Beyond Humanism (but not without it?)

Reflections on the Matter of Black Life (unannotated version)

this article was edited February 15 2020 to include a suggested reading list. You can find the annotated version here

August 2014. A veil had once hung over the eyes of Amerikkka but the vigils in Ferguson tore it away, shaking Rome right in its noxious belly. Michael Brown had been shot cold dead, and left to the concrete like strange litter, calling forth the mighty stride of an eradicatory process that loped across those Missouri streets like a flood to lift a standard against the devil’s ‘post-racial’ parseltongue and other Obama-era neoliberal forms of trickery. New Afrikan communities was tired, been tired; the grip of any notion that we were at last being treated as though ‘created equal’ was loosened. And, a rallying cry broke forth as we more deeply decided the kkkolonizer’s representationalism could game us no longer. It was time we demanded that our lives be made to matter. We disagreed on exactly how we would secure the matter of Black life, though, even if we knew there at least was/could/should be something to ground our value in. The smokescreens of that blue party which Malcolm correctly identified as foxes were utter uselessness to us now, and only by us acting for ourselves again could we advance Black community.

This self-activity, by which Black people would struggle to make sure our lives matter, found its basis in the idea that we were ‘Man.’ That’s how the nationalists brought it to me at least, in whose circuits I began to travel and mobilize in after watching Dorian Johnson cry out about his beloved friend’s death in front of those lifeless, listless news screens. “I am a man,” says the anti-racism I was raised on, which is to say that “I am human.” And therefore, since my matter has humanity as its axiological reference point, the basis of my life’s value, then I have/deserve the same experience of ‘unalienable’ rights as any other person. Demanding and attaining those rights was to be led by us, though — the people — for governance and the greedy capitalists would never accord them to us. We would unite with other common folk similarly dispossessed of their humanity, instead, and find solidarity with one another in our own communities’ respective quests for self re-humanization.

That is, unless these other so-called ‘allies’ were too invested in seeing us as non-human to allow us equal participation in their humanist projects. Then, of course, as we begin obstructing highways, flooding phone lines, burning flags, holding sit-ins, and teetering toward more escalated and organized forms of action, the people we should be solidary with would prove themselves to be traitors or enemies, like they was gunning for us too. This was especially true for those of us who were disabled or queer whilst navigating our ‘Hamitic’ flesh. Even the revolutionaries, radicals, the socialists, anarchists, communists — they too seemed keen on denying Black people our equal share in the fold of ‘humanity’ and in preventing us from doing what we needed to make our lives matter. And so, some decided, since the basis of our value seemed to be always at the exclusion of non-human lives, and Black people continued to be dehumanized, perhaps it was time to abandon ‘humanization’ as a project and give up on partaking in whatever projects were said to ‘make’ our humanity fulfilled or secured. The Black ‘non-humanists’ (as I call them) often turned to the work of critical theory (especially critical theorizing within Black Studies, queer studies, disability studies, animal studies, object studies, and ecocriticism) to further defend this new direction in thought. Their concern was with tracing the ways that ‘humanism’ fails Black people.

Humanism can be understood as the belief that our species has charge over our own destinies (as opposed to some cosmic force doing that), and the related belief that members of our species have the capacity to transform the conditions which might prevent such self-determination (again, precisely because the hindrances are not cosmic). It is important to note that there are different kinds of humanism: the mainstream ones either tie self-determination and the mattering of life to bourgeois/liberalism (the Westphalian state and capitalism) or to proletarian revolution (socialism or communism). I was raised on anti-colonial humanism, like many Black people, which ties self-determination and the mattering of our life to expropriation of resources and development of autonomy for the Third and Fourth Worlds (anti-colonial leftism). Skeptics of humanism, however, argue that humanism is unable to account for the reality of non-humans and those treated as nonhuman.

Primarily trained in the academic spheres of cultural and discursive analysis (with aspects of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, among others), so called Black critical non-humanist theory thus focuses instead on giving language to what its proponents see as already existing sources of Black rebellion and resistance that, on sheer virtue of our history as enslaved and dehumanized people, is said to have better implications for the fate of non-human Matters (and those treated as such) in ways that “humanism” cannot. This attention to the activity and ‘vantage point’ of ‘the Slave’ is not necessarily aimed at a particular political proposition or conclusion. For that reason, the labels used to describe this line of inquiry simply connect this slave-centered way of thinking about Blackness to some affective response or philosophical posture (and not so much an ideology). “Afropessimism” is the most popular of these labels ascribed to critical non-humanist studies of Blackness. “Black Optimism” is a close second favorite label. Frank B. Wilderson is the father of Afropessimism, while Fred Moten is Black Optimism’s progenitor. Other names you might find in the ‘non-humanist’ side of Black critical theory and cultural analysis would be Calvin Warren, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, and Hortense Spillers, although not all of them identify with either Afropessimism or Black Optimism (even to the point of outright rejecting the labels and/or the implications of these lines of inquiry).

