Geopolitics and Decolonization

Perspectives from the Global South

Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Lewis R. Gordon

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786605139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

Gathering researchers from or towards Global South epistemologies, this book enriches the debate on crucial questions for liberation in the South and the improvement of South relations. It argues that coloniality and colonialism are not outdated phenomena of the historical past, but contemporary marks that remain repressed. The dominance of Eurocentric paradigm in the social sciences explains the long-lasting detachment between thinkers and politicians from the Global South, which have been historically presented according to their respective relations with the West (Europe and North America). The dialogue on common problems and challenges to people and societies in the South, largely derived from their colonial past and condition, is still sparing. This book actively promotes and demonstrates the value of intercultural dialogue and debate amongst voices from within the Global South on issues to do with decoloniality, cultural rights, law and politics.

Part I

JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND CHANGE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Chapter 1

Dehumanization and Selective Violation of Human Rights Under the Logic of Coloniality

Fernanda Frizzo Bragato

INTRODUCTION

I argue in what follows that a relationship exists between (1) the depreciation of certain beings who are not considered fully human, (2) the violation of human rights through discrimination, and (3) the logic of coloniality that makes explicit the connections among the previous phenomena.

International human rights have been framing a body of norms that aims at reversing the historical process of disenfranchising and offense of dignity of most human beings reinforced by a discourse of relativization of humanity addressed to certain human groups. What determined the inferiority of blacks, Indians, women, homosexuals, non-Christians were discourses of gradation and hierarchy of humanity, which are still in play. In order to justify that some humans had no rights and therefore could be discriminated against, previously it was necessary to disregard them as full human beings. On the other hand, coloniality is a category coined by Aníbal Quijano that designates the dark side of modernity marked by the experiences of colonialism. Coloniality is the logic of domination, exploitation, and control established by modern colonialism that did not end with the formal processes of decolonization in the seventies.

First, I will discuss the discursive dimension of dehumanization, exploring how the idea of human was contrived and makes it possible to rule out most people from the concept of humanity. Second, I will argue that the discriminatory practices and discourses of dehumanization are not only interconnected, but also express the logic of coloniality. Finally, I shall demonstrate that the focus of international human rights on nondiscrimination is based on the assumption that most violations are strictly connected to the question of who are the rights holders. The established and prohibited factors of discrimination derive from different identities ranked according to a standard of humanity.

THE HUMAN AND THE EXCLUDED

Some human beings are not considered fully human due to discursive and practical processes of dehumanization in a sense that discourses of depreciation of certain human beings support practices of discrimination. Such discriminatory practices respond and explain, in large part, a systematic but selective violation of human rights that began in modernity, more precisely from the conquest of America,¹ and that persists today. On the other hand, liberal political struggles that took place in European modernity resulted in the first legal recognition of the so-called human rights that was also underpinned by a philosophical discourse that sets up two dogmas of modern political thought. First, all men have inalienable rights that stem from man’s human nature. Second, rationality is what distinguishes and defines us as human. Although Europe granted certain inherent rights to men, it violated these rights out of their land, including extermination, enslavement, and mistreatment of Americans and Africans. Nevertheless, the contradiction between the guarantees of human rights and the cruel practices overseas was not a clear one. The rights discourse was based upon an archetype of subject of rights according to which few humans can meet its requirements.

Suárez-Krabbe points to the idea of what defines a human being as one of the lies rarely questioned in dominant society, because although this idea seems to refer to all beings on this planet that descend from monkeys, it “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” (Suárez-Krabbe, 2016: 11). Black and indigenous men and women have never been considered fully human, so which dignity should be respected? However, as Douzinas (2000: 184) questions, can we have a concept of rights without having a definition of who or what is human?

Fairclough (2001) says that the discourse has a triple constructive power: It produces and reproduces knowledge and beliefs through different ways of representing reality; establishes social relations; creates, enhances, or restores identities. In this sense, the discourse of rights of man was consistent with the fact that rights could be bestowed on the small part of humanity while the rest were stripped of these rights. It is because the gradual construction of the concept of humanity from the idea of rationality determined who has been counted as a human being and who has not. Thanks to this discursive process, who became the subject of rights par excellence was “man,” one who is rational and therefore holds a dignity. He deserves to be treated as an end in himself and never as a mere mean. All men are equal because all of them are equally rational. As every man is equal, everyone is worthy, and rights became “natural” for who is human.

