ALt OPtion

 

Paul Gilroy - Yale University

 

 

Academic speculation assigns ÒraceÓ and nation to different specialisms but in numerous different settings all across Europe, important questions relating to national identity, national belonging and the integrity of nation-states are being articulated with the language and symbols of ÒraceÓ. This is not always overt. Racial division can be subtly inferred but its bio-political force is persistently reified and easily combined with ethnic absolutism, mechanistic culture and deterministic organicism to form a potent cocktail. Sometimes these populist operations are conducted by the right, sometimes they have tempted the left. The volatile alchemy of ÒraceÓ, nation and identity blurs those categories. The awkward problems this situation presents are compounded not only because ÒraceÓ and nationality are routinely associated or where they harden and set in the viscious patterns of absolute ethnicity. The very ground on which the ramshackle edifice of political anti-racism stood in the past has dwindled and the wholesome, democratic cadences of that elusive force for good: civic nationalism are not being heard as loudly and as frequently as its academic advocates had hoped they would be.

            In some circumstances, the authority of indifferent civic cultures has even been invoked tactically as a mechanism of tacitly race-coded power. It has even been deployed to silence and disregard the protests of people whose possession of formal and technical citizenship has not prevented them from being disadvantaged on the basis of descent, ethnicity, culture, religion, language, birthplace, phenotype or blood. Because citizenship is avowedly race-blind, to even investigate the charge of discrimination would be to admit illegitimate and corrosive distinctions into the traditional operations of a modern political culture that acknowledges no differences between its citizens and has made the boundaries of its complacent and homogenous commonwealth into the principal issue. Rightly assertive that humanity should not be divided along spurious racial lines, this response is mistaken where it dismisses the idea that racial divisions matter and trivialises the raciology that produces and sanctions them. Those factors of division provide the meta-physical currency for race-thinking that is endowed with the capacity to undo the historic assumptions of modern politics completely.

            The first battle is to apprehend ÒraceÓ as a process of relation, of kinship and narration rather than some badge worn on or lodged deep inside the body. My second plea is that, without making any concessions to the contemporary reification of ÒraceÓ, we try to find ways to take the divisive de-humanising power of race-thinking more seriously. In other words, we must be prepared to identify raciology as a specific and significant object, to comprehend it as a part of a web of discourse that has a knowable history and to appreciate its implication in the exercise of bio-political powers that have damaged democracy in the past and can still compromise it in the present.

            The interrelation of ÒraceÓ and nation remains contentious and complex. It touches the history of Europe’s enlightenment and of the academic humanities that have guided its civilisation. Some version of that narrative will doubtless be familiar to everybody here. I want to suggest that taking raciology seriously means there can be no excuse for failure to be intimate with the history of Europe’s modern invention of humanity in a racialised hierarchy. Telling and re-telling that story of rational irrationality, of knowledge and power is vital because it can provide significant ethical and political resources even now, particularly where we struggle to make adequate responses to the suffering raciology still creates. It should also be obvious that commanding that contested history is all the more important as living memory of the Third Reich dies out and ceases to form the constellation under which we do critical, oppositional work on the developing lore that brings the dismal and destructive power of ÒraceÓ to life.

            The next layer of difficulties involves exploring the relationship between the narration of nationhood and the elaboration of raciology. In order to address it satisfactorily, we must be prepared to make detours away from the geo-body of contemporary Europe into the imperial and colonial past where the catastrophic power of race-thinking was first institutionalised and its distinctive anthropologies put to the test. That re-orientation is an essential opening move but we must also be able to pass beyond the mere inclusion of Europe’s colonial territories. The empire was not simply out there – a terminal point for trading activity in the distant torrid zones of the world at the other end of Europe’s colonial chain. It was brought back here and conditioned the constitution of economy, society and culture at the core of the colonial system. This shift in standpoint presents a series of challenges to historians. Where the exclusionary force of race-thinking is palpable and it draws fresh strength from the most narrow-minded nationalisms, a measure of compensatory inclusion seems to provide an immediate answer. But it is only half of an appropriate response to these perils. The automatic assumption that European history will be told best and most powerfully when it is made to coincide with the fixed borders of nation-states will also have to be queried.

