For a pluriversal declaration of human rights

American Quarterly

Volumn 66, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 583-608

  Fregoso, Rosa Linda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84907509024     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2014.0047     Document Type: Review

References (89)

1. This essay is indebted to many conversations with colleagues, students, and artivists. I thank Gina Dent, Herman Gray, the external reviewer, and editor Macarena Gómez-Barris, for insightful suggestions that helped shape the final version of this essay. Special thanks to Sylvanna Falcón and Shelly Grabe, my collaborators and coprincipal investigators in the Human Rights in the Américas working group, funded by the Chicano Latino Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, subsequently funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) as a working group, "Bridging Humanities and Social Sciences Frameworks to Human Rights: Feminist and Decolonial Approaches." An earlier version of this essay was given as a talk at the American Studies Association conference in 2012. I thank members of the UCHRI working group for their suggestions for revising the conference paper: Neda Atanasoski, Cindy Cruz, Sylvanna Falcón, Shelly Grabe, Sharmila Lodhia, Marcia Ochoa, Elizabeth Philipose, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Marguerite Waller. Students in my graduate seminar, The Culture and Politics of Human Rights, and undergraduate seminar, Visualizing Human Rights, have helped shape many of the ideas in this essay. I am especially grateful to the artivists whose work inspires creative acts and thinking about human rights and social justice. The first stanza of Ingrid De Kok's poem "Some there be," in Terrestrial Things: Poems (Cape Town, South Africa: Snailpress/Kwela Books, 2000).
2. Elizabeth Sisco, "NHI - No Humans Involved," in Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, ed. Amy Scholder (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993).
3. See also Margot Leigh Butler's insightful essay on the exhibition, "I'm in There! I'm One of the Women in That Picture!," in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence, ed. Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 155-76.
4. Samera Esmier, Juridical Humanity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6.
5. Sylvia Wynter, "'No Humans Involved': An Open Letter to My Colleagues," Forum NHI 1.1 (1994): 43.
6. Shannon Speed and Jane Collier, "Limiting Indigenous Autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico: The State Government's Use of Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 22 (2000): 877-905.
7. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 37.
8. See Rosa-Linda Fregoso, "Transforming Terror: Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo's Señorita Extraviada," in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, ed. Alisa Lebow and Alexandra Juhasz (London: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
9. Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz's recent book makes a similar argument about musical improvisational. See The Fierce Urgency of Now (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 36.
10. For further discussion of "decolonial imaginary," see Emma Pérez's groundbreaking work, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
11. Catherine Walsh, "Interculturalidad y colonialidad del poder: Un pensamiento y posicionamiento 'otro' desde la diferencia colonial," in Interculturalidad, descolonización del estado y del conocimiento, ed. Catherine Walsh, Álvaro García Linera, and Walter Mignolo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2006), 23; my translation.
12. Gustavo Esteva and Makhuri Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism (London: Zed Books, 1998), 125.
13. See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 291.
15. Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation - an Argument," New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-337.
16. Esmier, Juridical Humanity, 119.
17. Walter Mignolo, "Who Speaks for the 'Human' in Human Rights," Hispanic Issues online 5.1 (2009): 22.
18. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Tratado sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra los Indios, trans. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Manuel García-Pelayo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1941), 155.
19. Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians; The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapas, against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered across the Seas, ed. and trans. Stafford Poole (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 132.
20. Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being," 266.
21. This coloniality of being, as Maria Lugones writes, "name[s] not just a classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human" ("Decolonial Feminism," Hypatia 25.4 [2010]: 745).
22. Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being," 286.
23. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 265.
24. Paolo G. Carozza, "From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights, Human Rights Quarterly 25 (2003): 287.
25. Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 263.
26. See also Mauricio Beuchot, "Bartolome de las Casas, el humanismo indigena y los derechos humanos," Anuario Mexicano de Historia del Derecho 6 (1994): 37-48;
27. Anthony Anghie, "Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law," in Laws of the Postcolonial, ed. Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 89-109;
28. Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (New Dehli: Oxford University Press, 2006);
29. Carozza, "From Conquest to Constitutions."
30. The project was funded by the Instituto para Igualdad y Género of the City of Querétaro, Mileneo Feminista, and Partido Verde (Laura and Pilar, interview with author, Queretaro City, Queretaro, August 2006).
31. Kester, One and the Many, 185.
32. For further critiques of traumatic imagery, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1977);
33. Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
34. William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
35. Mignolo, Dark Side, 5.
36. Guillermo Delgado-P., "Andean Indigeneity as Epistemic Dis/Juncture of Globalization," in Indigeneity, Collected Essays, ed. Guillermo Delgado-P. and John Brown Childs (Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific, 2012), 178.
37. According to Sylvia Marcos, nonindigenous is a term that Indigenous peoples use. See Marcos, "The Borders Within: The Indigenous Women's Movement and Feminism in Mexico," in Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, ed. Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 106.