In its everyday sense, the word “pessimism” is a “glass half empty” type mindset, where the attention is negative. Such negativity is an affective (or emotional) one, but it’s also more about where the attention goes: what is absent from the container. Water is gone from the glass. Now, imagine if this focus was a critical disposition or angle toward life. With Afro-Pessimism and Wilderson’s work, we find the focus/attention of analysis is on the ‘negative’ effects of Black struggle, for example the ‘loss’ of our original ethnolinguistic ties due to slavery. The loss is taken as a sufficient/vital enough source of or motivation for rebellion, such that we are then required to seek our freedom not in ‘progress’ but instead in things like the forced subversion that is the idea of the ‘nigger.’ The ‘nigger’ and what it means has been rendered opposite of every definition of ‘human’ grounded by the modern world’s socio-economic and politico-cultural matters. Afro-Pessimism says that analyzing and embracing this experience of Black negation from the ‘human’ is the only way to bring about the drive within Black people to ‘destroy the world’ system altogether and end the capitalist/colonial violence which exploits non-humans and those treated as such. Humanistic projects, on the other hand, are said to reinvest the people into the global colonial/capitalist system. They are seen as a bid to reclaim the structures that ground ‘human’ life, in violent contradistinction to non-humans. For this reason, Afropessimists see humanist politics and persuasions as untenable or unavailable to Black people.

Now, “optimism” in the everyday sense of the word is a “glass half full” type mindset, where the attention is positive. Such positivity is an affective (or emotional) one, but it’s also more about where the attention goes: what is there in the container. Water remains in the glass. Now, imagine if this focus was a critical disposition or angle toward life. With Black Optimism and Moten’s work, we find the focus/attention of analysis is on the ‘positive’ products of Black struggle, for example our creation of ‘new’ ethnolinguistic ties across national lines due to slavery. These ‘innovations’ are taken as sufficient/vital enough source of or motivation for resistance, such that we are then required to seek freedom not in ‘progress’ but instead in things like the forced survival techniques we had to take on amidst dehumanization. This survivorhood has persisted and existed outside of every definition of ‘human’ grounded by the modern world’s socio-economic and politico-cultural matters. Black Optimism says that analyzing and embracing the experience of Black affirmation despite the ‘human’ is the only way to bring about the drive within Black people to ‘make way out of no way’ in the modern world system, and thus end any further capitalist/colonial violence that exploits non-humans and those treated as such. Humanistic projects, on the other hand, are said to reinvest the people into the global colonial/capitalist system. They are seen as a bid to reclaim the structures that ground ‘human’ life, in violent contradistinction to non-humans. For this reason, Black Optimists see humanist politics and persuasions as useless or unnecessary for Black people.

Afropessimism and Black Optimism blew up during the heyday of the Black Lives Matter moment as questions of Black humanity and whether it mattered became pushed to the fore. They brought their version of critical non-humanist theories to many of our political attention, on the ground in organizing spaces, on social media, and in the academy. For many, they provided an analysis of the failures of multiculturalism in the ‘postracial’ age and an explanation for neocolonialism in the ‘postcolonial’ age as well as an understanding of Western assault on socialist movements worldwide (along with the coloniality of many self-described socialisms). All were linked back to slavery and anti-blackness, where Afropessimism and Black Optimism presented the current aftermath of decolonization movements from the late 20th century as evidence that these struggles had been failed attempts to integrate into humanism. Afropessimism and Black Optimism were thus taken as clarifications about the conditions that made Ferguson possible.

