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Julia Surez-Krabbe
Introduction
One of the most serious critiques against human rights politics is that its primary point of reference is white male subjectivity based on a normative construction of the category human. This essay explores the intimate relationship between race, gender, and the definition of what it means to be human
during the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and suggests that we
revise our historiological and legal assumptions about human rights. The
classification human emerged out of the discourses of the Spanish colonizers during the 16th century. To understand how this designation problematizes twentieth(and twenty-first)-century human rights, the following discussion
translates the coordinates of our analysis from the space of Europe to the
Americas and from the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(ratified by the United Nations in 1948) to the late fifteenth (post-1492) and
sixteenth-century discovery of the Americas.
This analytical shift, a shift in the geography of reason, provides a vital
framework for examining the history of human rights from the Other side.
The rights narrative commonly refers back to the English Bill of Rights in
1689, the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1788 in the context of the French
Revolution. According to this account, these declarations reached a culminating point in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Balfour/Cadava 2004: 282, Douzinas 2000, 2007a) and a series of more recent
culminating points in connection with the history of UN peacekeeping and the
recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars are referred to in the third
section of this paper, where the notion of a just war is examined.
In contrast to mainstream accounts of rights and race, the understanding
expressed here proceeds beyond the scientific racism that emerged during
the nineteenth century and classified humans biologically. Such determinism
was a radicalization of the hierarchization of humans that emerged shortly
after the 1492 discovery of America (cf., for instance, Csaire 2006, Quijano 1992, 2000a, 2000b). The fault line in human rights politics namely its
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normative formulation of what it means to be human1 needs to be considered in relation to the historical connection linking human rights to race and
to gender. This tie emerged out of the period of the first modernity, that is,
the period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. During this time, the first
systematic transatlantic connection involving slavery, genocide, and the exploitation of Europes Other was also established.
The shift in the geography of reason that informs this essay involves developing concepts beyond mainstream definitions of human rights. Boaventura de Sousa Santos nuanced understanding of the different processes of globalization is useful for addressing the other side of human rights; human rights
can be globalized localisms, localized globalisms (reinforcing relations of
power), as well as a common inheritance of humanity (contesting power
relations) (2002a: 2529). In addition, Frantz Fanons distinction between
2
the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing (Fanon 1967: 10) is relevant
to this analysis; namely, the distinction between those whose existence accords with prevalent norms and those who are constructed and assessed
against those norms. In the zone of being, human rights provide legality and
protection. However, in the zone of nonbeing, rights require victims and are,
more often than not, articulated around the logic of appropriation, exploita3
tion, and violence (cf. Santos 2007: 1, Surez-Krabbe 2011). Simultaneously, the zone of nonbeing contains the possibility of treating human rights as
the common inheritance of humanity by virtue of other grammars of human
dignity4 that occur among subjects in this zone.
This essay explores the limits of human rights with reference to the critiques of de Sousa Santos and Fanon. It also examines historical and current
normative constructions of the category human. The following section
addresses presumptions of sovereignty from the subjective stance of the conquistadors and their heirs. The de facto lack of access to the emancipatory
and enabling aspects of human rights is an outcome of that subjective stance
and a major concern for social movements and progressive political organizations involved in enacting human rights. It is at the point where human rights
collapse that the struggles for human rights become most relevant. In order to
grasp contemporary human rights politics, we therefore need to apprehend the
reasons behind this failure (Baxi 2002).
1
2
3
4
This essay refers to human as a category, among other things, to emphasize the ways in
which the term is used to hierarchize people.
See Fanon 1967 and Gordon 1995, 2004, 2009 for more on the zone of nonbeing.
See Santos conceptual image of the abyssal line in 2007: 1.
The research project ALICE, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons (2012-2015), operates
with this terminology. See the project webpage at: http://alice.ces.uc.pt/en/index.php/thema
tic-areas/human-rights-and-other-grammars-of-human-dignity/?lang=en.
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the context of the discovery of America (including the Caribbean) from the
sixteenth century onwards. The I conquer is the first modern subjectivity. It
is a way of being that seeks to erase the Other through exploitation and violence. It is an incarnation of the conqueror, who arrived and practiced diverse
forms of violence in the Americas; it represents a male, enslaving, and phallic
ego (Dussel 1992, 2008). The first modern subjectivity is thus also a deeply
gendered subjectivity (Dussel 1992, Lugones 2007, Maldonado-Torres 2008).
While Dussels conceptualization of the I conquer elaborates some of the
ideas already being explored within the Latin American philosophical tradition, it is especially by virtue of Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Maria Lugones analyses that this essay explores the links between the colonial/modern
subjectivity, race, gender, and human rights.
In any examination of human rights, acknowledging the colonial origins of
modern subjectivity is crucial; this reveals an oversight in human rights
scholarship that many human rights proponents and critics alike overlook. To
refer to one example, Costas Douzinas' seminal Human Rights and Empire:
The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (2007b) demonstrates this
blindness to the concept human within human rights and within the practices of humanitarianism, even though his approach is otherwise persuasive.
