Making Abolitionist Worlds

Proposals for a World on Fire

Abolition Collective

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781942173380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Making Abolitionist Worlds gathers key insights and interventions from today's international abolitionist movement to pose the question: what does an abolitionist world look like? The Abolition Collective investigates the core challenges to social justice and the liberatory potential of social movements today from a range of personal, political, and analytical points of view, underscoring the urgency of an abolitionist politics that places prisons at the center of its critique and actions.

In addition to centering and amplifying the continual struggles of incarcerated people who are actively working to transform prisons from the inside, Making Abolitionist Worlds animates the idea of abolitionist democracy and demands a radical re-imagining of the meaning and practice of democracy. The Abolition Collective brings us to an Israeli prison for a Palestinian feminist reflection on incarceration within settler colonialism; to protest movements in Hong Kong and elsewhere, that use "abolition democracy" to advocate for the abolition of the police; to the growing culture of "aggrieved whiteness" in the United States, which trucks in fear, anger, victimhood, and a demand for vengeance to maintain white supremacy; to the punitive landscapes that extend from the incarceration of political prisoners to the mass deportations and detentions along the U.S. southern border.

Making Abolitionist Worlds shows us that the paths forged today for a world in formation are rooted in antiracism, decolonization, anticapitalism, abolitionist feminism, and queer liberation.

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ALREADY SOMETHING MORE

HETEROPATRIARCHY AND THE LIMITATIONS OF RIGHTS, INCLUSION, AND THE UNIVERSAL

J Sebastian

INTRODUCTION

Why are we seeking rights when our movements call for justice? Rights have served as a tool of contestation to challenge exclusionary practices and differentiated treatment for various groups over the course of the development of the United States. Several historic milestones reached in the early twenty-first century represent the narrative of inclusion through rights-based struggle. For example, in 2007, the Indigenous Rights caucus of the United Nations produced a ratified document of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN DRIP), to which many have pointed as a sign of recognition and reconciliation between Native and settler societies.¹ In 2008, Barack Obama became the first biracial president in US history, a moment that prompted liberals and conservatives alike to declare the country “postracial.”² The gay rights movement secured the ability to marry through the 2015 US Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, at which point mainstream gay-rights advocates celebrated the achievement of full equality.³ Despite the recent claims to inclusion through civil and human rights protections, state violence and harm still continue, especially against marginalized communities at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and disability, among others.⁴

Scholarship in the burgeoning field of Critical Ethnic Studies has demonstrated that the hierarchies constructing racial, gender, sexual, and class-based differences are rooted in the systemic power relations of settler colonialism—white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Standardized ideas about social relations constitute these systems by determining difference as a means to discipline. Determining difference as a marker for disciplining is foundational to how these power dynamics continue. Heteropatriarchy functions to discipline difference into a naturalized system of social relations through the imposition of a male/female gender binary, compulsory heterosexuality, and dyadic nuclear family relations.

This mode of relationality, foundational to settler colonialism, attempts to foreclose other understandings of gender, social relations, and kinship networks.⁵ This power dynamic arose through a specific sociopolitical worldview that privileges whiteness, wealth, conformity with the gender binary, and compulsory heterosexuality as natural, rational, and civil.⁶ These relations are not predetermined or endemic to social relations. Rather, they are a product of a particular trajectory of organizing sociopolitical relations that we can trace to the rise of colonial-modernity.⁷

As an analytic, colonial-modernity reflects the ways in which colonialism has been foundational to modernity. The rise of colonialism instituted a massive shift in sociopolitical relations that cohered systemic power relations through hierarchies of difference. As anticolonial theorist Patrick Wolfe has articulated, colonialism is not an event, but a structure; its logics recur through systemic colonialism, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism. Using a genealogical methodology, I employ a rereading of the first legal legitimization of Spanish colonialism by sixteenth-century Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria in order to engage the relationship between universal rights and civility within colonialism. This article offers an alternative lens on the history and origin of universal rights to show how Vitoria’s work determined the legitimate exercise of universal rights through heteropatriarchal standards of civility.⁸ The concept of civility furthers heteropatriarchal disciplining of social relations into accordance with Western (European/Christian) norms and standards.⁹ I therefore argue that Vitoria’s work constructs a set of shared universal rights on implicitly exclusive terms by fundamentally limiting who is capable of exercising universal rights.

