Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais (Dec 2017)

On the Coloniality of Human Rights

  • Nelson Maldonado-Torres

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.6793
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 114
pp. 117 – 136

Abstract

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The universality of human rights is delimited by what is considered to effectively constitute the state of being human in the first place. In addition to a secular-line that separated the divine from the human, the hegemonic modern Western concept of the human emerged in relation to an onto-Manichean colonial line that often makes human rights discourse inefficient for addressing modern colonialism, or complicit with it. For any decolonization of human rights to occur, there needs to be a decolonization of the concept of the human. Frantz Fanon’s prayer to his body in Black Skin, White Masks offers a basis for building a decolonial humanism and humanities that counter the coloniality of human rights and serve as propaedeutics for any effort to make human rights relevant for decolonization.

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