            As principled opposition to nationalism has faded, a sense of the interconnection between race-thinking and nationalism has declined. Nationalism can now stand in for anti-capitalism. Academic theory’s affirmative nationalists have won a partial victory – but they are few because their characteristic division of the field into wholesome civic and evil ethnic varieties is difficult to secure and their favoured link between nationalism and a discourse of plural citizenship is more fragile than they like to concede. Though far from Europe, Benedict Anderson’s recent line of enquiry is more typical: he asks whether the beleaguered dissenters of the over-developed countries can afford to discard the patent goodness involved in the versions of nationalism and patriotism thrown up by these millennial times? In Britain at least, a plausible answer to this would have to take the mentality of the advertisers into account. That corporate innovation has deformed the political process, distorting it with the new confidence that claims nationalism is no longer a dangerous force because national consciousness can be re-built, re-signified and re-presented at will. The idea that their nationalism can now be protected against any unwholesome linkage with race-thinking has been bolstered by the spin-doctors’ sense of the infinite plasticity of political representation. The new political corporationism believes it can make anything mean whatever governments want it to mean. However, in the profane, untidy, post-colonial world, a world traumatised by the genocidal aspirations of earlier phases in the development of raciology, the writing of history involves a reckoning with the imposition of limits. Anything is not possible all of the time. The totalitarian implications of that particular fantasy should be obvious.

            With the history of that fascistic legacy firmly in mind, I want to go back briefly to the writings of that exemplary European thinker Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Kantian, Aryanist and sterling inspiration to the raciological fantasies of the National Socialists. To my mind, he stands for the easy racialisation of the European ideal and reminds us that alongside Hellenism and Hebraism we should acknowledge the stubborn presence of what we can call Nordicism. If we appreciate the constitutive force of raciology on the thinking of nationalists, we can see Chamberlain’s work as he wanted it to be seen: as a strong bridge between Kant and Hitler over which that noble hero, the Teutonic Plato, could drive his historic battle chariot through the chaos of racelessness. Chamberlain’s anti-semitism points towards our own period where he disavows hatred of the Jews in favour of the apparently more lofty goal of Aryan self-love. It allowed praise of the authentic eastern Jews while articulating special scorn for those who dressed themselves up as what they were not and what they could never become. According to him, properly organic political links between ÒraceÓ and nation could only be constructed via a state that maintained and strengthened Aryan racial traits in carefully-planned ethnological operations analogous to the scientific work of the livestock breeder: ÒHorses and especially dogs give us every chance of observing that the intellectual gifts go hand in hand with the physical; this is specially true of the moral qualities: a mongrel is frequently very clever, but never reliable; morally he is always a weed. Continual promiscuity between two pre-eminent animal races leads without exception to the destruction of them both. Why should the human race form an exception?Ó[1]

            Remembering these sentiments on the brink of the twenty-first century is a powerful reminder to keep race-thinking at the centre of things. This is to be done I repeat, not to reify ÒraceÓ but so as to better appreciate the constitutive force of raciology as something that has shaped our modernity and undermined its best promises with colour- and culture-coded hierarchies. The sheer familiarity of Chamberlain’s outlook cautions us that we are not, as yet, in some post-raciological space which populist ultra-nationalism, fraternalism and race-thinking cannot reach. To make matters worse, we lack a critical political language with which to make sense of the recent resurgence of race-thinking in its novel genomic forms. The tangle we currently experience between the idea of nationality and the idea of ÒraceÓ cannot be easily disposed of. It should be interpreted as a symptom with sources that go right back into the formation of nationalism as a geo-political and anthropological doctrine, that is, as a way of managing and orchestrating historical time according to a distinctive exclusionary logic that poses the problems of belonging and fate as metaphysical puzzles that ÒraceÓ alone can solve.

