A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)
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My participation in this conference-se-ries (Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Anti-Black Racism and Anti-Indigenous Rac-ism), as well as my own work on the sub-ject, is and has been carried out by someone
who is neither Islamic in any of its variedethnic configurations (Arab, Iranian, Turk-ish, Indonesian, Central Asian, or Islamicpopulation in Western Europe or the US),nor a Jew, a Black or an Indigenous person.My experiences and subjectivities are onlyindirectly related to religious, national andlife experiences of people who have grownup and been educated in any, or various,historical and subjective configurations justmentioned. I learned to see the world first
Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director for the Center of Global Studies and theHumanities at Duke University. He is an active member of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality andhas been exploring the decolonial option as an epistemic and political avenue to overcome the limits of modernand Western epistemology founded in the Greco-Latin legacies and Western Christianity and its reincarnation inSecular philosophy and sciences. Among his recent publications: The Idea of Latin America (2005), received theFrantz Fanon Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2006. Co-editor with Madina Tlostanovaof Double Critique: Knowledge and Scholars at Risk in the Post-Socialist World (2006). In collaboration with ArturoEscobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2007). Co-edited with Margaret Greer and Maureen Quilligan,The Black Legend. Discourses of Race in the European Renaissance (2007).
Dispensable and Bare LivesColoniality and the Hidden Political/Economic
Agenda of Modernity
Walter Mignolo
Duke University––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Abstract: Walter Mignolo discusses how racial formations in colonialism and imperialism haveto be understood in the context of the simultaneous transformation of Christianity and the emer-gence of the capitalist world economy. In his contribution he focuses on how Christian theologyprepared the terrain for two complementary articulations of racism. One was founded on Chris-tian epistemic privilege over the two major competing religions (Jews and Muslims), the otheron a secularization of theological detachment culminating in the “purity of blood” that becamethe biological and natural marker (Indians, Blacks, Mestizos, Mulatos) of what used to be themarker of religious belief (Jews, Moors, Conversos, Moriscos). Mignolo also discusses the emer-gence of secular “Jewness” in eighteenth century Europe and how these developments were con-current with Western Imperialism in the New World. He concludes that secular Jewness joinedsecular Euro-American economic practices (e.g., imperial capitalism) and the construction of theState of Israel by what Marc Ellis describes as “Constantine Jews.”
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as a son of European immigrants in Argen-tina, more specifically from Northern Italy.Later on, when I went to the university andthrough my Ph.D. I became aware that atthe university you learn to see the worldthrough a discipline, whatever the disci-pline is. That is, you identify yourself witha discipline and people identify you withthe discipline. You see yourself and they seeyou as a historian, biologist, lawyer, sociol-ogist, and semiotician. Through a lengthyprocess I learned to identify myself by theseventies as a semiotician (for which Mi-crosoft Office doesn’t have a word in itsThesaurus) interested in discourse analysisand literary theory on the one hand, andthe historical foundations of epistemologyand hermeneutics (which later I realizedwere Western ways of framing certain op-erations and procedures of knowledgecommon to human beings—and perhapsliving organisms) on the other hand.
It was at the junction of this personalturmoil that
The Darker Side of the Renais-sance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization
(1995) started as a process of understand-ing the opening up of the Atlantic in the six-teenth century, “modern” imperialcolonialism (that is European: Spanish,Portuguese, French, British), in contradis-tinction to contemporary and similar orga-nization (cfr. Ottoman Sultanate orQuechua Incanate). I became aware, in theprocess of writing and researching, thatpeople in the Valley of México living in theAztec Tlatoanate, whether in conformity ordissenting (like the people in Tlaxcala, whosupported Hernán Cortés), were com-pared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews.The comparison was twofold: on the onehand, Indians and Jews were dirty and dis-trustful people; on the other hand, “Indi-ans” in the New World may have been aconsequence of the Jewish diaspora. JesuitFather José de Acosta collected, in his
Histo-ria Natural y Moral de las Indias
(1589) a leg-acy that goes back to the middle of thesixteenth century pondering whether “In-
dians” descended from Jews. Although hedismissed the possibility, he had neverthe-less addressed an issue that was in every-body’s mind. Acosta first dismissed thepossibility of a connection between Jewsand Indians because Jews had a sophisti-cated writing system from a long time agowhile Indians were considered “illiterate”(in the Western sense of the word). Jews likemoney, Acosta points out, while Indians areindifferent to it; and while Jews take cir-cumcision seriously, Indians have no ideaof it. Last but not least, Acosta pointed thatif Jews were indeed the Indies origin of In-dians, they would not have forgotten theMessiah and their religion.
