New Books in World Affairs David L. Eng, "Reparations and the Human" (Duke UP, 2025)
Mar 3, 2026
David L. Eng, a scholar of literature and critical theory and author of Reparations and the Human, joins to explore law, psychoanalysis, and reparations. He traces colonial roots of who counts as human. He contrasts Holocaust consensus with fragmented reckonings over Hiroshima and comfort women. He examines uranium, indigenous dispossession, and calls for rethinking the human through dependency and interdependence.
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The Human Became A Political Category
- The nominal shift from 'human' as adjective to 'the human' as noun recasts universality into a political tool that polices belonging.
- David L. Eng traces this change to mid-19th-century usage and links it to biopolitical efforts to define populations and exclusions.
Locke's Reparations Defend Colonists Not Indians
- John Locke treats reparations alongside property, producing a dual logic that defends European property while justifying dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
- Eng reads Locke's colonial role in Carolina governance to show reparations rationalized land seizure and violence against natives.
Psychoanalysis Contains A Colonial Reparation Scene
- Melanie Klein's reparative theory contains a colonial scene where colonizers are both perpetrators and the 'victims' entitled to restoration.
- Eng coins 'colonial object relations' to show repair can reproduce repopulation with the colonizer's image rather than redress the colonized.
