Vote NEG for a hermeneutics of suspicion that refuses the AFF’s consolidation of Western thought.

Scholars in the fields of critical ethnic, Black, and Native studies who welcome the charge of decolonization and abolition in the corporate university often labor to push back against and expose the limitations of the “epistemic turns” or “epistemic revolutions of Europe” that Sylvia Wynter so deftly tracks in her voluminous body of work. Scholars committed to the politics of Black abolitionist work and Native decolonization must often assume postures of suspicion—“misanthropy”—and sometimes must outright refuse Western thought’s arrogant universalist assumptions, commonsense tautologies, and professed reforms to the category of the human; due to these ways, they often experience a great deal of hostility and violence. When decolonial and Black abolitionist thought has to contend with Western or European continental theory, specifically its critical theories of progressive (liberal) social change, one often encounters an epistemic crisis or what scholar Frank Wilderson refers to as an antagonism. Forced to wrestle with antagonisms that often require Native/Indigenous and Black death, the scholar committed to decolonization and abolition in the university seminar space often has to refuse necropolitical epistemological systems, which structure white liberal humanist ways of thinking and imagining the world. This kind of labor and violent confrontation in the classroom on a repeated basis can transform one’s educational and professional experience into one rife with stress, anxiety, and unease. More specifically, I have watched graduate students of color experience this kind of stress, anxiety, and unease as they confront the pressure to “take up” more contemporary impulses within Western “critical theory” to move “beyond the human” or toward the posthuman. One task of this article is to attend to the ways that Black and Indigenous academics, as well as Black and Native studies scholars, are expected to perform a commitment to a Deleuzian brand of posthumanist and nonrepresentational theory as proof that they are critical and postmodern scholars and disciplinary formations. Lately, I have heard questions posed to Black and Native scholars and activists who theorize the work of movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and other work addressing Black and Indigenous death to explain what relationship this (survival- based) work has to “identity,” “the subject,” or “the human.” More specifically, the questions are posed as ones that assume that these movements reify one or all of the above categories. Additionally, the inquiries are accompanied by an expectation that the person(s) and the movements will disavow all claims to identity, subjecthood, and the desire for humanity. What kinds of hostilities, assumptions, and misrecognitions lurk in inquiries such as the following: “Is Black Lives Matter a humanist movement?”2 “Does BLM reify the notion and idea of the human?” “When will Native studies transcend or get beyond the subject or the human?”3 Because emerging scholars in the academy often contend with these hostile inquires in the seminar space, while teaching, at conferences and in other spaces of academe, a change in comportment, tone, affect, and ways of being in the academy also needs to accompany the modes of conceptual and theoretical resistance within Black and Native studies. This article is as interested in the postures, affective states (skepticism), and stubborn practices of insubordination such as refusal that frustrate forward movement and business-as-usual in the academy. Specifically, this article tracks how Native feminist refusal and Black feminist suspicion respond to Deleuzian theory. Native feminist politics of decolonial refusal and Black feminist abolitionist politics of skepticism informed by a misandry and misanthropic distrust of and animus toward the (over)representation of man/men as the human diverge from the polite, communicative acts of the public sphere, much like the politics of the “feminist killjoy.”4 Throughout this article, I deploy the term “feminist” both ambivalently and strategically to mark and distinguish the scholarly tradition created by Black and Native women, queer, trans, and other people marginalized within these respective communities and their anticolonial and abolitionist movements.5 Until a more useful and legible term emerges, I will use “feminist” to mark the practices of refusal and skepticism (misandry/misanthropy) as ones that largely exist outside more masculinist traditions within Indigenous/Native studies and Black studies. “Decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” depart from the kinds of masculinist anticolonial traditions that attempt to reason Native/ Black man to White Man within humanist logic in at least two significant ways. First, neither participate in the communicative acts of the humanist public sphere from within the terms of the debate. Further, they do not play by the rules.6 Specifically, the Native and Black “feminist” politics discussed throughout launch a critique of both the logic of the discussion about the human and identity as well as the mode of communication. In fact, practices of refusal and skepticism interrupt and flout codes of civil and collegial discursive protocol to focus on and illumine the violence that structures the posthumanist discourse. Attending to the comportment, tone, and intensity of an engagement is just as important as focusing on its content. The particular manner in which Black and Native feminists push back against violence is important. The force, break with decorum, and style in which Black and Native feminists confront discursive violence can change the nature of future encounters. Given that Black women who confront the logics of “nonrepresentational theory” are really confronting genocide and the white, whimsical disavowal of Black and Native negation on the way to subjectlessness, it is understandable that there is an equally discordant response. Refusal and skepticism are modes of engagement that are uncooperative and force an impasse in a discursive exchange. This article tracks how traditions of “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” that emerge from Native/Indigenous and Black studies expose the limits and violence of contemporary nonidentitarian and nonrepresentational impulses within white “critical” theory. Further, this article asks whether Western forms of nonrepresentational (subjectless and nonidentitarian) theory can truly transcend the human through self-critique, self-abnegation, and masochism alone. External pressure, specifically the kind of pressure that “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view “posthumanist” attempts with a “hermeneutics of suspicion,”7 is needed in order to truly address the recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory. While this article does not directly stake a claim in embracing or rejecting identity per se, it does take up the category of the human. Because the category of the human is modified by identity in ways that position certain people (white, male, able- bodied) within greater or lesser proximity to humanness, identity is already taken up in this discussion. Conversations about the human are very much tethered to conversations about identity. In the final section, the article will explore how Black and Native/Indigenous absorption into the category of the human would disfigure the category of the human beyond recognition. Further, I discuss “decolonial refusal” in relation to how Black scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Amber Jamilla Musser work within a Black feminist tradition animated by a kind of skepticism or suspicion capable of ferreting out the trace of the white liberal human within (self-) professed subjectless, futureless, and nonrepresentational white theoretical traditions. In other words, in the work of Sylvia Wynter, one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory— specifically its attempt at self-critique and self-correction in the name of justice for humanity— to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current “closed system,” which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the other.9 Wynter’s study of decolonial theory and its elaboration of autopoiesis informs her understanding of how the human and its overrepresentation as man emerges. Recognizing that humans (of various genres) write themselves through a “self-perpetuating and self-referencing closed belief system” that often prevents them from seeing or noticing “the process of recursion,” Wynter works to expose these blind spots [shortcomings].10 Wynter understands that one of the limitations of Western liberal thought is that it cannot see itself in the process of writing itself. I observe a similar kind of cynicism about the way the academic left invokes “post humanism” in the work of Jackson and Musser. Musser in particular questions the capacity of queer theories to turn to sensations like masochism within the field of affect studies to overcome the subject. Further, Jackson’s and Musser’s work is skeptical that white transcendence can happen on its own terms or rely solely on its own processes of self-critique and self-correction. I read Jackson’s and Musser’s work as distrustful of the ability for “posthumanism” to be accountable to Black and Indigenous peoples or for affect theory on its own to not replicate and reinforce the subjugation of the other as it moves toward self-annihilation. Both the human and the post human are causes for suspicion within Black studies.