But, for many others, Afropessimism and Black Optimism in particular (and critical non-humanist Black Studies in general) were both, if anything, confusing at best and counter-revolutionary at worst. I was one of those folk. My personal issue wasn’t so much with the Western philosophical orientation or the dense metatheoretical and theoretical nature of them both, although I can admit these elements certainly made them off-putting and frustrating to me (and still do). My major issue with them was that I had seen people use these lines of inquiry, especially Afropessimism, to make a wholesale rejection of decolonization. In these instances, the self determination of the colonized masses, the reclamation and expropriation of stolen resources from the First World by the Third (and Fourth) World — this was being called ‘anti-black’ and as necessarily reliant on violent and exploitative antagonism against non-humans (or those marked as such). And as someone who had cut my political teeth on Black nationalism and Pan Afrikanism, I couldn’t get with that position. I wasn’t thoroughly opposed to critiques of humanism, though, in the way that those more aligned with my political tendency often were. A number of intense and volatile debates exploded on part of the Black Left in response to the conclusions being drawn from Afropessimism in particular. But, because I was open to critiques of humanism, I decided to take an extended foray into the Afro-Pessimist and Black Optimist world, hoping to see if there was perhaps any legitimacy to their conclusion about decolonization.

I was thrown off by the canon, even after reading through alot of it. I tried to focus instead on the content of their analysis, and identify exactly why much of the Black revolutionary world has an issue with the two lines of inquiry. Time and again the best way I could tie them together why they were so controversial for many revolutionaries was that, according to my understanding:

Afropessimism teaches that people lack the capacity to meaningfully alter our external and internal realities beyond anti-black exploitation or devaluation because of an unconscious antagonism against non-humans that always manifests itself as (and comes from) our society/history making acts Black Optimism teaches that people have no need to affirm or to try and realize any capacity to alter our conditions because to do so is always already a conscious act of violence or devaluation toward non-humans, and thus not a genuine break from the exploitative flow of human society/history.

With this takeaway in mind, it became clear to me why those defending and decrying these lines of inquiry often became so hostile with one another, or just completely didn’t understand one another at all. There was a basic, often implicit presupposition embedded within anti-colonial/socialist humanism that was being strained against by Afropessimism and Black Optimism, under the banner of ‘non-humanist’ critique. This assumption is the materialist one. Materialism is what emphasizes our species’ capacity as living/biotic entities to alter our external and internal conditions. The application of Afropessimist and Black Optimist approaches to critical non-humanism seemed thoroughly against this premise, though, in the name of centering the ‘vantage point’ of an ‘object’ (non-human) — implying that nonhumans lack this capacity, and that seeking to utilize this capacity (or locate it in others) sustains antagonism against (or equals the devaluation of) nonhumans. Whether this anti-materialism is intentional or not, I cannot say, but what I can say is that in all my time spent trying to understand these lines of inquiry, I still very much find it problematic. But, this is not because I seek to protect humanism.

In fact, I must admit, I too share a skepticism of humanism, the same skepticism that Black critical nonhumanists seem to share. I find issue with the way when using ‘human’ as a reference point for how/why we should make our lives matter, find fulfillment, have value — -people often unevenly divide who is or isn’t included. In my days as a Black nationalist (which is one of the major reasons I moved away from that tendency) I witnessed how appeals to our common belonging in the fold of ‘Man,’ though well-intended defenses of our right to self-determination, pushed out those who weren’t cishet men or abled people. And, throughout the history of our movements, we have seen the way that a recourse to ‘rehumanization’ has failed to fully account for the way ‘human’ is portrayed as more deserving of liberty and value than others in the first place — a type of ideological neglect that has had detrimental consequences in our quest for autonomy, again, especially for queer and disabled Black lives.

That said my critiques of humanism do not involve a rejection of materialism. In fact, my critiques of humanism are only possible because I (try my best to) espouse materialist analysis. Materialism, in its most dedicated and principled form, is ecopolitical and not anthropocentric. Humanism in the revolutionary world bases itself on materialism, but is not the quintessential representative thereof. At the end of the day, the humanistic framing of a capacity to alter conditions and have charge over one’s destiny as a ‘human’ thing — -this only arose as an attempt to recognize the ecological (and not cosmic/karmic) situatedness of oppressed people’s basic needs, the ecological situatedness of categories like labor, the ecological situatedness of experiences like hunger. In other words, that alteration and destiny have their fulfillment in ecological Ends; and the “progression” toward those Ends is not emphasized because genuine decolonial humanists value progress as a value unto itself. Instead, it is their materialism causing them to foreground consolidating around those ecopolitical Ends, a conscious clarification that is not necessarily because of a belief that we are wholly distinct from (and thus deserving mastery over) so-called ‘nature.’ The demand for “full unification” with more-than-human Matter that materialism strives toward comes, instead, from a recognition that we need such progression because we are alienated from deeper earthly participation and consciousness due to our history of domination. From this angle, one finds that we only ever begin subverting and surviving because we are ecological entities struggling to more fully realize ourselves within our environment against the enkkklosures that have trapped all kinds of Matter. For this reason, socialists and anti-colonialists are able to identify capitalism and colonialism as ecocidal, and within their demands for worker ownership of the means of production or of resource expropriation by/of the Third and Fourth Worlds we find more potential for a transformative ecopolitics than bourgeois/liberal humanism could ever allow for.

