Fiction and the Intrahuman

• In Event: Humanness as Praxis: Colonialities of Being in Curriculum Theory

Abstract

Through a wide-ranging historical deconstruction of humanism, Sylvia Wynter (2003) unveils the human as a naturalized social construction advancing the over-representation of ‘man.” Man is conceived by Wynter as a set of scientific, heteronormative and patriarchal claims, discourses and representation structuring hierarchies, categories, cultures and genres of being. Riffing on Fanon’s insistence that a sociogenic construction of the human supplement existing ontogeny and phylogeny of the human, Winters (2001) calls for a radically altered humanism through the praxes of human relation.

Wynter (1994) describes her project as postcolonial, which she further characterizes as of the intra-human. In this regard, her scholarly concerns holds resonances with post-structural deconstructions of the subject of humanism (Derrida, 1989; Lyotard, 1989; Nancy, 2009). Still, as with scholars of philosophy in general, under-theorized is a theory of pedagogy undergirding Wynter’s notion of praxis as human being. To extend her political notion of praxes through an educational framework, I turn to curriculum scholars and cultural theorists theorizing human formation as subject to and an effect of significant pedagogical relations (Britzman, 2009; Grumet, 1998; Pinar, 2006; Salvio & Boldt, 2006)

Rather than stake the hope for human being as praxis in the domain of intellectuals, as does Wynter (1994), my scholarship locates praxis in the ordinary yet profound pedagogical relation of the in-human creature born to a (m)other and fallen to her language and the social world. Drawing on Kristeva (1987) and Arendt (1993), I suggest that those involved in education and political philosophy take seriously the maternal dynamics of intra and inter relation giving way to the child’s subject formation. If Wynter directs our attention to the structural logics and genres of knowledge through which humanness is constructed and massively distributed, my paper will draw attention to micro, psychosocial intra-dynamics of human relation that make knowledge of self, other and the world, in the first place possible.

Through my deliberation of postcolonial ideas of the inhuman and the human I will argue that the intra of the intra-human construction requires a psycho-sociogenic framework that locates the fictional formation of the human in our earliest attachment to and affection for educated and socialized others. Turning to fictional depictions of the human in becoming as depicted in postcolonial literature, in this case Toni Morrison’s (2015) God Help the Child, I extend Wynter’s use of literary language to theorize human being as praxis. I suggest that curriculum is most radical when it turns to praxes of the human in and as a fiction that allows readers to think the human apart from ontological and hetero-normalizing categories of man, gender, race and health. Praxis arrives to the reader in her ‘freedom-seeking’ capacity (what we might call reading) to deliberate or hold court over her inner being and external forces (Nancy, 2009). I pose Morrison’s intra-poetics of race as one such deliberation that labors to liberate human being from its metaphysical shackles and, more importantly, dares to activate the praxis of being human for which Wynter advocates.

Author

• Aparna Mishra Tarc