Prologue

I grew up in a city called Calcutta, officially renamed Kolkata, its Bengali equivalent, with the advent of the new millennium. The two words, and arguably the two cities, had long coexisted. The sonic distinction between the two also pointed to matters of class and education. Those who called the city Calcutta—phonetically kælˈkʌtə, culminating in the retroflex /t/ instead of the softer palatal /T/ of Kolkata (coal-kata)—were most likely to be educated in “English-medium” schools founded by colonial missionaries. They/we were intended to be designer versions of Macaulay’s minutemen, “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” as he describes them in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” (249). The making of this class, however, involved more than abstract interactions between empire and psyche; minute-made natives embodied this refashioning in the flesh as well. The corporeal commitment involved in pronouncing the Anglophone version of the city’s name requires lingual, alveolar, and glottal orchestration. Tongue, teeth, breath, diaphragm, palate, mouth, and elocutionary training collaborate in the pulsive production of language lined with flesh. As he practices rolling his r for hours in his room after arriving in France, Frantz Fanon’s aggrieved speaker in Black Skin, White Masks discloses the reason for undertaking this sort of labor: “I must take great pains with my speech because I shall be more or less judged by it” (20). It seems to me now that the Anglophone word “Calcutta,” born of the concerted efforts of flesh and mind, was but one of many ways of bodying forth the piecemeal, “retail”-level refashioning implicit in the colonial civilizing mission, an early harbinger of the struggle for control over the body, its expressions, ingestions, and reformation in globalization (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137).

Fanon’s observation, “not with impunity . . . does one undergo [colonial] domination” (Toward the African Revolution, 41), and Theodor Adorno’s disconcerting insight, “it is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces” (Minima Moralia, 63), point us to the problem of how to think from the standpoint of “damaged life” in the aftermath of imperial modernity. What should be at stake in postcolonial conversations today? This book aims to uncover the dually psychophysiological dimensions of hybridity and claims biology as a valid—indeed a crucial—area of interest for critical postcolonial studies in order to direct attention to the question of life lived in the psyche and the flesh after empire. The sociopolitical challenges of the twenty-first century require us to look beyond biologically deterministic conceptions of racialized difference to porous, pliable, and plastic bodies and psyches as critically embattled zones of conflict in the wake of imperial modernity. Global capital’s inheritance of imperial designs on the psyche and the flesh is part of a long season of the production of what I call “postcolonial biology” in an attempt to draw attention to power over life and lifeways in the relay from colonialism to a late capitalist, consumption-driven world under new forms of empire.