            The left’s tendency to look benignly on nationalism and see it as a bulwark against the encroachments of capital, globalisation, American imperialism and unwanted supra-national authority begins to appear deeply problematic. It has been bought at the price of cutting nationalism free from all discussions of raciology. Its most dangerous effect is a situation in which the utopia of multi-culturalism is ceded meekly to the allure of the corporate world. This predicament needs to be answered by an equally serious and potent cosmopolitan variety of non-racial, we could call it ÒplanetaryÓ, humanism that sees exposure to otherness as more than loss we’ve been told it must be. That fanciful aspiration takes us onto different political ground. At the risk of sounding defensive, I am prepared to concede that there’s too much loose talk about identity these days. The concept provides the cipher for a messy constellation of cultural and political difficulties. In Europe, its currency is so closely associated with timely anxieties about who we are and what we want that it might be used to characterise the spirit of these troubled and irreversibly hetero-cultural times. Though it often seems trivial, much of this identity-chatter is the product of substantive historical shifts: in the relationships between cosmos and polis, geo-body and dwelling-place, citizen and stranger, the inside and the outside. Its wide dissemination is connected with the communicative revolutions that have compressed time, condensed space and fostered new kinds of technologically-mediated presence and inter-connection. In these conditions, the language of identity helps to articulate the sense that our relations with ourselves have entered a novel and unsettling phase. It offers an invitation to new ways of narrating the self, understanding social solidarity and exploring the history of subjects in their interrelation and, just as significantly, in their subordination.

            A distinctive inventory of political tasks appears where ÒraceÓ and ethnicity are admitted as sources and symbols of fundamental identity, and an equally fundamental difference. It has been defined by a number of key conflicts. The protracted struggle to document and thereby bring value to the lives of people who have been marginalised and overlooked is the first of these. The second, has involved a series of aesthetic battles that challenged racial hierarchies and the unsentimental codes of racialised abjection with a disturbing and disruptive positivity. These protracted confrontations were shaped by the disreputable desire to project the beautiful complexity and the complex beauty to be found in cultural formations that are almost always dismissed as primitive or simple and therefore unworthy. Above all, this work inside Europe and beyond it, has been driven by the democratic obligation to find, restore and celebrate the human dignity that racisms cannot countenance and which their continuing operations deny.

            These struggles overlap and interconnect. They are not merely oriented towards the immediate goal of winning a belated, restorative measure of cultural recognition for marginal and rejected people. They have gone beyond that work and contributed to the formation of the political and cultural field in which identity politics is constituted. There, politics is not limited by or to the matter of identity. Nor is the resulting identity politics an immature form, some preliminary curtain-raiser or insubstantial overture to the grim business of real change. Though we will have to be ready to answer accusations of political correctness, we should not retreat from the realisation that identity is more than ever politicised, especially where new and challenging conceptions of politics have been snatched from the jaws of those perennial failings: disabling narcissism and inertia-inducing self-absorption. Identity-talk articulates more than the existential predicaments of an age in which ÒraceÓ and nation are being struggled over. The timely anxieties to which it helps supply therapeutic answers are being played out simultaneously in several differing forms. They circulate in the expanding domain of cultural politics but also shape the public and civic discourses that contend around the goal of enhanced tolerance and social pluralism. The timely fears that have arisen, characteristically from the prospect of lost or diluted national, ÒracialÓ or ethnic identity, are also being registered in more intimate, private, but not yet fully-privatised spaces. By diverse means the moods, themes, textures and techniques associated with identity politics have moved into the spectacular public spaces created by the impossibly vivid visual order of contemporary commerce. The full contemporary force of bio-politics dictates that their greatest power is manifested close to the body where they voice increasingly desperate ontologies of gender and help to stage the primal scenes of post-modern culture in a custodial and managerial relationship between self and soma. Another, complementary variety of attention to identity is manifested in the narrowing civic sphere where in answering the fragmentation and atomisation of the social, it sanctions neurotic outbursts against the increasing leakiness of the boundaries placed around apparently fundamental but essentially imagined kinship groupings like families, tribes, nations and of course ÒracesÓ.

            Richard Rorty speaks for this vogueish commitment to authentic identity as an antidote to the post-modern condition when he offers his own anxious readers the reassuring suggestion that Ònational pride is to countries what self-respect is to individualsÓ. A more nuanced but not dissimilar position emerges from the writings of Charles Taylor the Canadian philosopher who has brought many valuable and principled insights into contemporary discussions of Òmulti-culturalismÓ. He is well-known as a cautious advocate of the revolutionary modern notion that there is an ethics involved in the right to have an authentic relation to oneself recognised in public culture, in other words, of the right to live a life that is true to oneself. But the same problem raised by Rorty’s disturbing words of comfort is evident here as well. Recognition for individual authenticity becomes enmeshed with the different demands to be recognised as authentic that emerge from the claims of collective, social groups. There too identity has been isolated and projected as a pre-eminent form of solidarity. Habitual culture, or more technically, ethnicity constitutes a well-worn hinge connecting these two quite different dimensions of identity.