But then there was also the question ofenslaved Africans. What to do with them?Early in the sixteenth century, Indians wereconsidered vassals of the King and serfs ofGod. Consequently, they couldn’t be en-slaved—which legitimized the massive en-slavement of Africans. Bartolomé de LasCasas supported, first, the dictum about In-dians and Africans, but then he correctedhimself and condemned slavery. Africa andAfricans were already classified in Chris-tian cosmology as descendent of Ham,Noah’s cursed son. And that was not goodfor one of the meanings of “Ham” was“Black.” The conjunction of “cursed’ and“black,” plus the fact that Ham’s descen-dents spread through Africa and to the cur-rent Middle East, prompted the scenario forthe British to describe Spaniards as “Black-amoors.” When Elizabeth I of Englandlaunched the campaign against the brutal-ity of Spaniards against the Indians (knowntoday as “the Black legend”), the Spanishwere likened with “Blackamoors” under-lining the close connections between Spainand Muslims from North Africa (Greer, Mi-gnolo and Quilligan, 2007). “Moors” and“Black” were thus conflated as undesirablepersons in Christian Europe and used to es-tablish the
internal imperial difference
be-tween England (a want-to-be empire) andSpain (a leading imperial force).
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Now what you have here is a messyhistorical configuration, the emergence ofthe racial matrix of the modern/colonialworld; that is, of Western imperial capital-ism and of racism as a necessary epistemicstructure that legitimized at the momentthe epistemic supremacy of Theology and,later on, the epistemic supremacy of Philos-ophy and Science as the ultimate proof ofthe empirical existence of “races” dividingthe human species and ranking human be-ings according to their degree of humanity(ontology) and their degree of intellectualcapacities and knowledge (epistemology).
2
However, the messy historical configura-tion has an underlying logical and histori-cal structure: Christian Theology wasconfronted with equivalent and competingreligions of the book (Jews and Moors);with people like Indians who lack religionand were victims of the mischievous andperverse designs of the Devil; with a com-plex population who descended from Hamand became a confusing mixture of “Black-amoors”—that is, not exactly Moors asMuslims and simultaneously Black who
could have been Muslim or not in Europeand Africa; and finally with “AfricanBlacks” when they were enslaved, trans-ported to the New World from different Af-rican Kingdoms, diverse in their language,religions and histories. The messy histori-cal configuration entered, nonetheless, in aprocess of order and management throughthe creation of the Spanish Inquisition in1505. The Spanish Inquisition contributedto clear up the field.
In retrospect, the racial matrix (and thehistorical foundation of racism as we knowit today) is a combination of two structures,one religious and one secular. ChristianTheology and European Egology (e.g., inthe sense of René Descartes and ImmanuelKant) both provided the frame for racialclassification and management of the pop-ulation.
Let’s imagine two triangles (see Figure1). One of them has Christian Theology/Christians at the upper angle of the triangleand at the base you see Islamic Theology/Muslims or Moors at one end and JewishTheology/Jews on the other. Then youhave “Moriscos” and “Conversos” to des-ignate the “religious mestizaje,” the mixingof Christian and Moorish blood on the onehand and Christian and Jews blood on theother. That was clear in the Iberian Penin-sula, or, if you wish, in the heart of theemerging empire. In the colonies, the situa-tion was different since there was no reli-gion of the book and therefore no
1
Emil C. Bartel points out (in her article ti-tled “To Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Dis-crimination and Elizabeth I”), that,
In 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued an“open letter” to the Lord Mayor ofLondon, announcing that “there are oflate divers blackmoores brought intothis realme, of which kinde of peoplethere are allready here to manie,” andordering that they be deported fromthe country.
One week later, she reiter-ated her “good pleasure to have thosekinde of people sent out of the lande”and commissioned the merchantCasper van Senden to “take up” cer-tain “blackamoores here in this realmeand to transport them into Spaine andPortugall.” Finally, in 1601, she com-plained again about the “great num-bers of Negars and Blackamoors which(as she is informed) are crept into thisrealm,” defamed them as “infidels,having no understanding of Christ orhis Gospel,” and, one last time, autho-rized their deportation. (
Studies in En-glish Literature 1500-1900
, 46.2, 2006,305-322).
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Racism as an epistemological and ontolog-ical construction of imperial knowledge (Chris-tian Theology and Secular Egology (e.g., secularphilosophy and secular science), has been ar-gued in several opportunities, following up onAnibal Quijano’s seminal works on the “coloni-ality of power.” Racism has been construed as
epistemic colonial
difference
by devaluing knowl-edge beyond Greek, Latin, Christian Theologyand Secular Egology (see Mignolo 2000, 2002)and as
ontological colonial difference
(Maldonado-Torres 2007) by devaluating non-Western peoplein relation to the ideal of Man both in the Euro-pean Renaissance and European Enlightenment(e.g., consider for example the declaration of theRight of Man and of the Citizen).
