10: Unmastering Reading: Decolonizing Ourselves, Our Texts, and Our Criticism

Using life writing as a method of inquiry, this chapter argues that learning to be a critical reader depends on being able to strategically identify and disidentify with the bodies of authors and the protagonists they create. Identification, understood through Diana Fuss’s work as an imperial process of occupying the bodies of others, is described as central to “mastering” reading (learning to read in a way that reaffirms colonial norms). Decolonising reading practices and readers, therefore, requires strategies that work against identification. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, the chapter proposes that instead of identifying with others, we could read to understand how bodies are in continuous states of becoming, being formed by the conditions and atmospheres in which they live. The chapter uses both the history of the author’s experience as a reader of Frantz Fanon and a short analysis of his text Black Skin, White Masks to explain how we can continue to decolonise ourselves and our reading practices.