If we’re returning to the ‘glass half empty’ or ‘glass half full’ idea, when our attention and responses are turned to what’s “lost” or what’s “present”, this focus bypasses another awareness: that there is a connection and relationship between whatever the container aims to hold (the water) and the molecular, biotic, geophysical realities beyond the glass from which the water originated and to which it returns. This bypass of the materialist and ecopolitical focus for a libidinal focus on part of the Afropessimist and Black Optimist is only correct if one considers all pursuit of the natural connection/relationship between those contained and that ecological universe which was dispossessed of us to be an idealization and myth, or to be a ‘meta-narrative’ aimed at upholding human-centric ‘ownership’ of Things. Far from idealized, though, or rooted inherently in human-centrism, it is more genuinely the vantage point of the object of human consumption (if the Slave stands in for the water in the glass) to defend its capacity to alter its conditions and emphasize the ecopolitical Ends of the materialist analysis that teases out said capacity. Because, in that instance, we would attend to the water freezing over at the call of the cold and rendering cracks in the glass, or rising up out of the glass in gas form as it is summoned by the power of heat energy, winds, and sun rays into evaporation and condensation, and as it cycles through sky, sea, land, and plant as well as animal bodies in metabolic journeys. When it comes to Black liberation, therefore, my attention/focus is not primarily on the affective, philosophical mechanisms that are contained in the history of Black subversion and survival. As an Anarkata, I do recognize with Ashanti Alston how important these cultures of oppositionalism have been; I just don’t put these sources of rebellion or resistance before me as more effective than a revolutionary proposition. They are not the primary or more effective arena from which to transform us. I believe that revolution is necessary, and this requires a conscious element (working in tandem with the unconscious), one which truly does require us to seek our freedom in the embodied and material quest for full unification with more-than-human forms of Matter. It is this which will abolish the parts of us vested in hierarchy, ownership, and other captive mechanisms. It is this which tends toward liberation of all Things.

Now, colonialism very much has prevented Marxist humanisms from staying with the ecopolitical Ends of materialist analysis; and similarly, cishetpatriarchy and disablism hinder many decolonial humanists from clarifying the ecopolitical Ends of materialist analysis as well. On this account we should be critical of humanism. Humanism hinders us making ourselves as ecologically conscious as materialist analysis ultimately intends for us. Humanism forces materialism’s reference point to be the same construct so historically tied up with anthropocentrism, racism, sexism, transmisia, disablism, anti-blackness, the dehumanization of fat folk, dark skinned folk, non-Christian folk, and more. In this way, ironically, humanism links materialism to metaphysical fictions that hierarchically assign value to living and non-living entities, and thus identifies the basis of self-determination erroneously — with oppressive authorities. In understanding struggles for ‘humanization’ by the colonized as corrupted versions of materialism (that fail to fully consciously meet an ecopolitical End), we must still dig into materialism’s project of reclamation and reunification, which is a decolonial and anti-capitalist initiative, and recognize it as something that ties together our liberation with the liberation of more-than-human Matters. Realizing the capacity to alter our conditions involves our environments and is shared with abiotic and other biotic entities cannot, therefore, be called anthropocentric (neither is it an anthropomorphizing of so-called ‘nature’ to uphold an ecopolitical origin/end for the materialist premise).

Black struggle allows us to free materialist anti-colonialism from cooption into the silly notion of our species’ exceptionalism (and the exceptionalism of those who “overrepresent” themselves as at the apex of our species) — a problem to which humanism has been historically so vulnerable, or which humanism hasn’t effectively called our politics out of. We absolutely should go and fetch our history as Black people and use its insights to strain against the brutal weaponization of hierchical ‘human’ valuation against all life/non-life and especially against the most marginal of Black people. Taking Black critical non-humanism, however, and synthesizing it with a materialist basis for liberation that has always had ecopolitical implications is the only way we will more clearly locate our people’s activity in the earthly source of power and call forth the drive in Black people to bring about a world that is free of antagonism and contradiction, ultimately destroying the one so full of it currently. The mattering of Black life is in, quite literally, matter; and the grounds for our value is, quite literally, the ground. And this is not because we (should) control it, but because we come from and are part of it. To ensure that we matter, we must conspire with ground/matter against Massa’s house, built on objectifying/thingifying and exploiting. Yes, that means ending our species’ participation in those violences. Yes, however, that also means decolonization, which does not have to be anti-black or linked to these violences. Hence, alongside a critical analysis of our rebellion/subversion or our resistance/survival — and the implications these have for the fate of non-humans — we need a consciously ecopolitical science of our revolutionary struggles, which has similar ‘non-humanist’ (non-anthropocentric) implications.