Given the historical construction of universal rights and civility, this essay considers what it means to still talk in terms of furthering universal rights today. Because the structure of settler colonialism is ongoing, Vitoria’s legitimation of Spanish colonialism through universal rights are deeply embedded in the ongoing ideology of colonial-modernity. Placing Vitoria’s work alongside queer and trans scholarship and activist critiques of mainstream LGBT rights demonstrates the ongoing consolidation of heteropatriarchy through notions of civility as embedded in the law to condition privileged access to an inherently exclusionary universal. The notion of so-called universal rights operates to bring people into parity with one another, based on the determination of such standards as set by the West. However, examining the emergence of the notion of the Western-universal through Vitoria’s construction of universal rights reveals the issues in our present as part of the long-standing power relations of colonial-modernity. Under this construction, how could universal rights fundamentally function as universal?

UNIVERSAL CIVILITY

The civilizing mission is entrenched within the project of colonialism.¹⁰ The concept of civility, in its most basic definition, articulates a difference between those who demonstrate the proper elements of civilization, and those who are considered to be uncivil. Federal Indian Law scholar Robert Williams, Jr. argues that the link between civility and conquest is deeply embedded in Western society, going back to Greco worldviews.¹¹ Throughout Vitoria’s argument, this distinction between civil and uncivil is constantly at work, most notably in his framing of all Native peoples as “barbarians” in violation of natural law. In today’s terms, the discourse of civility extends into determinations of proper citizenship, respectability, and normalcy.

The origins of modern universal rights

Spanish King Charles V called upon Vitoria in 1537 to legally justify the project of colonialism and its institutions.¹² Responding in part to the narratives of brutal conquest by the conquistadores, Vitoria needed to demonstrate that Spanish conquest was operating under the proper legal accordance.¹³ In particular, Vitoria was called to demonstrate that the Spanish had appropriate “just title,” or legal rights, to be in the New World. Delivered forty years after Columbus landed in the Americas, Vitoria’s work reflects the terms of the massive shift in sociopolitical relations, which by that point had violently conjoined Europe, the Americas, West Africa, and spread into the Philippines and south Asia through the coherence of systemic racial chattel slavery, emergent capitalism, and the missionizing spread of Christian conquest.¹⁴

In answering the question of what title justified the Spanish colonial conquest, Vitoria was confined to the legal justification of the late Middle Ages. However, as Vitoria delineated throughout the lecture On the American Indians, none of the standard justifications worked in this instance.¹⁵ Vitoria himself held that when the Spanish landed in the New World, they had no just title for conquest: “In conclusion, the Spaniards, when they first sailed to the land of the barbarians, carried with them no right at all to occupy their countries.”¹⁶ Because of earlier precedence he had to follow, Vitoria also dismisses legitimate title on the basis of “discovery,” and spreading Christianity. Though these two concepts will surface again as determinants for intra-European colonial competition, they are not the foundational basis on which the origins of colonialism are legally legitimized.¹⁷

Vitoria provided the legal justification for Spanish colonial expansion into the Americas as predicated on the denial of Native societies’ exercise of universal rights through their relegation to the uncivil. Vitoria utilized the framework of a universal, which does not actually contemplate inclusion for all, but rather privileges inclusion only for the civil European. Vitoria could not rely on the traditional medieval frameworks of European law to justify the colonial project, because none of them actually work to justify Spanish conquest. It was of a new order. Vitoria had to articulate a legal standard that would allow the lucrative endeavor of Spanish colonialism to continue, so that Spain was not found in violation of legal doctrines and potentially forced to forfeit its expansive project to another European crown.¹⁸ In order to solve this dilemma, Vitoria resorted to a reformulation of a millennia-old Roman legal concept: the law of nations, which enables all nations to exercise the universal rights to trade, travel, and preach.¹⁹ Vitoria espoused that the law of nations serves as the authority to create binding rights under which all nations operate. He further legitimated this notion of rights by claiming it would create a “common good” for humanity.²⁰

The law of nations is important because it allowed Vitoria to place European and Native societies into the same plane of legal jurisdiction.²¹ Through the law of nations framework, Vitoria determined that the Spanish were legitimately occupying their New World holdings through the right of the Spanish to travel,²² preach,²³ and right to trade.²⁴ This allowed him to justify the extension of European governance, sociopolitical relations, and law into the Americas. By establishing this jurisdictional framework, Vitoria argued that the Spanish were entitled to exercise these universal rights as the legitimate grounds for colonial expansion. Furthermore, under the medieval doctrine of Just War, the universal right to trade legally legitimate the enslavement of Black people kidnapped into enslavement from continental Africa.²⁵