Early in Human Rights and Empire (2007b: 12), he provides a brief account
of the genealogy of the idea of the human being that stays within the geographical confines of Europe (Ancient Greece and Rome being the epicenters
of the narrative) and consequently collapses historical time to these places. As
such, Douzinas narrative neglects the events taking place during the first
modernity and the actors involved in these events. In addition, he does not
consider how race and gender inform the emergence of the category human effectively, disregarding coloniality. This means that, although interesting, his analysis and arguments are flawed as his critique moves within the
same Eurocentric framework as the ideas he examines.
By contrast, this essay establishes that the construction of man or the
human emerged in the context of the discovery of America. Several scholars have shown that this construction had already been established during the
sixteenth century, as can be seen in the context of the debates among the
Spanish colonial powers concerning the humanity of the Indians. These debates, best known as the Valladolid debates, were conducted by representatives of two conflicting perspectives. According to the viewpoint represented
by Gins de Seplveda, who framed his argument in secularized terms (cf.
Seplveda 1996 [approximately 1550]: 109113), the indigenous peoples
were subhuman Others who had to comply with more advanced peoples and
their laws. If war was necessary to meet these aims, then war had to be
waged.
Seplvedas position provided legitimization for colonization and exploitation, including sexualized exploitation, as discussed below. Bartolom de
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In contrast to Lugones distinction between the light and the dark side (2007), I prefer Fanons more existential distinction between the zones of being and nonbeing (1967).
As such, the imperial attitude has quickly become a racist and colonial commonplace that has radicalized and naturalized the non-ethics of war (ibid:
247).
When Maldonado-Torres writes about the non-ethics of war, he does so in
order to emphasize the differences between the zone of being and the zone of
nonbeing. In the zone of being, we can discuss an ethics of war. This ethics of
war is, however, suspended in relation to those in the zone of nonbeing,
where it becomes a non-ethics that includes genocidal and epistemicidal practices towards the subjects relegated to this zone. As Maldonado-Torres elaborates, war also includes rape, and although the primary targets of this latter
practice of sexual violence are women, men of color are also regarded as
penetrable subjects (ibid: 247248).
These insights are linked to the development of human rights politics: the
imperial doubt had already been internalized within the subjectivity of the
conquerors by the time that Pope Paul III, in 1537, declared the Indians human. Hence, the Popes declaration had no significant impact (MaldonadoTorres 2007: 244, cf. Quijano 1992). Accordingly, the same doubt was already in play when the above-mentioned Valladolid debates regarding the
humanity of indigenous peoples occurred.
The imperial commonplace, the I conquer stance, was never an occasion
for interrogation by Cartesian doubt either and has been left unquestioned and
continues to lie at the heart of the dominant scientific disciplines concerned
with the study of social, economic, political, legal, and humanistic affairs.
This is not coincidental. Rather, as the last section of this discussion demonstrates, it connects historically to the processes that took place during the
transition between the first and the second modernity and so to the transition
between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when northern European
(mostly British, Danish, Dutch, French, and German) and North American
colonialisms began to take over the transatlantic connection and slave trade
previously controlled by the powers of Spain and Portugal. The next section
examines the complex relationship between the construction of the category
human, the race-gender normativity fundamental to the imperial attitude,
and human rights.
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ards. The difficulty is, of course, that these apparently universal standards are
actually Christian Spanish standards (Anghie 1996: 332).
While Vitoria emphasizes the humanity of the indigenous peoples in some
parts of his discussion, in others he excuses just war against them. He does so
because, according to the Spanish, the Indians are potentially ontologically
equal to them. The criteria for this ontological equality, however, are formulated within Spanish Christian epistemological frameworks and the negation
of the Other, the zone of nonbeing, lies at the center of this definition. In
other words, what the Spanish regard as the indigenous peoples potential to
become like them is, at the same time, that by which they negate the humanity
of the Other: that is, a potential for sameness is also a negation of difference.
This negation makes it possible to grant meta-legal status to the war
against the Indians; the war against the Indians was justified by the universal
jus gentium, similar to the way in which contemporary wars against Iraq and
Afghanistan are justified in the name of human rights. Indeed, whereas Vitorias argument concludes by not denying the difference of the Indians, it also
uses their assumed sameness and equality to deny them sovereignty. As mentioned, it is precisely because the Indians are equal to the Spanish that they
have to obey universal norms for example, those that dictate the right to
travel and explore other lands, to trade in a fair manner, and to spread the
Christian religion in other words, the Indians have the right to colonize if
they become what they in fact can never be: Spanish (Anghie 2004: 2021,
Vitoria 1981: 7276). Vitorias humanist equality masks difference and unequal power relations with a veneer of Spanish philosophical, cultural, economic, and political life. These Spanish forms of life dictate the terms of jus
gentium, demonstrating that the imperial attitude is in operation.