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theological-based knowledge, ChristianTheology became more and more displacedby Spaniards or Castilian. And on the lowerbase on the triangle we have then Indiansand Blacks/Africans. Religious blood mix-ture that engendered non-existing catego-ries until then as Moriscos and Conversos,in the Iberian Peninsula, were replaced byMestizos/as and Mulatos/as in the NewWorld. But, while in the Iberian Peninsulathe blood mixture between Moors and Jewswas not accounted for (and probably phys-ically not very common), in the New Worldthe mixture of Mulatos and Mestizas orvice-versa engendered a new racial cate-gory, Zambos and Zambas. From here on,classification multiplied but all of themwere displayed under the “purity” of Span-ish/Castilian blood (Cástro-Gómez 2006).
When I convinced myself that logicallyand historically “race” was an epistemiccategory to legitimize
racism
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and thatmodern/colonial racism was a Westerntheological construction at the confluence
of the expulsion of Moors and Jews fromthe Iberian Peninsula and the colonizationof the New World which brought Indiansand Black Africans into the picture, I be-came aware also that my own subjectivitywas formed by the history of European im-migrants in South America and the Carib-bean—by which I mean, not Creole fromHispanic descent since colonial times butEuropean immigration that started towardthe end of nineteenth century. And also, bymy own migration to the US to become aHispanic/Latino,
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I realized that:
a) Given the epistemic and ontological co-lonial differences that structure theimaginary of the modern/colonialworld, I enjoyed (as an Argentine fromEuropean descent) “the privilege”(from the hegemonic model of Manand of Knowledge) of having an edgeover the diversity of Indians and Afro-descendent in South America;
b) However, in relation to the Europeanand US model of Man and of Knowl-edge I was “deficient”: not quite Euro-
Figure 1
3
This idea is further developed in the intro-duction and afterword, and illustrated by sever-al of the articles contained in the collectivevolume,
Rereading the Black Legend
:
The Discours-es of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renais-sance Empires
, edited by Margaret Greer, WalterMignolo and Maureen Quilligan. Chicago: Chi-cago University Press, 2007.
4
I dealt with the complicities between Isla-mophobia and Hispanophobia in the paper pre-sented at the first of these series of workshops,published in
Human Architecture: Journal of theSociology of Self-Knowledge
, VI, Issue 3 (Summer2008).
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pean (only European descent) andindeed not really White in the US. TheSpanish accent colored me. Spanishlanguage has been demoted as a lan-guage of ground-breaking and guidingknowledge since the eighteenth centu-ry, when French, German and Englishtook over the leadership of Westernepistemology. Knowledge producedand framed in Spanish language is to-day, in the European Union, less influ-ential and less sustainable thanknowledge produced in English,French or German—English, above alldue to the imperial leading role of theUS.
Thus, it is as a South American fromEuropean descent
cum
Hispanic Latino inthe US (ethnic identification) and someonetrained in semiotic, discourse analysis andliterary theory, that I approach “racism” inthe modern/colonial and imperial/colo-nial world.
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The equation is relevant since Iam not starting from the discipline to un-derstand an imperial management of hu-man subjectivities (through racism) but, onthe contrary, I start from the subjective feel-ings of my own history and of those whoare not immigrants in South America, butdissenting creoles from Spanish descent orMestizos and Mestizas. That is, I joinedforces with those who instead of using theirprivileges, in South America, of being fromEuropean descent (one way or another, thatis, Creoles, Mestizas or Immigrants), take
advantage of their privilege to join thestruggles carried on by progressive Indiansand progressive Afro-South and CaribbeanAmericans. I am not “representing orspeaking for them (Indians and Afro-de-scendent).” “They” have been speaking forthemselves for centuries. And of course, noone will accuse me of representing orspeaking for them when the “them” inquestion are Jews or Islamic. I use semiot-ics, discourse analysis and literary theoryas a tool to deal with the problem I just out-lined. I am not using semiotics as a“method” to dissect “racism” as somethingthat is outside of myself and that I can“study” through my disciplinary identifi-cation. I am not hiding myself under theclothing of disciplinary objectivity, as if dis-ciplinary formations where not infected bythe modern racial matrix or were epistemicformations outside of it.
I am here inverting the process and thisinversion is indeed my methodology: theproblem at hand is infected already by theracial matrix and there is no way to hidefrom this infection in any discipline (semi-otics, sociology, political science, biology,bio-technology) and pretend that “racism”and “human being” or “humanity” can bedescribed and explained from the uncon-taminated eyes of God (theology) or eyes ofReason (egology). Furthermore, disciplinesare a surrogate for religious and ethnicidentities. Disciplinary identities areformed under the principle of objectivity,neutrality, reason without passion, mindwithout interference of affects, etc. Disci-plinary identities are formed on the basis ofa set of beliefs posited as detached from in-dividual experiences and subjective config-urations. However, disciplinary identitiesare no less identities than religious or eth-nic ones.
