Deepa Jani
Deepa Jani is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Old Westbury in Long Island. She specializes in Global Postcolonial and Postmodern literatures, Anglophone African and World Literatures, and Critical Theory. Her research also focuses on gender and critical race studies, humanism and human rights discourse, and globalization studies. Her articles on Coetzee and critical theory have appeared in two edited collections, one of which is on postcolonial studies and the other on critical studies. Additionally, her second article on Coetzee was published in the Oxford Journal, Forum for Modern Language Studies. Her interview on Coetzee appeared in the film and App, Traverses: J. M. Coetzee in the World. She has also served as peer reviewer in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literatures and Critical Theory. She is currently completing her first book manuscript titled “J. M. Coetzee: Ethics, Subalternity, and the Critique of Humanism.” In preparation for her second book project on the legacy of humanisms from the Global South, she is also working on the article “Bandung, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said: Postcoloniality and the Question of Humanism.”
Collected Work
“Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity”
This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apartby returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, the essay argues that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. It contends further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.
“Frantz Fanon: Postcoloniality and New Humanism”
Frantz Fanon’s ethical injunction to imagine a “new humanism” in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth has engendered intense debate in the last 40 years among postcolonial scholars over the character of Fanonian humanism. Some argue that it is “residual humanism” rehearsing pieties of the European form, while others exult in Fanon’s “emergent humanism” that radically breaks with Western humanism. This chapter argues that his humanism is neither residual nor emergent. It contends that Fanon conceptualizes decolonization as an antonymous process, a “humanism without humanism,” that ruptures with the Eurocentric humanist episteme, while also fashioning a liberatory project of Bildung for the postcolonial people, leading to the advancement of their consciousness to the nation-people, thereupon ushering in a new humanity, a decolonizing project ironically modeled on the narrative of self-development of bourgeois subjectivity. Fanon is a profoundly revolutionary thinker and a thoroughly Europeanist one at that.