The imperial attitude additionally interprets the Indians resistance to becoming like the Spanish as their inability to comply with the universal laws of
jus gentium. This allows the Spanish powers to affirm that the Indians are
violating universal laws and consequently committing a transgression that
legitimates just war against them (Anghie 1996: 326). Indeed, this is a naturalization of inferiority, and this inferiority itself becomes the rationale for a
just war (cf. Dussel 2008: 166, Maldonado-Torres 2007). By these means, the
Indians end up existing as violators of the universal law who cannot implement righteous war themselves. Just war is, by this definition, a Christians
right; therefore the indigenous peoples would have to convert to Christianity
before being able to conduct war righteously (Anghie 1996: 330). As suggested with reference to the recent Iraqi and Afghani wars, the foundations of
contemporary international law and the doctrine of sovereignty share this
ambiguity which is obscured or explicitly negated in most studies of international relations and international law (cf. Anghie 1996, 2004).
Conclusion
The imperial attitude has remained almost wholly unexamined in dominant
knowledge construction since the sixteenth century. This is connected to the
processes that took place during the transition between the first and the second modernity, when northern Europe started to take charge of the transatlantic connection and slave trade previously controlled by Spain and Portugal. In
this period of transition, the colonial elites across the Atlantic continued to
deny, or render obsolete, the social struggles of non-elites that, however, had
powerfully affected their thought and political practice. While it is outside the
scope of this discussion to consider the dynamics between emancipation and
the subsumption or neutralization of emancipation within the coloniality of
power, it is nevertheless important to underline the crucial role the Other has
played in changing the terms of ideas and legal issues, perhaps most saliently
in relation to the idea of racial equality (cf. Surez-Krabbe 2013). It is symptomatic of the imperial attitude that the impact of the social struggles of these
Others, such as the Haitian Revolution (17911804), has been largely negated
over time.
The criticisms that came to be known as the Black Legend, which was
primarily advanced during the Enlightenment, involved a representation of
Spanish colonialism as anachronistic and exceptionally brutal.6 The Black
Legend was in effect a Protestant, northern European backlash against Catholic, colonial Spain promoting the imperial interests of northern European and
North American colonialisms. By representing Spanish colonialism as particularly cruel, northern European colonial powers could differentiate themselves as being more humane and modern (Beverley 2008: 599). In effect, the
Black Legend played an important role as another stratum of denial, which
legitimized colonialism and the imperial attitude.
The initial layer of denial, as outlined above, in the discussion of I conquer and its imperial attitude is based upon the negation of the Other. The
second layer is the Cartesian ego cogito, which conceals the negation of the
Other and is built upon the I conquer. The third layer is an extension of
these negations, whereby Spain and southern Europe are themselves located
in a border zone, as they are, for example, via the Black Legend. Spain, Portugal, and the rest of southern Europe are considered neither modern nor
colonial. At best, they might be considered pre-modern due to an academic
bias towards the heritage of Ancient Greece and Rome (cf. Santos 2002b).
One of the common assumptions of northern European elites has been an
Julin Juderas coined the term in his 1914 book The Black Legend and Historical Truth in
reference to anti-Spanish propaganda. The Black refers here to the pejorative representation of Spanish colonial behaviour.
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understanding of the Other as being at an earlier stage in the history of humanity; more specifically, at an earlier stage of northern European history.
Significantly, the imaginaries reflected in the Black Legend have facilitated a denial of the transatlantic nature of Western ideas since the discovery of
the Americas. This denial is one of the reasons why many students of human
rights depart from the assumption that these are mainly a product of seventeenth and eighteenth century northern European thought, particularly linked
to Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Locke (Two Treatises of Government,
1690) and additionally place the origins of human rights in the French Revolution (as outlined in the introduction to this essay). This historical narrative,
however, is an aspect of the third stratum of negations mentioned above.
To forward this essays central thesis that human rights are not only
built upon, but also protect, white male subjectivity, and that they are the fruit
of the construction of the category human that emerged as a central point of
discussions among the Spanish colonizing elites during the sixteenth century it is pivotal to understand the three layers of negation briefly outlined
above. The race-gender power relations embedded in the category human
played a significant role in the context of the social struggles of racialized
subjects in Latin America during independence and republic-building. Among
the effects of these struggles was the inclusion of the idea of racial equality in
the legal frameworks of several newly independent countries.
Many years later, the idea of racial equality also came to impact on the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Glendon 2003: 33, cf. Carozza
2003). Although the idea of racial equality put the Latin American and Caribbean legal tradition at the forefront of human rights thinking, it increasingly
lost its emancipatory potential and was instead accommodated by white male
elites to protect their interests. It was indeed used to make invisible and to
neutralize the struggles of racialized subjects, who had brought the idea of
racial equality into the light in the first place. For instance, the widespread
assumption that the abolition of slavery was a white mans concession still
has currency.
The period of independence and republic-building in Latin America is
connected to the general decline of Spain as a major colonial power and the
rise of northern Europe and the US as imperial powers. While Latin American
independence movements explicitly used the idea of racial equality, the elites
in Europe and the United States largely ignored racial issues. As the French
revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen attest, the
concerns for racial equality had been absent in these latitudes for some time.
Contrary to debates on the rights of people in the sixteenth century, consideration about the colonial aspects of issues concerning citizenship and
(in)equality were increasingly absent from elaborations of the ideas of rights
(Mignolo 2000: 29).
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