From the sixteenth century on,epistemic and ontological constructions ofracism had two major devastating conse-quences: the economic and legal/politicaldispensability of human lives. Dispensable
5
By ‘modern/colonial’ I refer to the Euro-pean, philosophical and political concept of mo-dernity, countered by dissenting historiesplacing coloniality as the missing half of the sto-ry. Moreover, when I say ‘imperial/colonial’ Irefer to both sides of the equation, imperial/co-lonial. Although modern imperialism (that is,Western capitalist empires) without colonies hasbeen in place since the nineteenth century (e.g.,England in South America and England and theUS in China since the Opium War), there are nocapitalist Western empires without
coloniality
.Thus, by imperial/colonial I mean
imperiality/co-loniality
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lives were and are either assumed (natural-ized “feelings”) or established by decree(laws, public policies). Two human com-munities that paid the price of economicand political devaluation of human liveswere enslaved Africans from the sixteenthto the eighteenth century and German Jewsin the twentieth century. Both histories aremy own history as a human being; disre-garding whether I am Black, Jewish or Ar-gentine “from European descent.”However, as an Argentine from Europeandescent I cannot be oblivious to the fact thatthe two communities in question where en-slaved Africans and German Jews. Why so?When, by who, and how was such cosmol-ogy put in place and why did the cosmol-ogy in question “constructed” enslavedAfricans and German Jews as undesirable,dispensable or unvalued human lives?
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My understanding of anti-Semitismand the Holocaust comes from my under-standing of the racial matrix of the mod-ern/colonial world. More specifically, itcomes from my understanding of dispens-able lives in a capitalist market-driveneconomy (particularly in the transforma-tion of monopolistic mercantilism to free-trade mercantilism before the IndustrialRevolution), coupled with the legal/politi-cal dispensability brought about by the for-mation of the modern-nation state inEurope. The first is the case of enslaved Af-ricans and the second of the murdered Jewsin the Holocaust.
Economic dispensability of humanlives is a practice, and subsequently a cate-gory, that did not exist before the sixteenthcentury. It was put in practice during themassive slave trade and exploitation of la-bor engendered by the European discoveryand exploitation of the New World. Dis-pensable economic lives have two comple-
mentary meanings. The life of an enslavedperson is dispensable because once a givenenslaved-body is no longer labor-produc-ing it can be replaced by another enslaved-body. Behind the naturalization of eco-nomic dispensability were all European At-lantic imperial/colonial, merchants as wellas the monarchic states (Portugal, Spain,France, England and Holland). OttobahCugoano gained his freedom in England, inthe second half of the eighteenth century(after being enslaved in the Caribbean) anddevoted several pages to the economic as-pect of slavery and the dispensability of hu-man lives in his
Thoughts and Sentiments onthe Evil of Slavery
(1976). One among manyobservations, strictly relevant to the eco-nomic aspect of dispensable lives, is the fol-lowing:
The vast carnage and murderscommitted by the British instiga-tors of slavery, is attended with avery shocking, peculiar, and al-most unheard of conception, ac-cording to the notion of theperpetrators of it: they either con-sider them as their own propertythat they may do with as theyplease, in life or death; or that thetaking away the life of a black manis of no more account than takingaway the life of a beast.
A very melancholy instance of thishappened about the year 1780 asrecorded in the courts of law; amaster of a vessel bound to theWestern Colonies, selected 132 of
the most sickly of the black slaves, andordered them to be thrown overboardinto the sea
,
in order to recover theirvalue from the insurers, as he had per-ceived that he was too late to get a goodmarket for them in the West Indies.(pp, 85; italics mine, WM)
Cugoano’s observation was echoed
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some 150 years later, by a Trinidadianscholar and politician, Eric Williams. Will-iams recasts the making of enslaved Afri-cans’ dispensable lives and re-framed thelegacy of the racial/colonial wound in acontext that was not visible at the time ofCugoano. For Cugoano, Christian ethicswas the weapon available to him. AndChristian ethics serve him to build twocomplementary arguments. One about thebarbarian attitudes he found in colonizersfrom Spain and Portugal to Holland,France and Britain. The other was theChristian struggle against the growth ofeconomic horizons that transformed hu-man subjectivities into predators that willgo to any length in order to obtain eco-nomic benefits. Williams instead had theMarxist analysis of capitalism to replace theethical dimension that Christianity offeredto Cugoano. However, both Cugoano andWilliams introduced a dimension that wasalien to both, Christianity and Marxism:they introduced the radical critic of racism,which means the radical critique of the im-perial/colonial foundation of capitalism.
A telling paragraph by Eric Williams(in his Capitalism and Slavery, 1944) bringstogether the bottom line of racism in themodern/colonial world and by the sametoken constitutes an opening to the de-colo-nial option that both critical Christianityand Marxism are missing. The de-colonialoption has been opened by subjects who ei-ther suffered directly the consequences ofracism (Cugoano) or its enduring legacy(Williams):
One of the most important conse-quences of the Glorious Revolutionof 1688 and the expulsion of theStuarts was the impetus it gave tothe principle of free trade. In 1698the Royal African Company lost itsmonopoly and the rights of a freetrade in slaves was recognized as afundamental and natural right ofEnglishmen. In the same year the
Merchant Adventurers of Londonwere deprived of their monopolyof the Muscovy Company that wasabrogated and trade to Russiamade free. Only in one particularrespect did the freedom accordedin the slave trade differ from thefreedom accorded in othertrades—the commodity involvedwas man (Williams, [194] 1994, 32).
