“Well, City Boy Rangoon, it’s time to stitch up the evening”: Material, meaning, and Man in the (post)colonial city

Tilley, Lisa

Abstract

How are ‘Man’ and its matters cultivated in urban life? And how are resistant claims by the Other to be already-human materialised in the city? Through a reading of the human/material of Rangoon, this chapter calls for posthuman engagement with the figure of the human as it is outlined in the work of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and cognate scholarship in the sociogenic mode. With reference to contemporary and historical urban life in Rangoon, the chapter considers how matter is already formed in a sedimentary way along the Man/Other-than-Man historical split in the human. The basic claim made here is that unless we understand how the human has been overrepresented in the figure of Man, and marginalised as Other-than-Man, then we are far from an understanding of how matter acts in the world’s becoming.

Citation

Tilley, L. (2017). “Well, City Boy Rangoon, it’s time to stitch up the evening”: Material, meaning, and Man in the (post)colonial city. In M. Jackson (Ed.), Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315686721-8

• Acceptance Date: Aug 1, 2017
• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: May 2, 2023
• Publisher: Routledge
• Series Title: Routledge Research on Decoloniality and New Postcolonialisms
• Book Title: Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman
• ISBN: 9781138920903
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315686721-8
• Related Public URLs: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315686721-8/well-city-boy-rangoon-time-stitch-evening-lisa-tilley