Toppling the (Hu)Man: Posthumanism and the Mattering of Historical Spaces (Poster 4)

• In Event: Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Abstract

This presentation considers the teaching of toppling statues as a specific method that both enables a critical accounting of history and interrupts the conception of what Sylvia Wynter (2003) has called the overrepresentation of Man as human. For us, these acts of toppling break open a vault of possibility. As noted by Ana Christina Mendes (2021), “the destruction and erasure of the artifact, mak[es] it newly visible for what is and was, or may newly be understood to be, as a reminder of acts of violence that may be understood to be in many ways ongoing” (p. 398). Drawing on the convergence of critical posthumanism and decolonial theory, we consider how toppling as a specific method already implicates a critical accounting of history and the complex sociality of historical change. Additionally, we wonder if the toppling(s) of such statues and monuments can open up a more expansive vision of what it means to be human, a rupture of what Sylvia Wynter (2003) has called the overrepresentation of Man. Of course, the act of toppling is not enough, and we caution against any hasty move to replace and forget. Instead, we see toppling as part of a broader refusal that demands an engagement with the difficult knowledge of our past (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Simon et al., 2000), while allowing for a possible interruption of the figure of the human as mastery, epistemic certainty, and anthropocentric future-making.

Authors

• Francisco Medina, Graduate Center - CUNY
  Presenting Author

• Karen Zaino, Miami University (OH)
  Presenting Author

• Debbie Sonu, Hunter College - CUNY
  Presenting Author