Slavery, as a particular form of exploi-tation of labor, is consubstantial to capital-ism. While slavery in the form it acquired inthe economy of the Atlantic since the six-teenth centuries officially came to an endduring the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury, it never ended in reality. On the onehand, not only did people from African de-scent continue to be enslaved; when theywere not, they continued to be racializedand marginalized from society. On theother hand, a new form of slavery devel-oped until today. More so, what neverended was the commerce of human bodiesand, today, the commerce of human organs(Waldby 2006). Dispensable lives are thosethat become indispensable when they be-come commodities.6
It so happened that human agents whocontrolled knowledge and money had theauthority (not necessarily the power) toclassify and manage sectors of the humanpopulation. Their authority was an invisi-ble structure that was nevertheless im-printed on their bodies and minds. Thatinvisible structure has been described as“the colonial matrix of power” in its syn-chronic as well as diachronic dimensions.
6 The obvious connections between en-slaved Africans in the early imperial/colonialAtlantic period and enslaved and exploitedwomen, today, have made even the editorialpage of the New York Times. See Bob Hebert,“Today's Hidden Slave Trade” at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/opinion/27herbert.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/P/Prostitu-tion&oref=slogin.
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The colonial matrix of power provided andprovides legitimacy to constant processesof racialization decreeing human lives dis-pensable under the progressive and neverending face of economic growth and capitalaccumulation. For that reason, capitalismwith a human face is either an honest uto-pia or a perverse lie. Good intentions to endpoverty are misleading in the sense that thevery concept of poverty was invented andintroduced in the rhetoric of modernity tohide the fact that the poor are indeed livesthat are dispensable and as such they are ei-ther discarded or when necessary made in-dispensable as labor force and consumers(The Economist, August 2007, the New Mid-dle Class in Latin America).7
Another example, among many, are theHealth Care Centers in the U.S. The NewYork Times (Sunday, September 23, 2007)reported the story of Habana Health Carein Tampa Florida. In 2002 the HabanaHealth Care was purchased by a private in-vestment firm which bought, around thesame period, another 48 Health Care Cen-ters in the country. “Efficiency” and “Man-agement” were put at work. There was animmediate personnel reduction; costs indaily life of patient’s needs were also effi-ciently reduced. The cost the families of thepatient paid was maintained. Conse-quently, patients receive less and less atten-tion, several died as a consequence ofcareless attention, while the private inves-tors increased their economic benefits.President George W. Bush was reported asdefending the privatization of Health Care:“Democratic leaders want to put morepower in the hand of government by ex-panding federal healthcare programs. It’sso incremental a step towards government-run healthcare for every American.” He
added that federal programs would lead to“a European style government-run healthcare” (Financial Times, World News, on Fri-day September 21, 2007). If you put to-gether the government-run “war” in Iraqand the government washing-hands onhealthcare, you have two outstanding ex-amples of dispensability of human lives inbenefit of corporate-run economy and poli-tics supporting it. It is also another good ex-ample of “efficiency in management” toreduce cost and to increase benefits on thedispensability of human lives. Thus, thebrutal transformation of slavery in the six-teenth century and the Jews’ Holocaust inthe twentieth century are two outstandingcases of the “naturalization” of dispensablelives in a society in which reducing costsand increasing production and accumula-tion of wealth go hand in hand with politi-cally saving communities from the“danger” menacing it (e.g., communists,Jews, terrorists, immigrants, you name it).These are the final horizons of salvationand the reason for living.
III. DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES: COLONIALITY OF KNOWELDGE AND OF BEINGS
Behind the history of slavery in the for-mation of the Atlantic economy, the foun-dation of capitalist economy and, later on,of the nation-state, there was somethingmajor, as I have tried to suggest. Slaverypracticed on African bodies was the tip ofthe iceberg of a most fundamental perver-sity: human beings making human livesdispensable and transforming them intocommodities. Five centuries later, NorbertWiener saw the dangers in the domain oftechnology when he adverted to “the hu-man use of human beings” (Wiener 1949).He was writing on the edge of the JewishHolocaust. While Africans were the firstvictims of the economic side of imperialsubjectivity, the Jews were the first victims
7 A good account of the “invention of eco-nomic poverty” (different from the religioussense of “poverty of spirit”) was provided byKarl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Polit-ical and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston:Beacon Press, 1944, pp. 35-58.
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of the modern state. Human lives becamedispensable in the domain of the economyand of the state—that is to say, as technolo-gies for controlling economy and authoritytwo spheres of the colonial matrix of powerlinked to racism and patriarchy.
