Race, Rights and Rebels: Alternatives to Human Rights and Development from the Global South (Global Critical Caribbean Thought) - Softcover

Su\Xe1rez-Krabbe, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783484616 ISBN 13: 9781783484614

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

An analysis of the evolution of the overlapping histories of human rights and development, and an exploration of the alternatives, through the lens of indigenous and other southern theories and epistemologies.

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Julia Suárez-Krabbe is Associate Professor of Cultural Encounters in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, Denmark.

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Race, Rights and Rebels

Alternatives to Human Rights and Development from the Global South

By Julia Suárez-Krabbe

Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2016 Julia Suárez-Krabbe
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-461-4

Contents

Preface, 
1. Bad Faith and the Death Project, 
Part I: Temporalities of Reason, 
2. Teyuna and Columbus, 
3. Race, Rights, and Development, 
4. Rights and Rebels, 
Part II: Geographies of Reason, 
5. Towards Decolonial Methodologies, 
6. Common-Unity, 
7. Identity and the Preservation of Being, 
8. Pluriversality, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Bad Faith and the Death Project

Coloniality underlies western knowledge production, western-centric political practice and notions of common sense. These ways of knowing, being, and political practice produce and reproduce racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and the depredation of nature. They have multiple expressions: in both left and right political positions, in conservative and critical dominant academic thinking, and in the minds and hearts of many people. They are the dominant frameworks of thinking, which have been established as truth through the historical processes of colonialism and coloniality, and as such are rarely questioned. Rather, the main tendency is that these truths are reinforced. The problems emerging from this can be exemplified through the folktale The Emperor's New Clothes. In Hans Christian Andersen's classic version of the story, the emperor's vanity and his subjects' complicity with the illusions of power lead to the emperor being cheated by two tailors who make him a dress of a supposedly fine fabric, so sublime that only the rich and powerful can see it. The fable's point is that there is no such fabric — only the claim to its existence and the privileges that come with affirming its existence. This nonexistent fabric leads the emperor and his subjects to pretend that the emperor is indeed wearing exquisite dress, and to praise his attire. The emperor, however, is naked. The force of colonial discourse lies in how it succeeds in concealing how it establishes and naturalizes ontological and epistemological perspectives and political practices that work to protect its power. Indeed,

In colonialism, there is a very peculiar function to words, words do not designate, but conceal. ... The words are a fictional record, full of euphemisms to veil reality rather than to designate it. Public discourses are ways of not saying. And this universe of meanings and un-told notions, of belief in racial hierarchy and the inherent inequality of human beings, are incubated in common sense. (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 19, translated from Spanish)

But discourses do not fashion themselves independently, and neither do ontological truths. The example of The Emperor's New Clothes serves to highlight that those verities are not true. Rather, they are presented as true by global elites, and many defend them as true ignoring the perceptible facts and social actors that tell them that they are false. Lewis Gordon calls this bad faith. Bad faith implies choosing to believe and defend comfortable lies about other groups of people and about one's own group. Choosing the lie is, at the same time, giving up freedom (Gordon 1999, 75). Bad faith is also important in understanding how the power of colonial discourse operates, and how it succeeds concealing its own establishing of ontological truths from itself. We all share responsibility in the defense of these truths — or rather falsehoods — and in choosing to work against these. When the people in the story of The Emperor's New Clothes pretend that the emperor is wearing a suit, they are defending the emperor, and reinforce the lies of power. There is another significant aspect in this regard — it is not simply a matter of choosing to reject the lie to work towards the truth. The problem is that colonial discourse is not just a story. It is also material, political, social, existential, and powerful. Among other things, it has the power to offer privileges to those who engage in defending it. Colonial power is not something outside of our everyday lives, it is also part of our everyday — and through this, it is complex, but never abstract. It is key to understanding the problems we face globally.

One of the lies rarely questioned in dominant society concerns the idea of what defines a human being. The idea of the human being seems to refer to all beings on this planet that descend from monkeys. But we are all human is a well-known adage, that is, it is an utterance that pretends to state an overcoming of racism through a methodological abstraction from the very historical fact from which the deep inequalities that we continue to face today on a global scale have emerged. This is not to deny that we descend from primates. It is to highlight, among other things, that the idea that this is the only important defining factor concerning humans is part of The Emperor's New Clothes. The term human being as it exists today is a colonial category that claims to be neutral, but is in fact formulated on the basis of a series of historically constituted hierarchies of race, gender, and living beings. It does not refer primarily to our ascendance to primates. When discussing notions of the human being in relation to human rights and development, it is important to highlight how the colonial category human goes hand in hand with that of nature. As the spiritual authorities of the four indigenous peoples that live in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian Caribbean teach, human and nature together are pivotal to understanding how the dominant practices of human rights and development cannot be understood as separate ideas: while human rights deals with human beings and their relationships as these are defined within the colonial ontology, development concerns humans' relationship to nature, and also to the management and exploitation of nature in ways that privilege humans. This relationship is characterized by an important paradox, that is, while human rights negate colonialism and coloniality as intrinsic to it, the ideas of progress and development justify colonialism and coloniality. Both human rights and development are important axes in the defense of the death project. As I understand it, the death project is inherent to coloniality and contains a complexity of relationships. When employing the term coloniality, I primarily refer to the system of domination that emerged with the European expansion initiated with the Castilian colonial endeavor in the Iberian Peninsula — more specifically the conquest of Al-Andalus, the subsequent conquest of the Americas, the witch hunts in Europe and the Americas, and the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade (Grosfoguel 2013; Mignolo 2000, 2006; Suárez-Krabbe 2014b; Wright 2001). This system of domination is still in play. European colonialism generated a specific coupling between racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the depredation of nature that became globalized, and whose effects we still have to fight. This modern/colonial interlinking involves modes of production, living, political organization, spatial organization, relationships to other people and living beings, ways of thinking, modes of acting, practices of production and reproduction of life and death, sexuality, aesthetics, spiritualities and knowledge construction....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783484616
• ISBN 13: 9781783484614
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 212
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland