Unthinking Mastery

"Seeking new genealogies for decolonial acts and thought, Julietta Singh unknots the connections between stubbornly resilient mechanisms of rule and current forms of knowledge production. Singh sketches the disastrous consequences of the ongoing investments in mastery that result in a ravaged environment and persistent racialized hierarchies of being, thereby giving us a critique of the human, a glimpse of the decolonization of the human, and the promise of something beyond the human." - Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure

"Notions of mastery have remained uninterrogated in theory for too long. No matter how reflexive we have become about other forms of power, mastery has been invoked as an essential good. Julietta Singh powerfully challenges this unproblematic invocation of mastery while revolutionizing postcolonial theory by fusing it with new materialism, animal studies, and queer theory. Balancing theoretical sophistication, textual nuance, and self-reflexive engagement with brilliance and care, Singh produces a powerful new theoretical synthesis that accounts for mastery and colonial violence in all their forms." - Christopher Breu, author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics

"A deft intervention in several different fields, Unthinking Mastery powerfully examines the insidious ways that the legacies of colonialism have infiltrated critical conversations in affect, queer, and ecocritical studies." - Melinda Backer, ASAP/Journal

"Singh’s work stands out in its truly transdisciplinary approach and simultaneous mobilization of feminist, posthuman, and decolonial thought." - Justyna Poary-Wybranowska, Contemporary Women's Writing

"Unthinking Mastery proposes dehumanism—a labor of language— as a pathway to social change and makes a contribution to the project of postcolonial theory as a theory of imaginative possibility." - Michael Mulvey, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

"While the approach of Unthinking Mastery is clearly interdisciplinary, the author turns foremost to the field of comparative literature to unravel forms of systemic dehumanizing violence that become obvious in forms of embodiment and language/narration. ... Her engagement not only touches on feminist and queer theories but also provides a powerful interconnection between environmental and postcolonial studies." - Monika Jaeckel, Anthropocenes