a brief manifesto

Death of the Post-colonial/Birth of the Post-Responsible

                The Swedish scholar Stefan Helgesson makes a timely intervention in a recent issue of PMLA.  His comments  in "Post-anticolonialism" (PMLA 132.2 (2017): 164-170) is quite what is needed to characterize  our global swamp of academic pretensions in the face of palpable human suffering.  We all pretend.  We  might ask the question "Why Write?" in our time and location for reasons akin to Jean-Paul Sartre's asking Qu'est-ce que la littérature  in the twentieth century. And we need to answer our question with reference to the impossibility of our totally rejecting  joy, pain, and thinking. Even if we contend it is possible (and ,for whatever reason, desirable) for a human being to be not-human, to be a thing, a machine, a linguistic sign or a figment of another's imagining,  common sense and empirical evidence  confirm  that death is the only absolute termination of a person's humanity. Figural death matters equally with literal birth.

                One sentence in Helgesson's article appealed strongly to my sense of how humanity has been cheapened in academic writing and work.

"Transferred to our times, the Third Space should rightly be seen as a crucial conceptual resource for articulating what we may call a procedural alternative to the politics of hatred and confrontation mounting on the Internet and perpetrated politically by the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Islamic State." (166)

Helgesson refers to the concept of Third Space discussed in Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994), considering that, in light of the histories of the 1990s, Bhabha's idea about "negotiation and transformation, was…not an abstract idea but a lived political reality" (166).  It might be added that Third Space offers an alternative to the politics of denial and cognitive dissonance, but provides no relief from the implacable germination of individual and collective terrorisms on our planet. Close reading and use of critical thinking skills in multiple interactive environments do little to ensure that we can avoid cheapening.  We must be forthright in so instructing our students.  Blessed are those of us who are not driven mad by the condition of being human, who resort to African indigenous knowing and the dao of the East that is trivialized by contemporary Enlightenment projects in the West.  We welcome the death of the post-colonial and shudder at the birth of the post-responsible.

                Growing evidence that colonialism in the pursuit of capitalism is ascending in 2017 diminishes the utility of post-colonial theory as such, and we can give the theory a decent burial.  Growing evidence that in higher education and other sectors of life what we once upon a time called "responsibility" is being swiftly demonized does authorize us to acknowledge the universality of post-responsible thought.  We do not have to like it, but we damned sure better not deny that it exists.  Strange forms of irresponsibility are being born as climate change moves forward.

                Another timely intervention enables me to close the circle of the absurd.  André Carrington's essay "Mike Brown's Body: New Materialism and Black Form." ASAP/Journal 2.2 (May 2017): 276-283 is refreshingly quare.  More quare than queer in speaking to gravity.  In his commentary on what is fast, furious, and loose in academic discourses, Carrington mentions the importance of Charles Mills's unironic essay on white ignorance, on an "epistemology of ignorance" in Sullivan, Shannon and Nancy Tuana,eds. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. At last, ignorance is bliss.  Carrington's final sentence appeals strongly to my sense of what is at risk among human beings and in their studies of literatures and cultures.

"In deference to the complications introduced to feminist, queer, and new materialist critiques…I do not want my relationship with the human to end just yet.  The body is still warm." (282).  Ashe. I concur from the pre-future angle of responsibility.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 6, 2017