Hannah Arendt provided a detailedanalysis revealing the dispensability of hu-man lives in the sphere of the political(Law, the State). Arendt’s analysis is at oncehistorical and conceptual. Historically, ittraces the avatars of the Jews, in Europe, af-ter they were expelled from Spain at theend of the fifteenth century. Although I’mnot claiming that all Jews in Germany andPoland that were victims of the Holocaustwere descendent from those expelled fromSpain, I do claim a direct link between theSpanish Inquisition, the expulsion of theJews, and the Holocaust. They are all logi-cally linked to the colonial matrix of power;they are all different manifestations of thelogic of coloniality. That the Holocaust can-not be explained through the history of Eu-rope only, as has been perceived byMartinican poet, essayist and activist AiméCésaire. Not only that it cannot be ex-plained through the history of Europe butthat, on the contrary, the Holocaust “re-flected” on Europe itself what Europeanmerchants, monarchs, philosophers and of-ficers of the State did in the colonies. Han-nah Arendt also perceived the connectionsbetween the Holocaust and European colo-nization of South Africa, but her view wasstill “centrifugal” (looking from Europeoutward) while Césaire shifted the geogra-phy of understanding and made his obser-vation centripetal (looking from outwardtoward Europe).
Césaire (like Cugoano and Williams),narrates, analyses and conceptualizes colo-niality at the intersection of the historicallegacies of African slavery and Western cat-egories of thought while Arendt does it atthe intersection of the historical legacies ofJewish people and Western categories ofthought. However, Jews and Africans are
differently located in the ethno-racial clas-sification in the modern/colonial worldbased on Christian Theology and SecularEgology. In both cases, nevertheless, theconceptual analysis is embedded in thememory of a community of people de-graded or suspected from the official rheto-ric and sensibility controlling authority,economy and, above all, the principles ofknowledge (e.g., epistemology). This iswhat Césaire had to say, being in France af-ter WWII and close to the impact of the Ho-locaust. He suggested a detailed analysis ofthe steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerismsince he (Césaire) suspected that suchstudy will reveal that,
…the very distinguished, very hu-manistic, very Christian bourgeoisof the twentieth century that, with-out being aware of it, he has a Hit-ler inside him, that Hitler inhabitshim, that Hitler is his demon, that ifhe rails against him, he is being in-consistent and that, at bottom,what he cannot forgive Hitler for isnot the crime in itself, the crimeagainst man, it is not the humiliationof man as such, it is the crime againstthe white man, the humiliation ofthe white man, and the fact that heapplied to Europe colonialist proce-dures which until then had been re-served exclusively for the Arabs ofAlgeria, the “coolies” of India, andthe “niggers” of Africa (pp. 36; ital-ics mine, WM).
We should add the Indigenous, Native,Fourth Nations, Aboriginals of Americasfrom Chile to Canada, Australia and NewZealand. As for the analysis that Césaireimagined and suspected will reveal whathe described in the paragraph above, wasperhaps provided—indirectly—by ClaudiaKoonz’s magisterial The Nazi Conscience(2003). Koonz observes that
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What surprised Jewish Germansduring this period was not the cru-elty of kleptocrats, fanatics, andmalcontents, but the behavior offriends, neighbors, and colleagueswho were not gripped by devotionto Nazism… Germans who, in1933, were ordinary Western Euro-peans had become in 1939, any-thing but. (2003, pp 11-12)
The telling lesson of Césaire’s suspi-cion and Koonz’s scholarly conclusion ishow subjectivities have been formed underthe naturalization of dispensability of hu-man lives in the frame of the colonial ma-trix of power. During the period of heavyslave trade lives made dispensable for eco-nomic reasons implied that the people in-volved in slave trade or benefiting directlyor indirectly from it, did not subjectivelycare. And if they did not care it was becauseeither they accepted that Africans were notquite human or did not care because theywere getting used to accepting the fact thatthere are human lives who are just as dis-pensable as human beings even thoughnecessary as workers, be they enslaved,servants or employed at minimum wageand without health insurance, etc.
In the Holocaust (in which the mainvictims where Jews although other “irregu-lar” people and citizens were also consid-ered dispensable—gypsies as well as“Aryan citizens” alleged to have damagedgenes or homosexual inclinations, shared aheritage, language and culture with theirtormentors), were declared a “problem” tobe solved (see chapter on Du Bois, titled“What Does It Mean to be a Problem?”, byLewis Gordon in his Existentia Africana,Routlege, 2000,). To solve the problem itwas necessary to invent strategies (technol-ogies as we say today) to eradicate themfrom the community, to make them non-cit-izens, to deprive them of all citizenshiprights and once they were converted to“things” (but not into “commodities”), to
exterminate them.Hannah Arendt offered the first con-
ceptualization, to my knowledge, of a situ-ation in which human lives becomedispensable when they are stripped of thelegal web that links people to the State, thatis, that makes people citizens. Like Césaire,who saw the problems in Europe from hisexperience of colonial histories, Arendt sawthe problems in Africa and Asia from herexperience as a Jew in Germany. That iswhy Arendt’s view is centrifugal while Cé-saire is centripetal: geo-politics of knowl-edge is crucial to delink (or to decouple)from imperial assumptions that categoriesof knowledge are one and uni-versal; thatis, knowledge is and should be centrifugal.