            We must now ask on what scale the cultural and psychological topography that must precede the precious moment of recognition is to be resolved? Are we to be content with the identities we discover, already constituted, in the saturated post-colonial field or can we imagine patterns of cultural politics that, in either restless or utopian modes, strive to bring new identifications, new life-scripts, into being? The idea of nationality has had to be reconfigured to fit with the techno-cultural patterns of increasingly globalised commerce and government. The territorial integrity of nations has also been qualified by sub-national and trans-national patterns of conflict and dissent as well as by economic, medical and ecological phenomena that do not defer to the historic borders erected around nation states. These changes have added urgent notes to the noisy proliferation of identity-babble. It should not however, be reduced to the patchy attempts to re-imagine and re-articulate insufficiently authentic and rooted communities that it undoubtedly contains. Those doomed efforts to revive properly-historic peoples may be veiled responses to the experience of emergent planetarisation but their appearance needs to be apprehended as constituting a political and cultural event in its own right.             Fundamentalist commitments to what I have called absolute identity have been promoted by defensive and desperate nationalisms as well as the more confident and authoritative varieties. They can be based on any factor of difference, but it is particularly significant for our purposes that this type of appeal to resolutely invariant sameness is now helping to mourn the lost homogeneity of that sublime object: Europe. Its discrete but apparently unchanging, traditional identities can be managed and safely cultivated only after additional fortifications have been erected against trespassing by aliens, strangers and refugees. Members of those groups, not all of which are readily racialised, may not always be dismissed as inferior or naturally-different but their unfamiliar cultures and the fixed identities that correspond to them, are judged to be so incompatible with proper indigenous patterns that catastrophe is the likely result of all mistaken attempts at inter-mixture and the inappropriate expectation of peaceful co-existence. Encounters with difference are just as unwelcome and potentially destructive as they were for Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They place that precious commodity, rooted identity in grave jeopardy.             Where national and ethnic identity are represented and projected as pure, exposure to difference threatens them with dilution and compromises their prized purities with the ever-present possibility of contamination. Crossing, as mixture and movement must be guarded against. New hatreds and violence arise not, as they did in the past, from supposedly reliable anthropological knowledge of the identity and difference of the Other but from the novel problem of not being able to locate the Other’s difference in the common-sense lexicon of alterity. Different people are certainly hated and feared but the timely antipathy against them is nothing compared to the hatreds turned towards the greater menace of the half-different and the partially familiar. To have mixed is to have been party to a great betrayal. Any unsettling traces of hybridity must be excised from the tidy, bleached-out zones of impossibly pure culture.

            This interesting moment becomes all the more difficult if we begin to appreciate that a similar investment in identity, as something that marks unbridgeable chasms in experience and culture has also appeared among the excluded minorities. It has provided a popular means of compensating the socially-excluded and downpressed for an internal exile from the real privileges of the insider status they are still emphatically denied. Simplistic fundamentalist views of identity and the related hatreds of mixture and mixing that accompany them now connect conservatives of different hues across the formal boundaries arising from their political ideologies. This deep and largely unanticipated bond has given the chroniclers of hybridity and the advocates of tolerance a lengthy new agenda. They have been called upon to answer the alchemy of race, nation and ethnicity with better figurations of culture and its trans-local workings. There is theoretical and practical work to be done towards the production of a routed rather than a rooted cosmopolitanism.

            The supposedly disruptive presence of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers is only the most obvious pressure inducing governments to communicate politically in the novel idioms of anxious identity. The commercial and cultural imperatives of Europe’s heritage industry have also fostered this development. On one side, where the best liberal traditions remain strong, cultural differences are enthusiastically reified and then, in the righteous name of civic multi-culturalism and respect for difference, they are given back to the minorities in bogus, purified form as legitimate sources of ethnic pride and celebration. If exotic differences are to be tolerated, it would appear that they must first be frozen and then handed over to cultural brokers and anthropological experts. On the other side, stand those who fear the erasure of ethnic distinctiveness that is currently being precipitated by weightless globalised commerce, Americanisation and other sinister but faceless corporate interests. These conservatives strive to harness identity’s ontological power to different ends. Inside their territory, it can be employed to bind dominant and subordinate groups to each other through a common enthusiasm for national identity and its resurgent passions. Right or left, they too must constrain the insubordinate fluidity of culture. Among both groups, it appears that there is still life in the old assumptions about belonging which strive in vain to organise the matching of bodies and cultures to their national and regional environments.