Suggested reading:

Below are some suggested works for better understanding of this piece. Some of these works overlap in terms of what themes they bring clarity to. For example, in the last section, the Richard York paper could also go in the second to last section

A. For introduction to Afro-Pessimism

1. Afro-Pessimism by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, Frank B. Wilderson

- 2. “Gramsci’s Black Marx” by Frank B Wilderson

- 3. The social life of social death: on Afro-Pessimism and black optimism by jared sexton

- 4. On Black Negativity, or The Affirmation of Nothing by Daniel Colucciello Barber and Jared Sexton

- 5. Onticide by calvin warren

B. For introduction to Black Optimism

- 1. The undercommons: fugitive planning and black study by fred moten and stefano harney

- 2. Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present by David Wallace

C. For introduction to Black women’s critical work often inaccurately labelled AfroPessimism*

- 1. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Truth/Power by Sylvia Wynter

- 2. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe by Hortense Spillers

- 3. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman

- 4. The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Labor’s

by Saidiya Hartman

D. For introduction to critiques of AfroPessimism

- 1. Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness by Annie Olaloku-Teriba**

- 2. Afro blue notes: death of Afro-Pessimism by greg thomas

- 3. Bad Faith and Afropessimism: Notes Toward a Debate by marcus sundjata brown

E. For introduction to turns in critical theory toward supposed ‘non-humanism’

- 1. On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy by Kyla Wazana Tompkins

-2. Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black feminist theories of the human by Alexander G. Weheliye ***

F. For introduction to ecology drawn from historical materialism

- 1. Critical human ecology: historical materialism and natural laws by richard york and philip mancus

- 2. Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 by karl marx

G. For introduction to ecopolitics that centers Black/Afrikan people

1. The Future of Science is Black by Cynthia Malone

2. Burnin Down Massa’s House: Notes Toward a Black Radical Ecology by KD Wilson

3. Ecocide and Genocide are the Secret of Capitalist Efficiency by Bruce A Dixon

Go Back and Fetch It: Black Radical Ecology and the African-Centered Paradigm by KD Wilson

*Black women’s critical canons are what I have noticed the ‘nonhumanist’ trend as practiced by Black people to be the most inspired by, myself included. I have not seen any of these theorists self identify as that label, which is why I tried my best to use it in quotes throughout the piece. It is important to mention that scholarly turns toward New Materialisms, Posthumanisms, Transhumanisms, which all claim to challenge orthodox humanism in some way, often steal from and recontextualize Black women’s critical canons; and that Wilderson’s Afro-Pessimism has been critiqued for doing the same act of cooption and misrepresentation. In writing this piece my hope is that I did not mischaracterize either the critical theorizing of Black women (more specifically the uses of such theorizing as I have encountered them in organizing spaces and political discourses) when I describe them as part of a larger tendency toward a ‘non-humanist’ politics. Instead, I hope to emphasize a space of conversation that Weheliye points to in Habeas Viscus, one created by thinkers like Sylvia Wynter or Hortense Spillers who demonstrate a “project of thinking humanity from perspectives beyond the liberal humanist subject, Man.” My hope and desire is to see that such Black feminist re-formulation of humanity is properly taken up within ecopolitical projects rather than misrepresented.