First of all, Arendt elaborates on thephilosophical implications and shortcom-ings of the Rights of Man. Writing while theUniversal Declaration of Human Rightswas not yet stamped, Arendt’s reflection ison the “Declarations of the Rights of Manand of the Citizens” that followed theFrench Revolution but was preceded by the“Bill of Rights” in late seventeenth centuryEngland and by “the Rights of the People”in sixteenth century Spain. These, however,naturally, are out of Arendt’s horizon. Inany case, her analysis of the Rights of Manis strictly offered at a time when the Uni-versal Declaration was being written whileshe was completing her book. Arendt per-ceives insightfully that “man, and the peo-ple” have been taken out of God’s tutelageand placed under the frame of Man: “Thepeople’s sovereignty (different from that ofthe prince)—was not proclaimed by thegrace of God but in the name of Man, sothat it seemed only natural that the “in-alienable” rights of man would find theirguarantee and become an inalienable partof the right of the people to sovereign self-government” (Arendt 1948, 291).
Arendt makes clear the link betweenthe Rights of Man and the emergence of na-tion-states in Europe, after the French Rev-olution which has been relegated as a
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forerunner in most recent Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights. What are the con-nections between both? Arendt points outthat:
The full implication of this identifi-cation of the rights of man with therights of peoples in the Europeannation-state system, came to lightonly when a growing number ofpeople and peoples suddenly ap-peared whose elementary rightswere as little safeguarded by theordinary functioning of nation-states in the middle of Europe asthey would have been in the heartof Africa. The Right of Man, afterall, had been defined as “inalien-able” because they were supposedto be independent of all govern-ment; but it happened that the mo-ment human beings lacked theirown government and had to fallback upon their minimum rights,no authority was left to protectthem and no institution was will-ing to guarantee them. (1948, 292)
Thus, the Rights of Man and of citizen-ship came together. One of the dramaticconsequences (particularly today for immi-grants in Europe and the US) is that lack ofcitizenship implies lack of protection. Thereare no instances in the Universal Declara-tion to protect people who are not citizensor who have been deprived of their citizen-ship. Stripped out of their citizen’s rights,citizens become “legally naked,” bare livesas Arendt (and more recently Giorgio Ag-amben) conceptualizes it. Thus, dispens-able lives are such either for economicreasons (commodity) or legal-state reasons(bare life). Multiplication of these two basic“technologies of death” can be traced geo-politically in Africa, Asia, South Americaand, lately, by US outside of the country: inGuantánamo and Abu Ghraib.
At the time of writing her book Arendt
still believed that “Never before had theRights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by theFrench and the American revolutions as thenew fundament for civilized societies, beena practical political issue” (pp. 293). Theproblem here is a generalized one mainlyamong scholars and intellectuals whosesensibilities and subjectivities have beenshaped by their dwelling in countrieswhere the Glorious, the American and theFrench revolutions took place. NoticeArendt’s unconscious move: she mentionsfirst the French and then the American rev-olutions. Why? The chronological order hasbeen displaced by the unconscious hierar-chical structure of coloniality of knowledgeand of being: within imperial internal dif-ferences, France (and German and En-gland) comes first and the US in secondplace. Racism is pervasive, it operates at alllevels. Furthermore, Arendt seems to beoblivious or unaware that Rights of thePeople (Ius Gentium) became a practical po-litical issue in the sixteenth century withthe European “discovery” and invention of“Indians” in the New World—another si-lence produced by the coloniality of knowl-edge and, in a way, a manifestation ofinternal epistemic racism, to which Imman-uel Kant has significantly contributed:Spain, for Kant, as later for Hegel, belongedto Europe’s South.
