I am an invisible [hu]man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a [hu]man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.
―Ralph Ellison
I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.
—Aimé Césaire
Every colonized people...whose soul and inferiority complex has been created by the death & burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation, that is, with the culture of the mother country….The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.
—Frantz Fanon
“To be or not to be”: that is the question Shakespeare (and Hamlet) so famously asks. What does this question really mean, what is it getting at, and what is so elusive about being or existence? In Hamlet’s soliloquy, Shakespeare pens questions and observations and tells of moments of life and death. What meanings do we give to our existence and that of others? These questions of what it means to be, live, and exist as a sentient being that seeks to comprehend the world are as relevant now as they ever were. But what does Shakespeare believe being human entails in the relatively new Eurocentered world of the early 17th century? One may point to Shakespeare’s Tempest to answer this last question since it is in this text that we can find a clear racial demarcation of those who are and those who are not. Prospero, Ariel, and Miranda represent all that is beautiful, prosperous, and rational, while Caliban symbolizes the so-called natural inferiority of colonized and enslaved Indigenous peoples (e.g., Retamar and Césaire illustrate this further). The Prospero superiority complex and the Caliban inferiority/dependence complex are what Mannoni (1950) had in mind when discussing the psychological effects and racial affects of colonization. While the Prospero complex entails the “pathological urge to dominate”, the Caliban complex may be succinctly described as the pathological urge to be dominated. However, as Fanon made clear in his critique of Mannoni’s work, one must think beyond psychological terms to examine the sociogenesis of racialized existence and the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized therein.
It is equally important to also examine the regimes of knowledge that uphold and indeed structure the racial-colonial order. Dominant narratives or discourses, whether philosophical tomes or written and performed as plays, serve as symbolic and pedagogical modes of domination deeply implicated in the material colonization and subjugation of others (e.g., Kant’s anthropology and racial classification, Hegel’s Spirit and Eurocentric historical teleology, Hobbes’ and Locke’s state of nature). They legitimize, in other words, the sociopolitical economic order and its many institutions. One could conceptualize this symbolic and material entanglement through the notion of academic imperialism, which “began in the colonial period with the setting up and direct control of schools, universities and publishing houses by the colonial powers”. This means that the ‘political and economic structure of imperialism generated a parallel [epistemic] structure’ (Alatas, 2003, p. 601 ). Narratives and discourses hence form part of the myths that keep the colonial order of things in place, without which we would find it difficult to understand the Longue Durée of coloniality and the reasons why the colonized are seduced by and participate in upholding the narratives and concomitant modern subjectivity and social practices responsible for their oppression and that of others. Why is this so? How is submission rewarded? How is resistance punished? How are both used to discipline and domesticate racialized subjects? How are the disciplining and dehumanizing discourses and practices experienced and collectively resisted by negatively racialized subjects? What is the political role of a counter-narrative? How is the dominant subjectivity (way of being) unsettled? Since racial-colonial narratives try to destroy our collective memories to distort our understanding of the modern/colonial order of things, how, then, do we collectively reclaim, live, narrate, and embody our histories and struggles to prefigure our decolonial futures in the present?
In ”Towards the Sociogenic Principle”, Sylvia Wynter gives us the conceptual tools to answer the above questions. She teases apart Frantz Fanon’s concept of sociogeny to both expose and interrogate the way modernity has destroyed our conception of humanity and what it means to be human. Wynter describes Fanon’s sociogenic (or sociogenetic) principle as “the always socialized nature of our modes of being human, and thereby of our experiencing what it is like to be human” (Wynter, 2013, p. 12). Through her analysis of Fanon’s observations of ontogeny and the problematic approach of the purely biological or bio-centric understanding of human existence, Wynter concludes that to reach a future liberatory state, we need a new language and conception to challenge our understanding of what it means to be human otherwise within the ruins of colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. How does one go against the grain of the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality undergirding the sociogenesis of racial hierarchies? How do people gain consciousness or double consciousness (Du Bois, 1903) of their systematically inferiorized position as well as a radical epistemological standpoint to think and do otherwise? In this essay (which is still being drafted), we try to answer these questions to sketch out the contours of a decolonial sociography, a methodological shift toward interrogating the racial axis around which social structures (institutions and hierarchical social relations) and dominant discourses/narratives/knowledges revolve. We thus explore how racial-colonial structures are narratively instituted and resisted.
