beyond Man:
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In Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument (2003), Sylvia Wynter outlines how the modern Western understanding of the human, Man, has ratified the formation of a hegemonic, normative framework of being under which Other ways of being are unrecognized, marginalized and abjected (Phillips 2014: 19) (Wynter 2003: 260). The “human”-the Enlightenment subject, the Cartesian “Rational Man”, C.B. Macpherson’s possessive individual, or the subject of Man as glossed in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966)-is thought to be a rational, delimited, autonomous political subject of the state; an embodiment of normative behaviour and ability (Luciano & Chen 2015: 190) (Weheliye 2014: 24). Although the notion of Man declares itself to be universal, this secular genre of the human excludes certain subjects who exist in the precarious in-between space outside its normative framework (for example, black subjects, indigenous populations, queer individuals, the colonized, the insane, the poor and the disabled) from the category of human and denies them their rights, citizenship and socio-political agency (Luciano & Chen 2015: 190, 193) (Weheliye 2014: 24). The Enlightenment category of Man thus operates as an apparatus of disciplinary dehumanization and biopolitical and necropolitical control through its condemnation of Other, marginal subjects to social death (Luciano & Chen 2015: 191) (Preciado 2020: 4) (Wynter 2003: 260). Wynter attributes the “overrepresentation of Man” (Wynter 2003: 260) to be the origin of all contemporary struggles concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, the environment and the asymmetrical distribution of resources between the rich, techno-industrial North and the comparatively rural South (Wynter 2003: 260, 261).
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In And What About the Human? (2012), Anthony Bogues illustrates how the Western imaginary of Man was established within the historical milieu of the European colonial project and its attending hierarchical taxonomies of human difference and racializing assemblages (Weheliye 2014) (Bogues 2012: 35). Modernity/coloniality (Mignolo 2007) (Quijano 2007) and its ideology of the “rise of the West” and the “subjugation of the rest of us”-African enslavement, Latin American conquest and Asian subjugation-is implicitly reinforced through the invisible, normative, cognitive-rational, masculinized epistemological framework of Man (Luciano & Chen 2015: 190, 191) (Mignolo 2007) (Quijano 2007) (Wynter 2003: 262, 263). Aimé Césaire thinks of colonization as “Thingification”; by this he means colonization transformed humans into “property in person” (Elsa Goveia) or “things” and thus forced them to “live” in a spectral “zone of nonbeing” (Bogues 2012: 36) (Mbembe 2003: 21). “Thingification” sanctions the heinous violence executed upon the “nonhuman”, deimmunized colonized subject by the “human” colonizer (Bogues 2012: 36). It is therefore imperative for any decolonial practice of freedom that endeavours to dismantle the hegemonic coloniality of being, power, truth and freedom to question and disturb the Western conception of Man (Wynter 2003: 260). In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Christina Sharpe presents the “non-subjecthood” of subjects residing outside the normative frameworks of Man in the “margins of humanness” (Luciano & Chen 2015: 193) as a productive position from which normative frameworks of being can be challenged (Sharpe 2016: 22). Like Sharpe (2016), Bogues recognizes that “Thingification” can be mobilized as a generative, queer position from which alternative ways of being human can be imagined from the perspective of subjugated and the marginalized “living corpses” (Bogues 2012: 36) who exist outside of the human (Bogues 2012: 36). To quote Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), “…what different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?” (Weheliye 2014: 8) By troubling and decentering the notion of Man itself, we can refuse to merely “assimilate” into the prevailing structures of marginalization (Cohen 2005: 437). Instead, we can call attention to the untenability of said hierarchical structures and begin to radically reimagine ways of being human more suitable to the actual reality of human existence (Bogues 2012: 46) (Cohen 2005: 437). These “effective antagonisms” (Preciado 2020) allow for the emergence of alternative ways of re/inhabiting and re-imagining the human (Sharpe 2016: 22). Walter Mignolo cautions us, however, against reproducing the marginalizing ontologies of modernism by imposing fixed notions of “new” and “better” ways of being that usurp “old” and “bad” philosophies of the human (Mignolo 2011: 273). Our radical reimaginings of the category of human should rather generate a pluriverse of decolonial cosmopolitism in which an infinity of heterogeneous ways of being can exist collectively (Mignolo 2011: 273).