The Media, Race, Violence Reading Group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. The group will engage with work from the fields of media studies, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, anti- and de-colonial theory, Black studies, cultural studies, and more.
#5: Becoming Human (I)
When: Friday December 11, 9-10:30am (and recurring the second Friday of every month)
Where: Zoom
This session will mark the first of a series of meetings concerned with interrogating the human and its relation to the long history of racial violence that continues to inform our lives. We will ask: How does the figure of the human become synonymous with the over-represented Western colonial construct, ‘Man’? How does the construction of ‘Man’ relate to racialising assemblages that bare certain nonwhite subjects from the category of human? How does technology relate to this particular construction of ‘Man’ and that which is presumed to be its opposite – Black Indigenous subjects, animals, machines. Sylvia Wynter stated that the object of her inquiry was not simply the human but rather the genres of the human. ‘Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human of “Man.”’ Wynter argues that the colonial world-making project imposed genre-specific truths on the world that have become solidified through the repetition of representations. Framing the human in terms of genre highlights its constructedness and invites us to work toward the abolition of ‘Man’ by simultaneously looking into the past and into the future. This interrogation of the human and its expression as ‘Man’ seeks to both question the autopoetic nature of racialisation and naturalisation of racism as commonsense, as well as seeking to articulate alternate conceptions of humanity grounded in irreducible difference.
This session will focus on a long essay by Sylvia Wynter that offers a history of the production of Man-as-human with a view to unsettling what she refers to as the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom. Continuing with our interest in speculative thought, we will also read an essay by Maddee Clark that considers both the reproduction of dehumanising, extinction narratives in science fiction and the possibilities of the genre for articulating Indingeous futurity. Mad Professor’s ‘Obeah Power’ offers us a way of leaping from the miserable present into a different future and models the possibility of a different relationship between technology and race. The further readings by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Alexander Weheliye (thanks for this suggestion Samira) offer vital context for the critiques of humanism articulated in Black studies and expand on Wynter’s thought. Future sessions will continue this thematic with a specific focus on the relationship between race, humanity, technology, technics, and machines, including readings from Vora and Atanasoski’s Surrogate Humanity
Themes/Objects: ‘Man’, pre-humanism, post-humanism, dehumanisation, animalisation, anti-Blackness, liberalism, futurity, automation, technology
Readings for Discussion:
Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation––An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3/3 (2003): p. 257-337
Maddee Clark, ‘Coded Devices’, Next Wave Worm Hole, 2016
Mad Professor, ‘Obeah Power’ (1985)
Further Reading:
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, One Becoming Human: An Introduction, in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World(New York: New York University Press, 2020), p. 1-44.
Alexander Weheliye, ‘Blackness: The Human’, in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
Extra treat:
David Scott (with Sylvia Wynter), ‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter’, Small Axe 4/2 (2000): 119-207.
Please contact Andrew Brooks for links to readings and to the Zoom discussion.