We also explore the relationship between the concepts of race, sociogeny, and coloniality to advance Wynter’s (1990) notion of sociography, which she left undeveloped. Drawing on decolonial theory, our understanding of sociography aims to address intersectional multiplicity present with the physical and non-physical, material and immaterial aspects of being, directly alluding to the challenges Fanon introduced versus the purely biological understandings of the human, lived experience, and consciousness.
This article may not meet the traditional standards since we are trying to wrap our heads around the notion of decolonial sociography and its potential to disrupt both the colonial gaze of ethnography as well as the individualistic tendencies of auto-ethnography.
The overall aim of the article, therefore, is to understand that “peculiar sensation” of a double consciousness that simultaneously examines and unsettles the way Others are perceived by the dominant ethnoclass and the way these perceptions and conceptions, in turn, impact the experiences of negatively racialized peoples. To resist being seduced or subsumed by whiteness demands that one engage in border thinking, which directly relates to the notion of double consciousness—that is, to know how one is perceived under a racial-colonial lens while knowing that one has and will continue to exist otherwise despite the symbolic and physical violence wielded against our minds and bodies.
How then can we advance and use decolonial sociography as a way to think (and have a critical/decolonial/double consciousness) from our lived experiences (psycho-social existence) while also paying close attention to the social structures involved (hence the use of sociography)? By integrating the biographic with the ethnographic, decolonial sociography offers reflections and insights into what it means to be human in a world that revolves around the structuring axis of race (which shapes all spheres of social existence—labor, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, knowledge, power, nature, governance, family, etc.). There are clear implications for using sociography since it disrupts the navel-gazing tendencies of less critical approaches to auto-ethnography and ethnography.
We argue that decolonial sociography enables analysts to unsettle psychologism, which reduces the mind or consciousness to cognitive processes in the brain. Decolonial sociography is less interested in why conscious experiences emerge than in the existentially or “socially situated” person whose pain, suffering, and colonial wounds and negative racial markings provide the heuristics through which to critically read, comprehend, interpret, and interrogate the social reality in which said person’s psycho-existential experience unfolds. One cannot separate the intimate relationship between transgressive decolonial hermeneutics and phenomenology, which offer our sociographic approach its critical and decolonial edge. Perhaps decolonial sociography may unsettle the biocentric understanding of being human (isolated modern subject) by addressing the always already intersubjective dimension of experience. Can we be without others? Is the other the condition of possibility for my existence? Can decolonial sociography point to how those on the receiving end of coloniality construct a radical consciousness and articulate a counter-narrative? What is to be said about the praxis unfolding within distinct yet interconnected sites of struggle?
In what the complete essay, an extended discussion on sociogeny (social genesis) of race and the coloniality of being will assist in answering the many questions asked thus far. We then sketch the contours of decolonial sociography to explore how the symbolic and material dimensions of race/racism are experienced, resisted, and expressed in all spheres of social existence. Our theoretical and methodological points of departure are the sociopolitical and economic structures of colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. As we discuss further, these interlocked systems of domination and exploitation are sustained through the narratives we tell and existentially enact.
Following Fanon (1952), we believe that a sociographic interepretation of racialized social existence “can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the [inferiority] complex” constitutive of coloniality (p. 12). By focusing on the psycho-existential dimensions of this complex or, better yet, colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 2000), one can critically examine the entanglement between what one is cognizant of in terms of experience and the social and political-economic structures that create the conditions under which these experiences unfold. A decolonal sociography thus aims to interrogate this entangled symbolic and material structure but also show how, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds, racialized colonial subjects are “willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the [racial] structure” of coloniality (Fanon, 1952, p. 13).