**There is a particular quote from Olaloku-Teriba’s piece which also inspired my writing here. Olaloku-Teriba works to correct Afro-Pessimist readings of Frantz Fanon which project their particular approach to what I call critical non-humanism onto Fanon’s work:

“Fanon is less concerned with the slave as an opposing pole from which ‘Man’ has built community… Fanon’s elucidation exposes the slave as contingently black, not ‘paradigmatically black’. In [the Afro-Pessimist] world-view, it… becomes necessary to begin by treating ‘race’ as a problem fundamentally rooted in the formation of sociality — in which the Black precedes the historical order and the processes, both violent and mundane, which create her.” I find Olaloku-Teriba’s description of how Afro-Pessimists theorize ‘race’ to also be correct, since a definition of Black as ‘preceding’ the conditions of her own possibility is pretty much exactly what Jared Sexton is getting at in the concept of ‘ante-anti-blackness.’ The reason Afro-Pessimism does this is, as Olaloku-Teriba points out, because race is not taken as just a ‘mystification’ that ‘makes possible’ the capitalist aspiration for workers to be stripped down and reduced to a ‘mere mechanism’ (the definition of the Slave that Olaloku-Teriba correctly identifies as truer to Fanonian understanding). Instead, the capitalist aspiration for a reduction to slaveness, to the Afro-Pessimist, originates in an ‘antagonism’ against a uniformly definable cultural ethos that groups designated as ‘Black’ have innately occupied since premodern times. What interests me about this retroactive ‘paradigmatic’ historical contrivance in Afro-Pessimism (and its circular logic) is how it is framed as the way to understand dehumanization by sheer virtue of a popular ideative association between ‘Blackness’ and slaveness. The thesis seems to be that such an association is ‘evidence’ that racism/racialization aren’t a technology of the material pursuit but rather should be a catch-all term to describe the politico-economic stage upon which a psychodrama about human to nonhuman conflict — one always already enacted between Black Afrikans and the rest of our species — is played out. For me, I don’t see a necessary connection between concern with “the slave as an opposing pole from which ‘Man’ has built community” (I agree with Olaloku-Teribu that this isn’t Fanon’s focus) and a definition of Afrikan struggle as paradigmatically Black in the Afro-Pessimist sense. I also believe that Afro-Pessimists are well aware of the leap in logic that this thesis requires, which is why they defer to libidinal analysis within a particular historical epoch and center that arena as the primary focus for transformation. As someone who is critical of humanism, however, and yet committed to materialism, I think it totally possibly to formulate that concern with human-nonhuman antagonism and not base it on an ahistorical definition of Slaveness, perhaps through the definition of it that Olaloku-Teriba expounds for us from Fanon. Here, race truly is understood as a mystifying technology that aids in (and arises from) colonizer/capitalists’ aspiration to reduce us to mere mechanisms. In this instance, the slave becomes an ‘opposing pole’ from which the community of ‘Man’ is made manifested insofar as the modern global State/capitalist colonial system and its mass ecocide relies on our “thing-ification” (Cesaire’s way of speaking about colonization). There was a violent pursuit of the land which Afrikans nurtured and communed with from which modern Western/capitalist ecocide (some call this an “Anthropocene”) was born. For me, foregrounding the land’s kinship with us and the ecocide built into a disruption of that relation puts the non-human at the center. Afrikan struggle under enslavement within this colonial context becomes the visceral and ‘visual’ drama that plays out on capitalism’s ecocidal stage simply because modern environmental catastrophes could not be made possible without the hierarchical, material subjection of our people by which our homeland is taken captive. For those interested in Black critical non-humanisms, I often suggest that Aimé Cesaire’s calling colonization “thingification” could be taken up as an entry point into this way of tying Black/Afrikan struggle to the material exploitation of other (more-than-human) ‘Things’ such as land, water, minerals, etc. I believe deploying the term in this way calls forth the underlying drive toward making non-anthropocentric understanding of our dehumanization by racial ideology, while first keeping the plane of discussion and the focus of our transformation at a material level.

*** I think it helpful to read the closing remarks of my piece through what Alexander G. Weheliye has called a ‘materialist reconceptualization of suffering.’ Weheliye builds on words from Asma Abbas and suggests a vision of Black struggle under political violences such as slavery which allows our liberation projects to overcome hierarchy, individualism, and appeals to the State so tied to discourse about (de)humanization by instead foregrounding a relation to Otherness which sees our suffering and labor as not phenomena one group deserves to experience less (as ‘humanization’ can imply), but sees them as phenomena which co-constitute the prevailing world order. The title of my piece is ‘Beyond Humanism (but not without it?)’ because I am looking to suggest (or ask of my readers) that even while my ecopolitical emphasis locates me philosophically beyond orthodox humanism, Weheliye’s materialist thinking of “suffering and enfleshment as integral to humanity” points to the possibility of precisely the “genre” of humanism that those of us who have concerns about the fate of non-human forms of Matter cannot dispense of — since it ties our struggle to that of alterity.