ABSTRACT
This chapter puts together ideological critiques of ‘race’ and human exceptionality in order to problematise and provincialise a comprehensively colonial conception of the human. More specifically, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century scientists mobilised the idea of race in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern humanism in which were buried stereotypes about the superiority and inferiority of certain modes of life and people. The chapter’s purpose in so doing is not to reiterate critiques of the depiction of Indigenous people as ‘less-than-human’. Instead it is to unsettle, and possibly rethink, the very terms in which the human was figured in western cultural and philosophical traditions. A particular understanding of the human is tracked through – variously anxious, boldly argued – investments in the idea that ‘we’ are nature-transcending beings: from Georges Cuvier’s attribution of intelligence to beings who walk upright; to Alfred Wallace’s claims for a distinct form of human mental evolution; to today’s human exceptionalists, for whom our unique technological ingenuity will apparently help avert ecological catastrophe. Critically routing narratives of human distinction and development through these sketches serves to decolonise humanism, uncover its radical instabilities, suggest its violent legacies across human and nonhuman registers, and open ground for engaging more rigorously and responsively with alternate modalities of be(com)ing human.
