Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 14

In a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a), one of the present authors makes effective use of Enrique Dussels' important book entitled Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History to underscore six interrelated discursive and instrumental technologies of dismemberment: Hellenocentrism, Westernisation, Eurocentrism, secularism, periodisation and colonialism (Dussel 2011, xv−xviii). These epic colonial and imperial processes framed what David Marriott (2012) correctly articulates as colonial ‘inventions of existence’ for whiteness. Decoloniality underscores the struggles for (re-)existence of blackness.

It was within this colonial context that Europe defined itself as the centre of the earth, the birthplace of reason, the spring of universal life, the abode of universal truth, the paragon of civilisation and the inventor of the rights of people (Mbembe 2017, 11). Further to this, the European ‘Man’ self-defined itself as the ‘discoverer’ of other human species. In the process, this European Man elevated himself to the category of the ‘Creator’/God – the superior human being. It is, therefore, not surprising that historians like John M. Headley have been so enchanted by Eurocentric thought, to the extent of believing the nefarious claims of Hellenocentrism, Westernisation, secularism, Eurocentrism and colonialism. Headleys' book entitled The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (2008) valorises Europe as the progenitor of values of humanism, democracy and human rights. The consequence of this conviction is clearly exemplified in Headleys' unproblematic acceptance of the imperial and colonial ‘paradigm of discovery’ as the basis for common humanity. Listen to him:

This sudden exposure to a fully inhabited (or so it seemed) yet extra-Christian world, this abruptly expanded ecumene with its variety of peoples, in time created an increasingly secular, religiously neutral lens that gradually revealed humankinds' common biological and moral unity. In the terrible shock that Europeans inflicted upon hitherto unknown peoples, the contacts between the peoples posited the fact of humanity as an ideal to be realised in some distant future. Beyond the brutal impact and the immense problem of Adams' newfound children, the intellectual instruments afforded by the decisive re-emergence of Stoicism and natural law, the traditional means of promoting such community, faltered in achieving the universal commitment implicit in the ideal of a single humanity. (Headley 2008, 27–28)

But to argue along the lines of Headley is to reject the undeniable fact that there were other human civilisations and human struggles outside Europe which contributed to the emergence of positive human values such as human rights and democracy. What Headley and other Eurocentric scholars ignore is that the unfolding of Euro-North American-centric modernity not only inaugurated ‘rupture’ (colonisation of time into pre-modern and modern temporalities) and ‘difference’ (see Bhambra 2007, 1) but also entailed a consistent stealing of history and denial of the humanity of others. Eurocentric secularism became predicated on what Gordon (1999) articulates as ‘bad faith’. Bad faith entails endless proclamations of tenets of humanity at the rhetorical level while practically killing humanity itself everywhere (see also Fanon 1963). Bad faith is claiming humanity for a particular ‘race’ and denying all other human species of humanity.

Gordon, in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1999, 1), poses the question: ‘What is the being or ontological limitation of human reality in an antiblack world?’ His response is: ‘Antiblack racism may embody the extreme poles of the possibility of a universal humankind; it wrenches human beings into the most extreme visual metaphors of difference: from the most light to the most dark, from the fullness of colour (something) to its complete absence (nothing), from “white,” that is, to “black”.’

In pursuit of bad faith, European secularism invented a science of death that was mobilised to justify coloniality of being. Using bad faith and pseudo-racial science, European secularism consistently pushed God out of the human imagination. Belief in God was only used instrumentally, in Africa and other sites of colonialism, to blind the colonised to the hypocrisy and negative features of the Western civilisational colonial project. Dussel (2011, xvi) emphasises that a new ‘periodization’, in which human history was cut into a linear chronology of ‘Ancient, Middle and Modern Ages’, emerged as Europe propelled itself into the future and all others into the past. No wonder, in this periodisation informed by bad faith and pseudo-racial science, that all other civilisations were dismembered and pushed into the category ‘Ancient’. The ‘modern’ was monopolised by Europe.

Thus, the foundational dismemberment of black people took the form of denial of their very humanity. This commenced with Christopher Columbuss' questioning of the natives of Latin America about whether they had ‘souls’ − remember the historic Valladolid Debates (1550–51) in which Bartolome de La Casas and Gines De Sepulveda engaged in intense debates over the ontological question of the humanity of the natives (Castro 2007). This, according to Castro, marked the genesis of the ‘colonial death project’ that eventually engulfed Asia, Africa and the rest of the world that experienced modern colonisation. The ‘death project’ was and is a reference to ‘the exercise of violence in coloniality, which targets the actual processes of life and the conditions for existence: in short, polarity’ (Suárez-Krabbe 2016, 3). ‘Necropolitics’ (Mbembe 2003, 11) and the ‘ethics of war’ (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 4) are leitmotifs of the colonial death project; they distinguished those who were to ‘live’ from those who had to ‘die’. Ramón Grosfoguel gives empirical framing to this project when he articulates the ‘four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century’ that were foundational to the politics of dismemberment and the modern colonial death project. These were the conquest of Al-Andalus, the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, the killing of millions of women accused of being witches by burning them alive in Europe, and the extermination of natives of Latin America (Grosfoguel 2013, 74). The conquest of Al-Andalus in 1492 targeted Muslims and Jews, and was propelled by the logic of ‘purity of blood’ as a form of dismemberment. At that time colour was not yet used as a criterion of exclusion; purity of blood and religion were the key technologies of dismemberment. Here lies the origin of the fundamentalist concept of ‘one identity, one political authority, and one religion’ (Suárez-Krabbe 2016, 54).

