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Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements
In Unthinking Mastery Julietta Singh challenges a core, fraught dimension of geopolitical, cultural, and scholarly endeavor: the drive toward mastery over the self and others. Drawing on postcolonial theory, queer theory, new materialism, and animal studies, Singh traces how pervasive the concept of mastery has been to modern politics and anticolonial movements. She juxtaposes destructive uses of mastery, such as the colonial domination of bodies, against more laudable forms, such as intellectual and linguistic mastery, to underscore how the concept—regardless of its use—is rooted in histories of violence and the wielding of power. For anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi, forms of bodily mastery were considered to be the key to a decolonial future. Yet as Singh demonstrates, their advocacy for mastery unintentionally reinforced colonial logics. In readings of postcolonial literature by J. M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, Indra Sinha, and Jamaica Kincaid, Singh suggests that only by moving beyond the compulsive desire to become masterful human subjects can we disentangle ourselves from the legacies of violence and fantasies of invulnerability that lead us to hurt other humans, animals, and the environment.
217 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 3, 2018
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715 people want to read
About the author
Julietta Singh
5Ìýbooks50ÌýfollowersJulietta Singh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond. She is a writer and academic who works at the intersections of postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018), and No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018). Her academic writing has been published in leading cultural theory journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Symploke, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her creative work has appeared in venues such as American Poetry Review, Animal Shelter, Prairie Fire, Social Text, and Women & Performance.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 17, 2021
eternally reading this forever i wish i had read it when i was much younger, but i think i needed it the most rn. this should be required reading for any humanities course, and for any scholar who is genuinely interested in carving a way to move forward & elsewhere.
February 5, 2018
I really enjoyed this - an importent critique of postcolonial and anticolonial thought from a place of radical decolonial thinking. Definitely recommend! The part on her cat was especially amazing :)
June 19, 2024
“When you study language, any language, you learn quickly that you do not possess it. To the contrary, the study of language and literature is precisely the study of how language escapes, evades, and crystallized differently at different times through different speakers.�
February 9, 2018
This book is incredible. It has me rethinking - or unthinking - so many building blocks of my approach to ethics, pedagogy, and solidarity.
September 25, 2020
an intimate and rigorous text in unthinking mastery, from core postcolonial texts and academic/disciplinarian knowledge production to vulnerable interspecies home spaces & eco-sovereignty gardens.
March 10, 2024
While this was an introduction (for me) to post-colonial thinking, I was attracted to practices like vulnerable reading and humanimalities.
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October 16, 2019Scholarly. Postcolonial, feminist, invested in dismantling our current oppressive formation of "the human." In particular, its focus is "mastery," which it understands as a sort of shared logic that links and informs many different scales of phenomena, contexts, practices, and experiences, including those that are easily legible as instances of oppression and domination but lots of others that we have to look at harder to understand as sharing in the same harmful logic. Though it shies away from a clear definition, the logic of mastery includes the creation of rigid boundaries, the placing of one side of that boundary as dominant over the other side, and the sustaining of that relationship over time. The book in particular traces logics of mastery through various contexts that we usually think of as opposing domination or at least as irrelevant to domination � the work of major anti-colonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi, through postcolonial debates about language, and via literary texts through our relationships with animals and with nature more broadly.
Following on those last elements, it expands on ideas from Sylvia Wynter and others in which liberation requires the cultivation of new genres of (and beyond) 'the human.' To do that, we can't just decide to end our reproduction of logics of mastery � they are too deeply baked into us and our practices and our social world. But we can attend to those logics and stay with the discomfort that close attention produces and we can cultivate encounters with texts and beings and experiences that, all together, will contribute to unsettling our stability as masterful subjects and creating possibilities for new logics of self and new social logics of 'we' that can open up other possibilities for life that are not dependent on domination and exclusion.
I have mixed feelings in general about this kind of scholarly work and its deep attention to the cultivation of new selves in how it thinks about transforming the world. I don't disagree with that connection � I think it is inevitable that substantive change can only happen simultaneously (though highly unevenly and unpredictably) across scales, and it is not a bad thing to be grounded in the scale of the self. In the case of this book, I think it really does have illuminating things to say about the ways in which colonial and authoritarian logics permeate our lives and our collective projects, and subvert what we hope to accomplish through them � in that sense, it is very much related to impulses found in non-scholarly anti-authoritarian contexts, and I think can be used to inform such impulses. I agree that these are things that we need to pay attention to and develop strategies to navigate, and that work will often not look like left stereotypes of what 'political work' should be. And I've always been in favour of engaging with scholarly work for what it is, recognizing that it follows its own logics and imperatives, and those of us who try to function at least a little bit in both worlds can contirubte to the work of translating it into more movement-legible terms. But I still wish books like this did more to situate their insights in the context not only of being a self encountering texts or a self listening across difference or whatever, but a self working in a group of other selves to push our institution to respond better to sexual assault or racism, or a self working a lousy job while going to school and trying to work on the local minimum wage campaign, or whatever.
Anyway, an interesting book if you like this kind of thing, at a remove from movements but not irrelevant to them, and a source of a few things I'll be happy to think about as I work on my current project.