To be rational has to do with the ability of understanding, reasoning, and speaking according to scientific patterns. The emergence of modern science as the governing episteme was the promise of the expansion of rationality and therefore of epistemic security (Gordon, 2010). Modern reason is instrumental reason. According to Fuchs,

Rational persons are autonomous agents carrying subjective rights and private inclinations. They act rationally in a variety of areas. The Cartesian cognitive actor arrives at indubitable logical truisms and certainties by systematic reasoning. The Kantian moral actor follows generalizable moral principles. The Hobbesian political actor contracts with other actors to create a sovereign body politic. The Smithian economic actor invests his resources prudently to maximize selfish gains; in the long run, this will make the commonwealth prosper as well. (Fuchs, 2001: 113)

By the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft (2000) questioned the alleged inferiority of woman: “In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole: in Reason. What acquirement exalts one being above another? Virtue, we spontaneously reply.” After clearly answering her own question, Wollstonecraft concludes that although it resembles universality, women are placed in an inferior position in relation to men. For her it is a contradiction that reason can be clouded by irrational prejudices. At the same time the author highlights the features commonly assigned to female gender, she gives a clue to understand by what means rationality defines who counts as human. The female features, such as foolishness, vagaries, fiery passions, servile vices, grace, and attractiveness are taken for granted and determine why women are seen as childish and unstable beings who can hold neither rationality nor autonomy.

Although supposedly universal and abstract, the modern concept of rationality is restricted to European standards in opposition to different ways of thinking, judging, and behaving. This discourse had its starting point in the conquest of America when the main question addressed by the colonizer was precisely the following: “Are the Indians men? Are they Europeans and therefore rational animals? . . . They are only workforce, if not irrational, at least ‘bestial,’ uneducated—because they do not have the culture of Central—wild, underdeveloped” (Dussel, 1996: 9).

In the early sixteenth century, Gines de Sepulveda was the official theorist of the Spanish Crown who rivaled Bartolomé de Las Casas about the human condition of the indigenous peoples of America. According to him:

The man rules over the woman, the adult over the child, the father over his children; that is to say, the most powerful and most perfect rule over the weakest and most imperfect. This same relationship exists among men, there being some who by nature are masters and others who by nature are slaves. Those who surpass the rest in prudence and intelligence, although not in physical strength, are by nature the masters. On the other hand, those who are dimwitted and mentally lazy, although they may be physically strong enough to fulfill all the necessary tasks, are by nature slaves. It is just and useful that it be this way. We even see it sanctioned in divine law itself, for it is written in the Book of Proverbs: “He who is stupid will serve the wise man.” And so it is with the barbarous and inhumane peoples [the Indians] who have no civil life and peaceful customs. It will always be just and in conformity with natural law that such people submit to the rule of more cultured and humane princes and nations. Thanks to their virtues and the practical wisdom of their laws, the latter can destroy barbarism and educate these [inferior] people to a more humane and virtuous life. (Sepulveda, 1941: 85)

The doubt about the human nature of the Indians gave the colonizer certainty about his own humanity-rationality. As Dussel says (1996: 9), “before the ‘ego cogito’ there is an ‘ego conquiro’ (the ‘I conquer’ is the practical ground of ‘I think’).” Accordingly, Maldonado-Torres notes that:

“I think, therefore I am” presupposes two unacknowledged dimensions. Beneath the “I think” we can read “others do not think,” and behind the “I am” it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that “others are not” or do not have being. In this way we are led to uncover the complexity of the Cartesian formulation. From “I think, therefore I am” we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression: “I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable).” The Cartesian formulation privileges epistemology, which simultaneously hides both what could be regarded as the coloniality of knowledge (others do not think) and the coloniality of Being (others are not). (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 243)

The debates on the status of the indigenous peoples in the conquest of America as expressed in the Valladolid debates of the 1550s gave rise to the idea of the human being that “does not capture the humanity of all human beings but which, instead, dehumanizes all those who are not constituted as Christian, European, property-owning, productive, and masculine” (Suárez-Krabbe, 2016: 73).

