the Internet, Burnett seeks to creatively subvert hegemonic and normative expectations around age and the different phases of life in the world of rapidly changing knowledge and technology. The chapter critically recovers life stages as aspects of being human, and restores ageing as part of the normal journey of life. This chapter is novel not only in the way it weaves the analytical and the artistic together, but also in how it restores the long time people spend on earth to the sphere of opportunities for liberation.

Arguing from the point of view of black mineworkers in post-apartheid South Africa, in chapter six Robert Maseko examines how conditions of poverty and the endurance of racism beyond decolonisation infantilise these workers, who retain the status of ‘minors’ in spite of their experience and maturity, and the hard and exploitative labour they perform. Black mineworkers still bear a bleeding colonial wound, long after administrative colonialism and apartheid have been abolished in South Africa. Using a case study of the South African Platinum Belt, Maseko exposes the existential experiences of black South African labourers who continue to live out apartheid-era relations and conditions well after the political independence of the country was achieved, and well into what is supposed to be a democratic era. Through his study, Maseko demonstrates that democratic dispensations in Africa seem to have failed to evaporate the durable realities of coloniality.

In chapter seven, Tendayi Sithole addresses the gendered nature of exploitation, using the experiences detailed in a slave narrative. At stake here is the politics of the slave, the figure who is denied any form of being. The life and death of Aunt Hester, Frederick Douglasss' aunt immortalised in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ([1845] 1995), is dependent on the will of her master, Captain Anthony, who is human, after all, and has the prerogative to lord it over her existence because she is the slave, his possession, his property, his thing – that is, nothing human. In many ways, in its form and its content, this chapter performs the violence suffered by the dehumanised in a world where being human is not guaranteed.

Much like human cultures, customs and traditions at large, human languages do not walk on their own legs, separate from the human bodies that bear them. Brian Sibanda, in chapter eight, argues the case for language understood as part of being human. Using the literature of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o (1981), Sibanda presents a critical vindication of language as being, and as a central part of the human. The political activism of Wa Thiong’o, who in protest against the cultural imperialism of the English language resorted to writing in his Gikuyu mother tongue, is understood to be a gesture towards the recovery and restoration of pride and dignity in being a human being. Like Morgan Ndlovu in chapter eleven, Sibanda contributes to and expands the thinking on the decolonisation of knowledge and decolonisation of being. The linguicides (killing of languages) and linguifams (famines of language) that colonialism perpetrated in Africa are not all that removed from the genocides of conquest that systematically and en masse eliminated the bodies of the natives. Decolonisation of language is presented as another principal way of restoring being to the human, in Africa and elsewhere.

Nokuthula Hlabangane, in chapter nine, contributes to the exploding of the myth of the superiority, objectivity and neutrality of Western science. The pretence of universality and rationality in Western knowledge and knowledge-making are not removed from the rhetoric of civilisation and modernisation that accompanied the enslaving and colonial missions in the Global South. In a powerful argument, Hlabangane, like many decolonial thinkers, insists on the provincialism and situatedness of Western thought. The gesture of this chapter is towards a decolonial delinking from Western thought for purposes of re-linking with it as one aspect of the thought that human beings have produced in the world, and not as the totality of world knowledge.

Paradoxically, some non-human entities such as commercial companies are increasingly being humanised and given personhood. In a modern capitalist world order corporations and non-human business entities have achieved the status of legal persons and corporate citizens. C.D. Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara contributes, in chapter ten, to a reassessment of the personhood of the juristic person in relation to ‘other’ people. Without either physical body or soul, the company in the modern world has hegemonically achieved a life and a kind of personhood of its own that frequently eclipses that of humans as we know them. This chapter explores the history and relationship of the company as a juristic person in a world where humanity and humanness are contested and cannot be taken for granted. The intersection of the power of money and that of law and politics in distributing humanness is a subject of interest in this important chapter.

Morgan Ndlovu, in chapter eleven, deploys a decolonial perspective to unmask the usurpation of traditional knowledges through the exoticisation and commercialisation of cultural villages. Ndlovu shows how the business of cultural tourism naturally depends on the idea of cultural differences, and how, in the non-Western world, it also serves as a ritual of denialism of the idea of co-humanness. In the tourism business of cultural villages, Ndlovu finds that the humanness and cultural being of poor, indigenous peoples are suppressed, and cultural differences manipulated, for purposes of profit by global corporations, in a form of theft and exploitation of indigenous knowledges that pits the powerful against the powerless. This chapter expands our understanding of coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being, and contributes to the unmasking of invisible structures of power and privilege.

Fittingly, this volume concludes with a critical search for a decolonial humanism and a diversal global dialogue. In chapter twelve, Siphamandla Zondi provides a critique of the ways in which humanity has been fragmented, and human communication reduced to a monologue in which power talks down to the powerless. The chapter philosophically bemoans the classification of human beings according to race that has impeded symmetrical dialogue between peoples with different access to power and privilege, in a world where human difference has been criminalised. The chapter is a critical plea for the decolonisation of being and restoration of communication, as a means of political and cultural translation aimed at achieving human understanding in human difference.