¹ Teju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Cole’s beautiful book of essays is a good place to start thinking about how to do decolonial work. He examines art, interactions, and contemporary politics in order to ‘apprehend the latent wisdom in the dark’ (p. xi). From him, I learn how to ‘read enigmatically’. Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 9. I learn also to invert the scholarly essay that subordinates the personal interactions to the citational literature. Here, the interpersonal is foregrounded.

² Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). We might start to achieve the insight that Cole, Black Paper, seeks and put on alternate frames through which to begin our query. For example, Povinelli, Geontologies, p. 9, starts with a rejection of the hierarchical distinction between life and non-life that often frames our reading of decolonial struggles. Rather than start with understanding existents in the world, our political theory work tends to privilege life as birth, growth, reproduction, and death over non-life that is available to life as a resource. This framing positions those characterized as living in hierarchical opposition against those characterized as non-life. But, ‘existents’ might be the only universal that I can rely on without flattening particularities. This matters to me because I remain motivated by Siba Grovogui’s comment that ‘There can be no partial public sympathies’ (‘Everyone and no one: Moral solicitude and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, London School of Economics, 6 December 2022).

³ In response to Negritude, Soyinka famously jousted that a ‘Tiger doesn’t proclaim its tigritude, it pounces,’ in what is both a critique of the emphasis on that particularity and an emphasis on the work of being, in Time magazine 17 November 1967.

⁴ Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (London: Rex Collings, 1972). Soyinka’s exquisite prose similarly rejects the framing of the body as distinct from the (non-living) world it inhabits. Seemingly, without the intent to debunk the living/non-living binary, he writes syntax that attributes agency to sounds, spaces, and inanimate objects. For example, he says that ‘sounds … beat’ against walls (p. 129), or about how ‘thoughts … flash through the mind’ (p. 131), or ‘slime hits the grass’ (p. 131) or ‘the winds hurls itself’ (p. 138). Between Cole, Black Paper, Povinelli, Geontologies, and Soyinka, The Man Died, I am prepared to profane hierarchical knowledges.

⁵ Povinelli, Geontologies, p. 28. Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020). Without the damning of the system itself, Povinelli suggests that marginalized positions, or Mamdani’s ‘permanent minorities’, are forced to occupy ever more narrow spaces and regimes of intelligibility. Damn the system!

⁶ Himadeep Muppidi, ‘Who Forms the Mass of Mass Destruction?’, Review of International Studies (2023)

⁷ Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). This is another example of the rejection of arguments that the destruction of the world is normal or produced by humans. Rather, Yusoff shows that specific modes of being human are destructive. We might posit, as do many of my interlocutors in this piece and elsewhere, that other modes of being human might then be instructive for thinking about decolonial openings.

⁸ Alexander Barder, Global Race War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Barder presents a detailed examination of the (white supremacist) air that we breathe. The question that remains is: what other stories can oxygenate our challenges to this dominant one? We face no shortage of interlocutors for this task.

⁹ Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 116. Humanism is implicated in the white supremacist, capitalist racial order. Sharpe says ‘…the category of the “Human” misunderstood as “Man” [and] languages of development … [along with] the material conditions that they re/produce continue to produce our fast and slow deaths’.

¹⁰ Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018), p. 263. She cites Frank Wilderson: ‘the cop’s answer to the black subject’s question – why did you shoot me? – follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you”’. Blackness comes to occupy a narrow space in a regime of intelligibility. Damn the system!

¹¹ Khatun, Australianama, p. 15. Khatun points out that other forms of knowledge and the ways of being they support were ‘disqualified from the late 18th century’ as irrelevant and premodern. The idea of disqualification can orient the decolonial thinker.

¹² Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage, trans. Jonathan Wright (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). Antoon reanimates these disqualified modes by showing how they have been subject to destruction and the worlds that they might have witnessed.

¹³ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004). The destruction that Antoon and others point towards is evident in Fanon’s writings about how it produces a reaction that must be similarly violent in order to be audible, but he tells us that they need to develop from a reaction to a politics. Damning the system must be a political project.

¹⁴ Soyinka, The Man Died, p. 125. Since there is no destination to reach, the development of a political project must accommodate the disqualified knowledges and modes of being that Khatun, Australianama, highlights, that is, if it is to carry a decolonial imaginary.

¹⁵ Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘A questionnaire on decolonization’, October Magazine, 174 (2020), pp. 73–8. Maldonado-Torres says that ‘liberal institutions prefer bodies of colour who utter the “correct” words and who relativize, minimize, domesticate, and potentially eradicate or keep at bay the wrong ones’ (p. 76). Importantly, he tells us that a much-needed ‘decolonial maturity includes the realization that the exploration of colonialism, decolonization, and related terms often provokes anxiety and fear’ (p. 75). This fear (and the pain it can yield) exposes the decolonial thinker to the problem as one of politics, the problem of a system that works very hard to maintain itself by determining the field of intelligibility. Damn the system!

¹⁶ Shiera S. el-Malik, ‘Why Orientalism still matters: Reading “casual forgetting” and “active remembering” as neoliberal forms of contestation in international politics’, Review of International Studies, 41:3 (2015), pp. 503–25. It is the political that matters, a form of the political that comes without guarantees because we cannot foreclose the future. Asad Haider, ‘Politics without guarantees’, The Point Magazine (August 2021), available at: https://thepointmag.com/politics/politics-without-guarantees/

¹⁷ Muppidi, ‘Who Forms the Mass of Mass Destruction?’, p. writes ‘to rip apart the meaning of facts while leaving the facts intact – what form of historical writing achieves that?’.

¹⁸ Ben Meiches, ‘Dreams of Atomic Genocide: Racism, Weaponry, and the Bomb’ (2023) points to white supremacy as creatively violent. While he writes about bombs and nuclear weapons, I keep thinking about the depiction in C. L. R. James’s Toussaint Louverture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 52–3, of a creative murder: bury a slave to the neck, lather their head with honey and molasses, and let ants and flies kill them slowly.

¹⁹ Sylvia Wynter, ‘No humans involved: An open letter to my colleagues’, Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1:1 (1994), pp. 42–73.