The rationality rests in the realm of knowledge. That is why the denial of cognitive faculties—both in the colonized subject and in women—provides the basis for the denial of his or her humanity. In other words, who does not think cannot be. In relation to indigenous peoples, it did not matter whether they thought according to their worldview, as this supposedly was not a legitimate way of thinking. Smith observes that indigenous concepts of spirituality contrasted with the Western view about the essence of a person. This essence has a genealogy that can be traced back to an Earth Mother, which means a human person does not stand alone but shares with other animate and, in the Western sense, “inanimate” beings, a relationship based on a shared “essence” of life. It is a difficult argument for Western systems of knowledge to deal with or accept ideas such as the spiritual relationships to the universe, to the landscape, and to stones, rocks, insects, and other things (Smith, 2008: 74).

Because it is opposed to European rational standards, alternative ways and vision of how to relate to the world were sufficient to characterize some people as barbarian, savage, brute. Instead of rights, those people demand repression, denial, and disciplinary restraint. Mignolo (2013: 46) adds that the idea of human and the idea of rights have been invented by humanists of the European Renaissance to respond, on the one hand, to the internal history of Western Christians and, on the other hand, to an external history of Christianity. Internally, the concept of man served to distinguish humanist from Easterners and pagans; externally, they applied the same concepts to affirm their own humanity before choosing who they named Indians and black people in the New World. Mignolo goes further to reflect on the origin of the discourse of Western superiority through the definition of man and human. Mignolo’s articulation is worthy of a lengthy quote:

Man and human—and not blood of skin color—is the bottom line of racial classification. And racial classification is nothing more than one answer to the question “who speaks for the human?” Classified races do not exist in the world but in the discursive universe of Western theology, philosophy and science. As existing racial classification—since the Renaissance—presupposes a ranking of human beings depending on their approximation to principles of knowledge—belief and rationality, form of life and socioeconomic organization—and on ontological approximation to the Vitruvian Man—form and social uses of the body such as posture, walking, dance, rituals, and Christian and non-Christian rituals—the actors who perform and maintain racial classification are the ones who speak for the human. (Mignolo, 2013: 51)

That is why Mignolo (2013: 44) states that “the concept of human used in general conversations, by the media, in university seminars and conferences, is a concept that leaves outside of ‘humanity’ quite a large portion of the global population.” People whose ethnicity, skin color, language, routines, and rituals are “humanly” deficient make up this quite large portion. Accordingly, Sánchez Rubio points out that the human rights idea is embedded in an excessively Eurocentric and linear imagery that turns out to establish an extremely numbed culture that is confined to a single hegemonic form of being human: one built by the very Western trajectory and by the liberal bourgeois modernity version (Sánchez Rubio, 2014: 49).

The dominant idea of human rights largely is commited to the assumption that what defines a human being is the presence of rationality. The problem is that even though some beings look like “humans,” they are not regarded as rational, so they are not fully human and consequently they are not entitled to human rights.

DEHUMANIZATION AND THE LOGIC OF COLONIALITY

In this topic I will discuss the colonial logic of denial of rights drawing from two assumptions discussed previously. The first one is the existence of a discourse that defines humanity and at the same time rules out most of human beings from this category, creating hierarchies that place Indian and black women on the lower levels and the white man on the upper levels. The second is that this discourse and subsequent practices of violations began at the dawn of modernity and remain to this day. From the first meeting with the indigenous peoples of America, European superiority established a relationship that was sustained not only by brute force, but also by a discourse that produced his truths about the subhuman condition of these “others.”

Coloniality is not the same as colonialism. As Maldonado-Torres (2007: 243) explains, “colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire.” On the other hand, “coloniality refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.” Thus, even though colonialism is almost finished, coloniality survives it.

Coloniality is the pattern of power relations between metropolises and colonies since the beginning of colonial modernity that means these relations are unequal and established by exploiting processes based on two assumptions. According to Quijano (2005: 227), the colonial matrix of power is defined on the one hand, from the “codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of ‘race,’ a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority in relation to each other.” This idea was taken over by the conquistadors as a basic premise of their relations with the Native Americans. On the other hand, coloniality is defined by the “constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity, together around and upon the basis of...