            This strange situation no longer involves asking the relatively simple question of what it takes to belong to a nation. Charles Taylor was right to have appreciated that it raises the different issue of what it takes to be recognised as belonging. Here too, many activists and artists have risen to the task of complicating the codes of recognition. Under these volatile and dangerous conditions, identity has repeatedly been reduced to ethno-politics and lodged in the protracted crises of cosmopolitan democracy to which the predicament of Europe’s sometime immigrants and their obviously non-immigrant descendants bears eloquent witness. The intergenerational and transcultural predicament of the so-called Òsecond generation immigrantÓ endorses an anti-primordialist view of identity as amenable to processes of historical and social construction. However, there are also grave dangers involved in seeing the chronic, compulsive creativity to create oneself as the outcome of nothing more than a sustained act of will. The ad-men are wrong. Identity may be a construction but that does not mean it is always under the conscious control of its bearers and manipulators. It proceeds in locations and at tempos they might not have chosen and requires the use of resources that they inherited and may not be able to command. Conceding ground to absolutism and seeing this construction-work as wholly different from the everyday processes of being and becoming experienced by other social groups, risks making immigrants and minorities into special custodians of identity. They re-appear in ethnic costume as groups that have, for elusive historical reasons, enjoyed a sort of Òhot-lineÓ into the glamorous world where authentic – and usually exotic – identities are determined. Their supposedly distinctive experiences are simultaneously microscoped and telescoped so that they fall into an unwelcome hyper-visibility. This is doubly dangerous because it abandons the great ordinary, non-exotic majority population in a blank Òidentity-lessÓ space. They retain a degree of normative power but where the glamour of difference cuts into their vision, they become understandably jealous of the certainties that feral, exotic identity can supply in turbulent conditions where selfhood is anxious and the bonds of collectivity uncertain. These are circumstances in which neo-fascism can thrive, animated by demands for national re-birth in the midst of the decadence and decline symbolised in equal measure by the post-traditional forces of multi-culture and those of gender-equality.

The contemporary fascination with identity cannot be divorced from this history and its formal political circuitry. It refers us not to the world of tidy and discrete regimented identities but to the dynamic and profane processes of identification in which selves are fashioned, felt, animated and renewed.

            As I have suggested, where absolute identity takes hold and cultures are reified, racialised exotica and ethnic transgression can acquire a powerful political charge. It bears repetition that they flow through the phantasmagoria of corporate multi-culture and lie at the very heart of contemporary commerce as well as the workings of post-colonial politics. Images of difference have been turned into icons and have proliferated in a weakened public sphere. They solicit and regulate the protean identities of their spectators. From billboards and advertisements, these seductive signs of identity shape the experience of moving through our metropolitan environments. These identities do not even meet in the market place. The crowd in that meeting ground has been dispersed into its private means of coming and going. Instead, carefully-targeted marketing operations seek to command the truths of identity by orchestrating its economic, cultural and psychic components and conscripting its addressees into desires they cannot refuse and identifications they cannot control. And yet, today, what you see is rarely what you get. A new game of identification has been initiated now that photographic images have lost their veridical privileges. Their special authority is draining away. Lost in a deluge of appeals to identity, their power is further undermined by the routine application of digital imaging and processing technologies. Placed at the computer, we are invited to play with images on screen, recomposing and refining them in a digital wonderland from which the totalitarian implications of the idea that anything is possible have been systematically purged.

            The relations of power, hybridity and inter-dependence created where marginal cultures flowed into the mainstream, need to be identified as another significant development in the representation of nationality. Corporate multi-culture arrests identity for its own purposes and transforms the visual languages and representational codes within which identity becomes visible, legible and intelligible. This visual culture racialises difference to produce post-colonial exotica with a high commercial value. It departs sharply from earlier patterns which made visible differences into nothing but emblems of misery and insult. The alien refugees who have settled across the street or down the road are consigned to the permanent twilight of their infra-humanity while the iconic, super-human figures of Michael Jordan and co. look down, smiling benevolently from on high.