The policies of physical extermination (genocide/ethnocide) targeting the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa constituted the second technology of coloniality. The black people of Africa did not only experience genocides but also enslavement, through what became known as the ‘transatlantic slave trade’. Enslavement naturalised ‘the colonial criteria of inferiority, linking racism and capitalism’ (Suárez-Krabbe 2016, 56). All of this history is important for an understanding of the genealogies of the invention of blackness on a world scale. For example, the terms ‘Negro’ and ‘black’, as racial inferiorising categories, emerged in the context of this inimical colonial/imperial/capitalist history. The time of the enslavement of black people and their transportation across the Atlantic Ocean into the Americas contributed immensely to the birth of ‘blackness’ as a state of being and an identity (Du Bois 1965, 20).

What has to be emphasised is that even though European discourses of the human were shifting across time and space, what remained constant was the invented inferiority of those deemed to be black. The Caribbean decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter (2003, 297) correctly captures the historical fact that the enslavement of black people created ‘a model for the invention of a by-nature difference between “natural masters” and “natural slaves”’. With specific reference to Africa, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o (2009b) argues that the ‘dismemberment’ of Africa unfolded in two stages. The first stage is traceable to the enslavement of black people and their shipment as ‘cargo’ across the Atlantic into the Americas and the Caribbean. This is how Wa Thiong’o describes what he considers to be the first phase of this dismemberment: ‘During the first of these, the African personhood was divided into two halves: the continent and its diaspora. African slaves, the central commodity in the mercantile phase of capitalism, formed the basis of the sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations in the Caribbean and American mainland’ (Wa Thiong’o 2009b, 5).

The second stage of dismemberment of Africa identified by Wa Thiong’o took place at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. This second level of ‘dismemberment’ took the literal form of the fragmentation and reconstitution of ‘Africa into British, French, Portuguese, German, Belgian, and Spanish Africa’ (Wa Thiong’o 2009b, 5). Wa Thiong’o further argues that those black people who were physically removed from the continent experienced ‘an additional dismemberment’ in the form of separation ‘not only from his[/her] continent and his[/her] labour but also from his[/her] very sovereign being’ (2009b, 6). Those who remained on the continent but experienced the ‘scramble’ for and ‘partition’ of Africa, were subjected to further dismemberment in the form of dispossession of land: ‘The land is taken away from its owner, and the owner is turned into a worker on the same land, thus losing control of his[/her] natural and human resources’ (Wa Thiong’o 2009b, 6).

What must be underscored is that the modern school, the Christian church and the ‘Westernised’ university play an active role in the colonial and even post-colonial process of dismemberment (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a, 2018b). This is so because ‘cultural subjugation was a necessary condition for economic and political mastery’ (Wa Thiong’o 1997, 9). Colonial education is identified by Wa Thiong’o as the most important force for dismemberment and alienation, because it invades and takes control of the mental universe in order to produce a distorted consciousness among the colonised (Wa Thiong’o 2012, 28).

Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018a, 2018b) distils six ‘dimensions of dismemberment’. The first is the ‘foundational dismemberment’ involving the questioning of the very humanity of black people, as well as the invention of blackness itself (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi 2016, 5). The second is enslavement, which resulted not only in the reduction of black African people to a commodity but also in the fragmentation of African personhood into continental and diasporic divisions. The third is the scramble for and partition of Africa that took place in Berlin, resulting in the fragmentation of the continent not only into various colonies but also into various invented and contending ethnicities, enclosed within colonially crafted boundaries. The fourth dimension is the theft/usurpation/erasure/silencing of African history so as to deny its very existence, in order to establish the Hegelian notion of a people without history and a continent of darkness and emptiness (Tibebu 2011, xiv). The fifth is the production and reproduction of dismemberment by the ‘post-colonial’ state, under the leadership of a colonially produced black bourgeoisie who are trapped in a paradigm of neocolonialism/coloniality. The final dimension is the continued reproduction of patriarchy so as to dismember women from power, knowledge and being itself.

Since Euro-North American-centric modernity unfolded as a combination of enslavement, genocides, conquest, colonisation, epistemicides, conversion and linguicides, the major challenge facing ‘ex-colonized’ people is how to ‘recuperate’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a, 78). This difficult and complex process of recuperation is at the heart of the process of re-membering.