Reassembling the Subject: The Politics of Memory, Emotion, and Representation in Abolitionist Mauritania

Abstract

This study explores an emancipatory politics of being human by asking what is at stake for a world predicated on the human being as subject. I commence with a critique of modernity and its tenet of human exceptionalism as the logical basis for our separation from social, ecological, and material others. Inextricable from these others, humans, I argue, are assemblages that merit representation as such. I demonstrate this by recruiting two human faculties conventionally considered evidence for both our human exceptionalism, or separation from perceived others, and its correlate of subjectivity: memory and emotion. I then demonstrate how even emotion and memory, as supposed wellsprings of subjectivity, in effect undermine the very premise of it in light of their assemblaged nature. I situate this study in Mauritania, where I investigate the politics and spatialities of slavery and abolition. There, I demonstrate how memories, emotions, and the humans that experience them are both consituents and products of human-environment assemblages. I then reveal both the discursive and material repercussions of remembering, feeling, and representing the world as subjects separate from this world. Finally, I suggest alternative avenues for geographic research in pursuit of a politics of being human beyond the human being as subject.