38. Sylvia Escárcega Zamarrón, "Authenticating Strategic Essentialisms: The Politics of Indigenousness at the United Nations," in Delgado-P. and Brown Childs, Indigeneity, 243.
39. Delgado-P., "Andean Indigeneity," 198.
40. Escárcega Zamarrón, "Authenticating Strategic Essentialisms," 240.
41. Mignolo, Darker Side, 71.
42. Shannon Speed, "Exercising Rights and Reconfiguring Resistance in the Zapatista Juntas de Buen Gobierno," in The Practice of Human Rights, ed. M. Goodale and S. E. Merry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 184.
43. Quoted in Jane K. Cowan, "Cultural and Rights after Culture and Rights," American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 19.
44. Speed, "Exercising Rights," 183.
45. Baxi, Future of Human Rights, 211.
46. S. James Anaya, "Indian Givers: What Indigenous Peoples Have Contributed to International Human Rights Law," Journal of Law and Policy 22 (2006): 111.
47. Joanne Barker, "Women's Work: Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Native Women's Activism," in Delgado-P. and Brown Childs, Indigeneity, 37.
48. Cindy L. Holder and Jeff J. Corntassel, "Indigenous Peoples and Multicultural Citizenship: Bridging Collective and Individual Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 24.1 (2002): 147.
49. Anaya, "Indian Givers," 111.
50. Quoted in Kester, One and the Many, 96.
51. Irene Simmons, interview with author, Tucson, AZ, March 18, 2007.
52. Baxi similarly writes about other alternative language of human rights rooted in a spiritual ethic of human responsibility, drawing from Levinas and Gandhi. See Baxi, Future of Human Rights, 210-12.
53. The improvisational violinist Stephen Nachmanovich writes about a similar notion of interbeing in South Africa: "There is a South African word, Ubuntu, which is the same thing as inter-being. Desmond Tutu brought it into currency in the West and it is the opposite of Descartes. Descartes is famous among other things for saying, 'I think, therefore I am.'" Ubuntu means "I have my being through your having your being." See Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, Fierce Urgency of the Now, 64.
54. For a critique of the masculinist use on the concept by Chicano cultural nationalists, see Rosa-Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
55. for a feminist reading of In'Laketch, see Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
56. M. Bianet Castellanos, "Becoming Chingón/a: A Gendered and Racialized Critique of the Global Economy," in Strange Affinities, ed. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 270-93.
57. Quoted in Marcos, "Borders Within," 89.
58. Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "The Notion of Rights and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity: Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia," Qui Parle 18.2 (2010), 32.
59. Barker, "Women's Work," 10.
60. Rivera Cusicanqui, "Notion of Rights," 33.
61. For further studies of Indigenous feminist thinking in the Américas, see Sylvia Marcos, Cruzando Fronteras: Mujeres indigenas y feminismos abajo y a la izquierda (San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas: CIDECI/ Universidad de la Tierra, 2010);
62. Friya Schiwy, Indianizing Film: Decolonizing the Andes and the Question of Technology (Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009);
63. Gisela Espinosa Damián, "Feminismo indígena," in Cuatro Vertientes del feminism en México: Diversidad de rutas y cruce de caminos (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 2009), 232-70;
64. Aída Hernández Castillo, "Entre el etnocentrismo feminist y el esencialismo étnico: Las mujeres indígenas y sus demandas de género," Debate Feminista 12.24 (2001): 206-30.
65. Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 17.
66. Marcos, "Borders Within," 93.
67. Susan A. Miller, "Native America Writes Back: The Origins of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography," Wicazo Sa Review 23.2 (2008): 10.
68. Holder and Corntassel, "Indigenous Peoples and Multicultural Citizenship," 147.
69. Robert Connolly refers to the "agential triarchy" as "nature without agency, humanity with imperfect agency and God with perfect agency; see A World of Becoming.
70. For further discussion of Pachamama, see Mignolo, Darker Side, 10-11.
71. Marcos, "Boarders Within," 88.
72. Miller, "Native America Writes Back," 12.
73. Unlike the liberal humanist figuration of rights as property, embedded in individual personhood, the ethics of presumptive care is traced to Buddhism by Nikhi Aziz insofar as rights are "not just for humans but for all sentient and non-sentient beings" (Aziz, "The Human Rights Debate in the Era of Globalization," in Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia, ed. P. Van Ness (London: Routledge, 1998), 42.
74. For further discussion of pre-Renaissance, nonhumanist notion of rights, see Tierney's discussion of Jean Gerson and Conrad Summerhart and their argument on behalf of animals and inanimate creatures capable of possessing "a kind of dominion associated with rights" (Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 268);
75. see also Baxi, Future of Human Rights.
76. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
77. Miller, "Native America Writes Back," 12.
78. Writing in another context, Talal Asad addresses the "destabilization of the concepts of rights-bearing human subject through "interventions by genetic engineering." As Asad adds: "Because the concept of the natural is now being reconfigured, we may now have to rethink the supernatural (Formations of the Secular [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003], 157-58).
79. Quoted in Marcos, "Borders Within," 91.
80. Marcos draws from Calixta Guiteras-Holmes's superb ethnography on Indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Perils of the Soul (New York: Free Press of Glenco, 1961).
81. Mignolo, "Who Speaks for the 'Human' in Human Rights?," 23.
82. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1969), 34-35.
83. For further discussion of the "human" in human rights discourse, see Asad and his discussion of the question of redemption in the language of human rights used by Malcolm X and Christian discourse informing Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights practices, in Formations of the Secular, 127-58.
84. Barker, "Women's Work," 40.
85. Quoted in Gina Dent, "Returns," Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 27.7 (2014): 8;
86. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 163.
87. Dent, "Returns," 9.
88. Mignolo, Darker Side, 362n64.
89. Connolly, World of Becoming, 79.