Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics

3. On Parahumanity: Creole Stories and the Suspension of the Human

  On Parahumanity Creole Stories and the Suspension of the Human Parahuman In April , Fenelon, the governor of Martinique, wrote: Je suis arrivé à la Martinique avec tous les préjugés d’Europe contre la rigueur avec laquelle on traite les nègres et en faveur de l’instruction qu’on leur doit pour les principes de notre religion . . . Je suis parvenu à croire fermement qu’il faut mener les nègres comme des bêtes.1 [I arrived in Martinique with all the European prejudices against the severity with which we treat the negroes and in favor of instructing them in the principles of our religion . . . I’ve come to firmly believe that it is necessary to guide the negroes like beasts.] Despite its utter banality, Fenelon’s apologia for slavery is notable as an example of the colonial categorization of Africans in the diaspora as neither human nor animal but as what I call parahuman beings.2 A category opened up by colonials attempting to manage black persons, particularly their capacity for collective resistance, the parahuman is distinguishable from other bodies produced in emerging biopolitical regimes because her body was broken in parts: an ear amputated for petit marronage, a hand for theft, an arm pulled from the body by the sugar mill, and sometimes a head cut from the body for resistance so total as to warrant death. If we are to take Fenelon at his word, the parahuman body that is guided, or governed (“mener”), as though it were an animal body is in analogical relation to the animals and to the human beings to which it is proximate. Under the logic of colonialism, this analogical relation worked to produce a hierarchy of species whereby the African slave was conceived as an interstitial   ON PARAHUMANITY form of life that could be exploited for labor power in the way animals were and that also protected Anglo-Europeans from recognizing their own animality. In taking up the term parahuman, I aim to challenge the hierarchal organization of life-forms that was common to colonial anthropologies and natural histories: I put animals, parahumans, and humans in horizontal relation (that is to say, para or beside each other) without conflating them. In addition to describing a relation whereby one category is beside another , presumably prior category, the prefix para- can describe a perversion of that prior category (paranormal, paranoia). Taking up this double signification of the prefix para, I propose that tracing the figure of the parahuman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals a perversion of the category of the human that was effected by diasporic Africans’ performance of their parahumanity. Afro-Americans’ parahumanity has generally been overlooked in favor of analyses that rehabilitate Africans and Afro-Americans to the rights of man and the realm of the human (this is true of the very different analyses of James Earl, Ottobah Cuguano, Frantz Fanon, and Henry Louis Gates).3 Instead of staying with this hierarchical arrangement that values human beings over other life-forms—a hierarchy whose structure was produced in no small part by colonialism—I aim to investigate the identificatory processes and the strategies of resistance that developed through the performances of those designated as parahuman. In order to build this analysis, I offer an archive of Creole stories through which we can trace the existence and development of the parahuman. I then offer an interpretation of this archive that shifts from prevailing understandings of Creole tales that, because they overlook parahumanity, interpret Creole tales as symptoms of colonialism instead of reroutings of colonial valuations of animality, humanity, and the relation between them. Although my interpretation of Creole tales diverges from the seminal analyses of Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé, and Édouard Glissant, their work offers a series of clues that I follow to develop my argument that Afro-Americans drew on the brutal colonial circumstance of dismemberment and bodily disaggregation to produce models of personhood that developed from the experience of parahumanity and in relation to animal bodies. These models of personhood registered a deep skepticism about the desirability of the category of the human, in so doing indicating an enlightenment tradition that is not founded on legitimizing or expanding the modern, secular category of the ON PARAHUMANITY   human, which has been the dominant critical understanding of enlightenment , including those analyses that extend to the colonies.4 Parahumans built modes of self and politics that were not...