#Rhodesmustfall: A Critical Posthumanist Reading of Photos of a Statue's Removal From a University Campus

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-6 - Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn, and Socially Just Pedagogies and Curricula

Abstract

My paper demonstrates the difference it makes in terms of socially just pedagogy whether researchers use a humanist or a critical posthumanist orientation for analysis of events. Illustrated through a dis/continuous diffractive analysis of a series of photos of the Cecil Rhodes’s statue before it was removed from a campus at a university in South Africa, I highlight the relational material agency of human and nonhuman bodies.

There is a growing body of work that uses critical posthumanism to queer humanist philosophy that has its roots in western metaphysics, which has had a strong humanist articulation since Descartes (e.g. Barad, 2003, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/2014). Humanism centres on the autonomous adult self as sole source of knowledge production, and instils binaries that marginalise, divide and dichotomise the ‘Other’ in age, race, ethnicity, ability and sexuality. One strand of postcolonial theorising interrogates these power-producing binaries, but it tends to retain the dominant western ontological binary between language and reality, with its emphasis on power, human agency and discourse. Another strand is a move away from identity and provokes researchers and pedagogues to think differences differently. In particular Karen Barad’s diffractive reading of Niel Bohr’s quantum physics in her influential book Meeting of the Universe Halfway (2007) is used, because it enables readings of images that disrupt the fixed categories and concepts upon which traditional disciplines of knowledge are built.

The background to this study is the powerful geo-political material and discursive action by a black student in March 2015, which started the #Rhodesmustfall movement and dis/continues to materialise further events in South Africa, as elsewhere in the world. Motivated by the still visible signs of colonialism and lack of transformation at the historically white University of Cape Town (UCT), the student scooped human excrement from a toilet in one of the townships and smeared it on the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Photos are used as data sources.
I conclude that my analysis shows how the material in our lives also has power and agency. Realising that bodies (including our own) always intra-act with the discursive, makes room for empathy and care for the nonhuman other, including the statue of Rhodes. The power and agency of this object is not limited to its symbolic meaning. The world of meaning is more than what can be represented in human-made language (Barad, 2007). The removal of language (in the broad sense) as the only knowledge-producing tool allows the material world ‘in’ when making sense of affect when statues are forcibly removed. Crucially it leaves open the question of what it means to decolonise a university.

Discussions about transformation often do not acknowledge the entanglement of the ontological and the epistemological. The posthuman reading of the images offers an alternative positive philosophical orientation towards a ‘post’colonial future that sees difference as always (e)merging as an a/effect of connections and relations within and between human and nonhuman bodies, thereby producing knowledge that transverses the disciplines.

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Cape Town