Following on those last elements, it expands on ideas from Sylvia Wynter and others in which liberation requires the cultivation of new genres of (and beyond) 'the human.' To do that, we can't just decide to end our reproduction of logics of mastery � they are too deeply baked into us and our practices and our social world. But we can attend to those logics and stay with the discomfort that close attention produces and we can cultivate encounters with texts and beings and experiences that, all together, will contribute to unsettling our stability as masterful subjects and creating possibilities for new logics of self and new social logics of 'we' that can open up other possibilities for life that are not dependent on domination and exclusion.
I have mixed feelings in general about this kind of scholarly work and its deep attention to the cultivation of new selves in how it thinks about transforming the world. I don't disagree with that connection � I think it is inevitable that substantive change can only happen simultaneously (though highly unevenly and unpredictably) across scales, and it is not a bad thing to be grounded in the scale of the self. In the case of this book, I think it really does have illuminating things to say about the ways in which colonial and authoritarian logics permeate our lives and our collective projects, and subvert what we hope to accomplish through them � in that sense, it is very much related to impulses found in non-scholarly anti-authoritarian contexts, and I think can be used to inform such impulses. I agree that these are things that we need to pay attention to and develop strategies to navigate, and that work will often not look like left stereotypes of what 'political work' should be. And I've always been in favour of engaging with scholarly work for what it is, recognizing that it follows its own logics and imperatives, and those of us who try to function at least a little bit in both worlds can contirubte to the work of translating it into more movement-legible terms. But I still wish books like this did more to situate their insights in the context not only of being a self encountering texts or a self listening across difference or whatever, but a self working in a group of other selves to push our institution to respond better to sexual assault or racism, or a self working a lousy job while going to school and trying to work on the local minimum wage campaign, or whatever.
Anyway, an interesting book if you like this kind of thing, at a remove from movements but not irrelevant to them, and a source of a few things I'll be happy to think about as I work on my current project.
July 19, 2020
A+
“We live because we have deposited energy and matter into the world and because forces well beyond what we can see or hear or touch have embedded themselves in us and have enabled and sustained our existences. The impossible historical inventory to which we might aspire includes those ecological and material entities that underlie our individual and collective forms of being.� p.176
“The end of Césaire’s play draws us through sound explicitly toward other voices—voices that have always been there but that (as readers, audiences, modern subjects) we have been untrained to hear. The background noise of the “natural� world becomes foreground, and the sounds of humans become sounds that comingle with other increasingly more dominant sounds. The sounds of nature at the play’s end are always already with and among us. Listening to these voices, we might begin to hear other songs of survival, and to sound differently among them� p. 176
“We live because we have deposited energy and matter into the world and because forces well beyond what we can see or hear or touch have embedded themselves in us and have enabled and sustained our existences. The impossible historical inventory to which we might aspire includes those ecological and material entities that underlie our individual and collective forms of being.� p.176
“The end of Césaire’s play draws us through sound explicitly toward other voices—voices that have always been there but that (as readers, audiences, modern subjects) we have been untrained to hear. The background noise of the “natural� world becomes foreground, and the sounds of humans become sounds that comingle with other increasingly more dominant sounds. The sounds of nature at the play’s end are always already with and among us. Listening to these voices, we might begin to hear other songs of survival, and to sound differently among them� p. 176
November 21, 2019
My favorite read this semester
December 12, 2019
i sped read this at 4am for my essay so i'll have to go back at go over it again i think, but the idealism of this text is cute even if im unsure how to put these theories into practice
May 13, 2021
Class book - WOWZA. Took a while to get into (don’t know much about Gandhi’s post colonial thinking) but the latter chapters getting into her own thinking are AMAZING! Wonderful epistemological work. Changed my thinking about humanitarian orgs, relation with animals, relation with ecology, and relation with people. We tend to think of humanitarians as good and Singh challenges that by asking questions. Why do these acts make you feel good? What are power relations involved? What does ‘helping� means and who defines it? The dehumanist way of thinking may strike people as weird but it tells us that the ‘human� as society defines it is based on exclusion. We can’t fix the system when the system was made to work against some. What a wonderful book!!
March 9, 2025
The irony of a book that is about deconstructing and rejecting colonialism and elitism while being written in the most pretentious and inaccessible language was too much for me. My eyes were in an almost permanent eye roll. She seems to have missed or forgotten along the way that part of the untangling from oppressive forces of academia needs to involve sharing truths that can be reached and felt. Instead if there is truth to be found, it’s buried under to many layers of self important words and obscure references to say anything that actually matters.
March 14, 2023
Maybe a 3.5 I really appreciated several moves including not defining mastery (to avoid mastering it) and the relationship between mastery, postcoloniality and decoloniality. I’m just not a post humanist or dehumanist scholar, I just don’t really find it that interesting.
March 18, 2025
I was fully ready to hate reading this and even though the author definitely uses some difficult language, she makes such great points about the way mastery influences us in ways we’re not aware, changing our relationship with what was mastered.
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March 12, 2021First chapter is helpful.
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