supremacy.
The Black feminists hold European humanism accountable for its false claim to universalism, assessing it against the real-life history of colonialism and slavery. Black feminism takes critical distance from that humanist ideal by exposing the racialized ontology that privileges whiteness as the human ideal emanating from the transcendental mind of European philosophers (Silva, 2007). The Eurocentric humanist model is criticized because it entails the imposition of hegemonic whiteness and hence implements the racialization of the categories of the excluded (hooks, 1981, 1990, 1992; Ware, 1992; Tuana, 1992; Alcoff, 2006, 2015). They argue consequently that we need to rescue humanism from the contradictory and violent mess into which Western culture plunged it, as evidenced by the legacies of colonialism, slavery and imperialism. As Gayatri Spivak writes, ‘There is an affinity between the imperialist subject and the subject of humanism’ (1987: 202). And this imperialist and exclusive form of humanism needs to be historicized and held to account.
Race theorists also point out the proximity between European humanism, as the foundation for the Enlightenment rule of scientific reason and democratic rule, and practices of violent domination, enslavement and instrumental use of terror. Reason and horror need not be, and historically have not been, mutually exclusive within the European colonial mindset and patriarchal system of values. This is what Sylvia Wynter defines as the paradox of the complementarity of European modernity and colonialism. This produces ‘the Janus-faced effects of large-scale human emancipation yoked to the no less large-scale human degradation and immiseration’ (Wynter, 2003: 270). Acknowledging that reason and barbarism are not self-contradictory, nor are humanism and genocide, may horrify the ‘clarity fetishists’ (Spivak, 1989: 206) of Western rationalism, but remains true. By extension, the claim to universality by Western scientific rationality is challenged (Spivak, 1999) as an expression of aggressive Western culture and of white supremacy (hooks, 1990).
Post- and decolonial feminist thinkers developed trenchant analyses of the physical and epistemic violence involved in reducing the sexualized, racialized and naturalized ‘others’ to inferior ontological status (Spivak, 1985, 1999). In her classic ‘Under Western Eyes’, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991) extended postcolonial feminist criticism to bear on Western feminist scholarship, exposing the binary constructions of first world and third world women within that community. The European colour-blindness and disregard of diversity has been revealed as everyday racism (Essed, 1991). Decolonial feminism developed from South and Native American feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s Chicana feminism (1987). They foregrounded the decolonial figuration of mestiza consciousness as an empowering alternative to dominant subject positions (Lugones, 2010).
In spite of these powerful critiques of humanism, postcolonial and race theory have not given up entirely on humanism, as Franz Fanon (1963 [1961]) and Aimé Césaire (2000 [1955]) teach us. For instance, Paul Gilroy (2000, 2016) thinks it is crucial to rescue humanism from its treacherous European perpetuators, looking to other cultural sources of hope and inspiration. He argues: ‘We might consider how to cultivate the capacity to act morally and justly not just in the face of otherness – imploring or hostile – but in response to the xenophobia and violence that threatens to engulf, purify, or erase it’ (Gilroy, 2004: 75). A vernacular form of multiculturalist and planetary cosmopolitanism is Gilroy’s response to exclusionary ethnocentric humanism.
Drawing inspiration from a variety of non-European sources, such as African Ubuntu (Mandela, 1994), Black, decolonial and Indigenous feminists rescue the humanist project by inscribing it into transformative politics with a strong spiritual undertone (hooks, 1990; Hill Collins, 1991). Buddhist, Marxist and other schools of ecofeminism and environmental activism produce their own brand of humanist defence of the human, combining the critique of the epistemic and physical violence of modernity with that of European colonialism (Shiva, 1997). These non-Western forms of radical humanism allow us to look at the ‘human’ from a more inclusive and diverse angle. They suggest new recompositions of humanity after Eurocentrism. This leads to a critical form of humanism referring to non-Western sources and looking at the human from a more inclusive and diverse angle (Narayan, 1989).
Black, decolonial and Indigenous feminists adopted a cautious approach to the generative potential of other traditions of humanism. Or, as the Combahee River Collective argued decades ago (1979), for those who have been systematically excluded from humanity, to be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. They take humanism as an unfulfilled project, betrayed by Eurocentric violence and aim to develop its anti-racist and inclusive potential. They are committed to explore new understandings of humanity after colonialism and to draw from non-Western sources the inspiration to fully realize the potential of the humanist project.
This is the line defended by Sylvia Wynter, in a strong claim to a specific Black ontology (2015) that draws from a radical anticolonial tradition to argue that ‘the human’ is always, somewhere, ‘a colonial figure’. For decolonial scholarship, especially when inflected by queer theory, race is the primary mover in ontological formations of the human and not just a problematic side-effect of it (Jackson, 2018; Winnubst, 2018). The production of the figure of ‘the human’ is located within the violent colonial history of racialization, as a central tool of European power. Wynter analyses the human accordingly as a colonial figure that is always becoming something else and whose presence implies a principle of deselection of Black people. Wynter makes an exclusive ontological claim for the primacy of race as a constitutive element of the human, alongside the politics of gender and processes of genderization. Maria Lugones (2007, 2010) analyses the colonial gender system and argues that any discussion of the human implies a racialized ontology implemented by colonialism. She argues that in the framework of empire, race functions as the defining factor in the construction of all other intersectional differences, notably class, sexuality and gender. Lugones joins forces with feminist race theory (Davis, 1981; Crenshaw, 1991) to draw attention to the specific and systematic violence visited upon women of colour. She criticizes the bias of feminist theory, which tends to reflect the bio-politics of white, middle-class women, ignoring women of Black and working-class backgrounds (Repo, 2016).
By extension, the racialized ontology of ‘Man’ in Western philosophy is assessed by Black feminists as non-representative of humanity. Wynter urges to correct this through a revision of humanism in relation to concepts of Blackness. She makes a useful distinction between the humanist ‘Man of Reason’ – whom she defines as ‘Man 1’ – and the nineteenth-century version – ‘Man 2’ – of post-Darwinian science. She argues that neither version of ‘Man’ does justice to the dehumanized others; only a full recognition of the racialized character of all ontologies can provide an adequate analysis of the human. For Wynter, ‘the human has not yet come’. She calls for the need for a third event (after Man 1 and Man 2), in which the deselected people join forces to recognize what they actually are. This involves contesting the workings of capital and developing a new kind of politics emerging from those who have been ‘de-selected’ (2003).
I describe this position of Black neo-humanism as ‘strategic anthropocentrism’,12 echoing the 1980s definition of ‘strategic essentialism’ by Gayatri Spivak (1985). The strategy consists in setting up a provisional morality – the belief in the absolute priority of certain categories (gender, race, class), which entails taking the calculated risk of making them more robust and stable than they may be in reality. This strategic statement expresses epistemic faith in the real-life experiences of the racialized (and sexualized and naturalized) subjects – the marginalized ‘others’. The politics of locations and their perspectivist method mean that, though there are significant points of encounter between a posthuman feminist position that targets Eurocentrism and racism from within and a decolonial perspective, there are divergences as well between the respective positions. Both deal with how to take ethical and political accountability for structural exclusions. Practising embodied and embedded perspectives allows for immanent points of encounter without appropriation.
Looking back at the mixed legacy of European humanism, notably its historical connection to empire, colonialism and enslavement, Audre Lorde put it with characteristic visionary force: ‘Our survival
