One Species, Same Difference?: Postcolonial Critique and the Concept of Life (original) (raw)

2016, New Literary History

one species, same difference? "life sciences." Chakrabarty deals most obviously with biology and ecology, while Gilroy is more concerned with biomedicine, genomics, and genetics. Neither scholar discusses cognitive neuroscience, a field that has, of late, significantly transformed the ways in which we think about consciousness, ethics, or the aesthetic experience. Of particular interest to both scholars of postcoloniality, it would seem, is a more restricted definition of the life sciences, one that requires us to linger on that first term, life, for a little while longer. Cognitive neuroscience's influence on the humanities has reoriented discussions of questions central to human life and has contributed to species thinking by proposing, for example, that there might be neurological "cultural invariants" that determine and delimit all human thought. 4 These issues turn primarily on what we might infelicitously call "the workings of the brain." The life sciences that Chakrabarty and Gilroy draw on, however, are typically concerned with understanding (and treating) the functions that regulate and generate biological life. The ethical appeal of their respective arguments resides in their focus on vulnerability and finitude, and, accordingly, their interventions mobilize life as a concept linked to longevity, duration, regeneration, and reproduction. In order to further probe the relationship between postcolonial studies and species thinking, however, we must differentiate between the environmentalist bent of Chakrabarty's most recent work and Gilroy's interest in medicine and biotechnology. It is important to make this distinction because ecology and biomedicine produce significantly different iterations of species thinking. As we shall see, Chakrabarty's environmental brand of species thinking focuses on the vulnerability that we share amongst ourselves and with other species on the planet; Gilroy's version underscores our biological commonalities as members of a vulnerable human species. And yet, despite these important differences, I suggest that both thinkers are united in their profound discomfort with the very idea of vulnerability that they seem, at first glance, to embrace. 5 Indeed, the main claim of my essay is that this ambivalence about vulnerability ultimately profiles new patterns of neocolonial domination and exploitation legitimized not in the name of "progress" and the civilizing mission but in the name of life, longevity, and the reproduction of the species. Species Thinking and the Anthropocene Let us begin with Chakrabarty and "The Climate of History," the essay that moved Baucom to articulate his own vision of species thinking. 6 Published in 2009, Chakrabarty's piece provocatively takes postcolonial