            Of course, the new premium placed on identity and difference in the commercial sphere is not automatically transferable into political and civic relations. The history of colonial and post-colonial societies can be used to show that the most appealing fruits of otherness can be craved and enjoyed by people who persistently despise their creators. Recent conflicts over multi-culturalism have, in any case, drawn attention to the ethical and political difficulties involved in separating cultures from the post-modern lives of their no-longer-traditional practitioners. Behind that delicate operation lie the deeper problems that arise from comprehending culture itself not as a dynamic unfolding but as a substance or form of property assigned to specific populations in ways that define and contain their essential particularity. Here again the body has provided the principal battleground. Its power to supply the proof that nature and culture have been aligned is being fought over by a variety of commercial, bio-political and oppositional interests. We must ask how corporeality represents a repository of identity, how bodies become objects among other objects but also afford a special site of resistance to the exercise of power? These questions have become imperative especially now that multi-dimensional body-imaging has opened up our corporeality to new kinds of scrutiny not all of which rely photographically on the medium of light. The body can now be observed at different resolutions. The observer’s gaze can receive the perverse truths of racial difference ÒepidermallyÓ or it can move away from the modern perils of political anatomy and pass easily in through the skin onto cellular and molecular scales where the brutal phenomenology of embodied difference is harder to apprehend. The line between inside and outside need not, it seems, coincide any longer with the threshold of the skin.

             I hope this wilfully utopian plea to become estranged from the viewing-habits associated with racial observance has some poetic appeal. I fear it may sound hollow while the mundane evils of race-thinking, ethnic-cleansing and xenophobia continue to colour our world and our relations with ourselves and each other. However, it should be considered not only as an aesthetic choice but an ethical one. Appreciation of the idea that national identity is mutable must be made to recover its old power to shock. Observing the recent emotionalisation of Britain’s political culture, I have had to accommodate the full disturbing force of this insight. The elaborate power of unanticipated identification, in this case with the beatified image of Princess Diana transformed the nation’s monochrome portraits of itself and delivered us rapidly to the limits of any approach to identity based on reified ethnic categories. For our minorities, the dominant presence in this epiphany of decency was not supplied by the late Princess but by the iconic portrait of Stephen Lawrence, a young man brutally murdered in a London street by white supremacists who are still today unpunished. His equally-saintly image, offset by the angry dignified work of his parents in their five and a half-year pursuit of justice provided a powerful representation of human suffering and an indictment of selective admission to the inner chambers of the national community. The Lawrence case has a won special place in the history of my country but it might also represent the wider demands for justice that are being voiced by black Europe. In this period of transition, they are articulating their discomfort with the notion of a colour-coded and hierarchical understanding of Europe’s future.

            I am not a member of the migrant generation. Perhaps that is why I am determined not to be defensive about my appetite for a race-less world in which identity is allowed to be complex. The choice in front of us seems to be stark. We can move towards a renunciation of the foundational absurdities of ÒraceÓ or choose to remain within its hall of mirrors. In choosing the latter and following what I see as the more cautious, conservative path, we opt to re-enact the dramaturgy of Frantz Fanon’s famous primal scene. It involves, you may recall, the figure of a deeply ambivalent immigrant to the metropole who sees himself being seen and feels the trauma of being captured by the spectatorship of white onlookers who freely amputate his humanity. There in the street or perhaps on a tram, they perceive nothing in his apologetic colonial presence save the unchanging dimensions of an ineffable otherness. I do not think we should try to play down the significance of that instructive encounter, or try to evade the elemental force of similar not-quite-confrontations with the casual codes of unthinking, white supremacy. But before we decide over-defensively to iterate that scene indefinitely, as it were by default, we should remember that Europe’s imperial potency is no longer intact. It has been succeeded by a corporate neo-colonialism with new emphases and different effects than those of its nineteenth-century predecessor. Here, on the edge of a new epoch, with our fragile embodiment being transformed by the new scopic regimes associated with the digital imaging technologies – both inside and outside the body – we can begin to inquire into the possibility of moving beyond and beneath that old colonial drama into a more forward-looking and assertively cosmopolitan stance. This new position could identify a dissenting place in Europe’s emergent trans-national polity with a new understanding of identity specified by some equally-novel ways of comprehending and figuring our humanity.