Francophone intellectuals writing at the time of decolonisation testify to the anxieties, for the colonised, of the moment of political transition, as well as to the demands that it makes of them as potential spokesmen, mediators, mobilisers, and critics. In response to these anxieties, Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun, and Kateb all denounce the atrocious dehumanising practices of colonialism before setting about the more intellectually complex project of reimagining a shared humanity, and proposing alternative forms of human relationality, in tune with the process of political liberation. It is perhaps significant, moreover, that this fascination with our shared humanity and its association with freedom has continued long after the period of decolonisation, and despite repeated denunciations of humanism, still preoccupies some of the major theoretical writers and critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If outmoded, universalising, and Eurocentric humanisms were dismissed by a generation of poststructuralists, the resonance of some concept of shared humanity has remained a provocative subject of debate, even within the work of those critics who unravel the metaphysics of Western humanism, such as Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, and their disciples. Indeed, Derrida's own reading of Heidegger's critique of humanist metaphysics in ‘Les Fins de l'homme’ stresses the inseparability of Heidegger's thinking from a lingering notion of human essence. In recent years, moreover, highly ‘textualist’ deconstructive thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler have returned to the human as the starting-point for reconsiderations of minority rights, or of grievable life respectively, as if, despite the dangers of abstraction and universalism, continued reflection on what we share as human beings remains an invaluable basis for ethics. Even more, the very limits and status of the human in the world have come under scrutiny as critics are reassessing the relation between the human and the posthuman, or the human and the animal, as well as the significance of the human as ‘geological agent’ at a time when ecological changes demand a rethinking of the very foundations of humanist history.

The current resurgence of interest in the human, and recent attempts to rethink how humanity names a universal permanently under (re) construction, were to some extent anticipated by the extraordinary dynamism with which the term was injected around decolonisation and after.