Resisting Colonial Mastery: Becoming Animal, Becoming Ethical in The Impressionist

Theories about Third Space or “in-betweeness” often lack an ethics that responds to the position of the majority of people who experience the violence of colonialism, as Amar Acheraïou argues. How can we think about hybridity with a more committed ethics? Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist suggests that much of the violence experienced by humans and animals under dominant or colonial thought stems from a traditional view of subjectivity as fixed, stable, knowable, distinct, and independent from others and the material world. Colonial logic views as “disposable” those regarded as not human or somehow less than human and often sacrifices them in order to maintain a stable, dominant notion of subjectivity, an exclusionary definition of Man, a continuous flow of extractionary capital from the colonies, and a particular hierarchy or ordering of the world. This article argues that The Impressionist portrays subjectivity not as fixed but in process, after Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming animal,” as a way to challenge dominant thinking. The novel also emphasizes the nonhuman nature of subjectivity and human dependence on the nonhuman, including the environment, for existence. The Impressionist offers an important corrective to concepts of hybridity by emphasizing that those humans and nonhumans regarded as “disposable” demand ethical treatment.