An Upside-Down Humanism for the Anthropocene

While thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Sylvia Wynter have criticized Enlightenment humanism for its embeddedness in coloniality, they also call for a refashioned humanism that expands the notion of the human while centering the agency of the oppressed. The author places these engagements in conversation with indigenous thought that challenges not only traditional humanism for its dehumanization of the non-Western, non-male subject but also humanist discourses of national liberation that reify these exclusions. Through its focus on literary writing and activism based in the resource-rich territory of Bastar in Central India, this article examines the separation of the human and the non-human that undergirds the Anthropocene, challenged in Adivasi-indigenous territories on the periphery of the nation-state, where extractive capitalism has rendered “inhuman” the bodies that fall outside discourses of national sovereignty. The author proposes an “Upside-down Humanism” for framing discourses of knowledge and modes of representation that center the entangled histories of the human and the non-human in worlds turned upside-down by extractive state-capitalism in the era of the Anthropocene.

Duke Scholars

Author Preeti Singh Asian & Middle Eastern Studies