Once Vitoria configured the law of nations as the universal framework joining the vast sociopolitical orders of the new world and the old world, he determined that the exercise of universal rights were not applicable for societies that were considered uncivil.²⁶ He explained this through the grounding of the law of nations in “natural law,” which is governed through reason: “What natural reason has established among all nations is called the law of nations.”²⁷ Reason is the demonstration of civility, which Vitoria argues Native peoples possess. Vitoria states, “The proof of this is that they are not in point of fact madmen, but have judgment like other men. This is self evident, because they have some order (ordo) in their affairs … which indicates the use of reason.”²⁸ However, Vitoria determines that Native societies possess only the capacity for reason as demonstrated by their uncivil aberrant cultural practices, which in turn justifies disciplining them into conformity with civilized Christian standards.²⁹

The determination of reason does not entitle Native people to legitimately govern their own land. Vitoria uses the formation of a universal jurisdiction that binds all societies in order to hold that European ideology should be the standard for global governance and social relations. Under the right to preach, Vitoria justifies the imposition of civility through spreading Christianity to correct those who are in a state of sin and violation of natural law as the duty of the Spanish: “Since all those peoples are not merely in a state of sin, but presently in a state beyond salvation, it is the business of Christians to correct and direct them. Indeed, they are clearly obliged to do so.”³⁰ By constructing Native societies as in possession of universal reason and within the same universal jurisdiction, Vitoria could claim that because their sociopolitical practices differ from Europeans, they must be properly brought into accordance with true reason—as civility, justified under the law of nations.

Vitoria bases the determination of incivility upon “natural law violations,” which included but was not limited to sodomy, lesbianism, polygamy, buggery, bestiality, and cannibalism.³¹ Violations of natural law are categorically marked in opposition to proper comportment with Christian European standards. These violations of natural law that form the basis of Vitoria’s justification of the civilizing project are the foundational premises of colonial heteropatriarchy.

Additionally, Vitoria stated that if Native people resist Spanish conquest they are in violation of the Spaniards’ universal rights to trade, travel, and preach: “If the barbarians attempt to deny the Spaniards in these matters which I have described as belonging to the law of nations, that is to say from trading and the rest … and they insist on replying with violence, the Spaniards may defend themselves, and do everything needful for their own safety. It is lawful to meet force with force.”³² Vitoria argued that if the Spanish are doing no harm then Native societies are not legitimately entitled to resist Spanish occupation.³³ Any Native resistance, read as a violation of universal rights, then subjects Native societies to legitimate warfare, conquest, and enslavement under the doctrine of Just War: “But if the barbarians deny the Spaniards what is theirs by the law of nations, they commit an offense against them. Hence, if war is necessary to obtain their (Spanish) rights, they may lawfully go to war.”³⁴

Vitoria relied on the reconfiguration of the law of nations because there was no precedential legal doctrine that justified the large-scale development of the project of colonialism. As political theorist Duncan Ivison explains, rights are a reflection of social relations.³⁵ I argue that Vitoria’s work refle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Manifesto of the Abolition Journal
• Intervention: Meeting Mumia Abu-Jamal: The Most Well-Known Political Prisoner in the US
• Intervention: Dis-Organizing Prisons and Building Together, Inside/Outside
• Intervention: A Family Like Mine
• Intervention: Abuse Thrives on Silence: The #VaughnRebellion in Context
• Intervention: From the Vaughn Uprising: ‘For a Safer, More Secure, and More Humane Prison’
• Article: Moving Through Flames: Toward an Insurgent Indecency
• Intervention: Is Marxism Relevant? Some Uses and Misuses
• Art: Out of the Shadows of Caste and Into Our Consciousness
• Article: Democracy Against Representation: A Radical Realist View
• Intervention: Abolitionist Democracy: Fear, Loathing, and Violence in the 2016 Campaign, with Notes for 2020 and Beyond
• Intervention: The Pitfalls of White Liberal Panic
• Art: Tear Down White Supremacy
• Intervention: As the US Oligarchy Expands Its War, Middle-Class White People Must Take a Side
• Article: Aggrieved Whiteness: White Identity Politics and Modern American Racial Formation
• Art: In this Place 206
• Article: Already Something More: Heteropatriarchy and the Limitations of Rights, Inclusion, and the Universal
• Intervention: “We Can Be Here Another Five Hundred Years”: A Critical Reflection on Shiri Pasternak’s
• Intervention: ‘How Does State Sovereignty Matter?’
• Art: O wind, take me to my country / O love, take me to my country
• Intervention: Zionism and Native American Studies
• Intervention: Embodied Refusals: On the Collective Possibilities of Hunger Striking
• Intervention: Notes on Photography, Power, and Insurgent Looks
• Art: We Are Not in the Least Afraid of Ruins
• Intervention: It Has to Burn Before It Can Grow
• About the Contributors
• Index