This study provides a wideranging critique of contemporary antihumanist postcolonial theory. By charting a genealogy of the complicity of humanism and oppression in the New World this analysis highlights the process of consolidation of a racialised autonomous and rational modern subject as well as the existence of a fractured modernity. Situating contemporary Derridean critiques of humanism within the Hegelian tradition this work demonstrates that postmodern antiessentialism does not succeed in escaping totalisation. Furthermore it contextualises the fractured modernity of the Western humanist tradition in relation to the works of key twentiethcentury thinkers such as Frantz Fanon Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas arguing that these authors problematise the common reduction of humanism to a totalising outlook due to their revelation of the gaps and fissures prevalent in the modern. Combining insights drawn from Fanons emphasis on lived experience Arendts enlarged mentality and Levinass nonontological transcendence this study aims to deconstruct the complicity between humanism and colonialism.