Advisor/tutor: Hypatia Vourloumis

December 2020

Abstract

This thesis explores what it means to be human guided by Sylvia Wynter’s thought provoking trajectory “Toward the Human, after Man” and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s encompassing book Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007); and argues that at the core of contemporary humanness lies a struggle defined by a racialized order of human existence. This struggle informs not only those racialized Others but to varying degrees impacts all human beings on a global scale. As a form of tentacular thinking this thesis contributes in troubling the colonial category of the human by introducing the figure of the human adoptee of color in relation to a decolonial ethics of care and healing. Pushing against normative notions of modes of being human the adoptee of color radically rethinks what it means to reclaim humanness and an ethic of care.