ABSTRACT
Appeals to the humanitarian are used for an astonishing array of purposes, and in everything from diversity statements to rationales for community-based research, to university mission statements, many of which belie the violent work of humanitarian ideologies and projects: for example, when humanitarianism is invoked to justify US militarism in various global sites. In regard to the violence of the universal, Sylvia Wynter describes and indicts the overrepresentation of “Man,” in which what she refers to as the “Western bourgeois” conception of the human is posited as synonymous with humanity as a whole. The mobilization of the humanitarian to achieve the various imperial forms of governance named above raises questions about the designation of certain events and interventions as humanitarian ones—i.e., as involving “widespread human suffering” that require “aid or support on a large scale.” Rather than seeking ethical purity through claiming a stance outside of power relations, they foreground complex relationships to the category of the “human”.