The history of “Rights” (of People, ofMan and of Citizen, Human Rights) is con-substantial to and constitutive of the colo-nial matrix of power. Such a statementwould be endorsed, today, by liberal think-ers and journalists writing in The FinancialTimes (http://www.newamerica.net/pub-lications/articles/2007/humanitarian_action_can_mask_imperial_agenda_5832). Arendt is correct in assertingthat the Rights of Man and of Citizens, inthe history of Europe since the GloriousRevolution (for her, the American and theFrench revolutions), is part and parcel ofthe nation-state building. What is missingin the picture is that British, American and
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French versions of nation-state buildinghave been made possible by the Colonialrevolution initiated by Spanish and Portu-guese monarchies in the sixteenth century.The Colonial revolution installed, in theNew World, monarchic managements ofthe colonies by displacing and marginaliz-ing the existing orders in the New World(Maya, Inca, Aztec) while disrupting (byextricating people from their communities)the existing order in Africa. Arendt per-ceived, however, that from the Rights ofMan to the “the recent attempts to frame anew bill of human rights” (pp. 293; she isreferring to the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights being drafted while she wasfinishing the manuscript) there was stillsomething slippery and hazardous in that:
[…] no one seems able to definewith any assurance what thesegeneral human rights, as distin-guished from the rights of citizens,really are. Although everyoneseems to agree that the plight ofthese people consists precisely intheir loss of the Rights of Man, noone seems to know which rightsthey lost when they lost these hu-man rights. (pp. 293)
For Arendt the historical situation shewitnessed in Europe, between 1930 and thelate 1940, was unprecedented. Unprece-dented was not the fact that many peoplelost their homes, “but the impossibility offinding a new one” (pp. 293)—a historicalsituation that prompted Arendt to compareit with slavery. And this is what she has tosay about slavery:
Slavery’s crime against humanitydid not begin when one people de-feated and enslaved its enemies(though of course this was badenough), but when slavery becamean institution in which some menwere “born” free and others slave,
when it was forgotten that it wasman who had deprived his fellowmen of freedom, and when thesanction for the crime was attribut-ed to nature.
Yet in the light of recent events it ispossible to say that even slaves stillbelonged to some sort of humancommunity; their labor was need-ed, used and exploited, and thiskept them within the pale of hu-manity. To be a slave was after all tohave a distinctive character, a placein society—more than the abstractnakedness of being human and noth-ing but human (pp. 297; italics mine)
“Nakedness of being” (also “bare life”is another expression used by Arendt andpicked up by Italian philosopher GiorgioAgamben), then, is not just the condition oflosing specific rights, “but the loss of a com-munity willing and able to guarantee anyrights whatsoever…the calamity which hasbefallen every-increasing numbers of peo-ple” (pp. 297). Arendt concludes then that,
Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without los-ing his essential quality as man, hishuman dignity. Only the loss of poli-ty itself expels him from humanity.(pp. 297; italics mine)
We arrive here at the crux of the matter:dispensable lives and bare lives. Bare livesare the consequences of legal-political rac-ism at work in and for the control of author-ity. Thus, the concept of citizenship fulfilledthat role and insured the authority of theState to keep people in and out of it. Citi-zenship is a legal-administrative entity thatwas con-fused with the nationality of theperson with his or her citizen number. Forthat reason, undesirable nationals (in thiscase German Jews), could be deprived oftheir citizen number because of their na-
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tionality; being Jewish was not exactly be-longing to a given religion but to a givenethnicity. Those who were born free buthad the bad luck of being born in lan-guages, religions, histories, memories, andstyles of life that were not the norm of agiven nation-state (say, Spain, France orGermany), may run into trouble. And theHolocaust was an extreme and dramaticexercise of the state controlling the na-tion(s).
Dispensable lives are instead the conse-quences of the racist foundation of eco-nomic capitalist practices: cost reductions,financial gains, accumulation to re-invest tofurther accumulation, are economic goalsthat put human lives in second place. Rac-ism is a necessary rhetoric in order to deval-uate, and justify, dispensable lives that areportrayed (by hegemonic discourses) asless valuable. Once again, the bottom lineof racism is devaluation and not the color ofyour skin. The color of your skin is just amarker used to devaluate. Thus, humanlives as commodities and the fact that slaverytransforms human being into commodities,means that they did not just lose their rightsbut they lost their humanity. At the otherend, the concept of citizenship served a sim-ilar regulatory function for controlling pop-ulation. Thus, it is not only the loss of polityitself that expels him (Man) from humanity, asArendt has it. Enslaved Africans have beennot expelled but pulled out from their com-munity. It is shortsighted, and self-serving,for Arendt to say that “yet in the light of re-cent events it is possible to say that evenslaves still belonged to some sort of humancommunity” (pp. 297), and to place bare lifeand the Holocaust above dispensable lives,human lives transformed into commodi-ties.
Thus, both crimes against humanity—dispensable and bare lives—are ingrainedin the very logic of coloniality. Certain livesbecome dispensable in racist rhetoric to jus-tify economic control, chiefly exploitationof labor and appropriation of natural. Lives
are dispensable when expelled from human-ity not because the loss of polity but becausethey are pulled out of their community (en-slaved Africans yesterday, young womenand children today) to become commodi-ties. Lives become bare in racist rhetoricthat justifies national homogeneity andideal citizens. In the first case, commodity ispreferable to humanity; in the second citi-zenship is preferable to humanity. Thus, wehave here epistemic racism at its best,working toward controlling economy andauthority—two pillars of the modern/colo-nial world which is also the world of impe-rial capitalism (i.e., the Ottomans could bedescribed as imperial but certainly not asimperial capitalism) and Western Christianmonarchies and Western secular nation-states.
This is the moment to remember AiméeCésaire’s view of the Holocaust. Whatcounted for Césaire was “the application ofcolonialist procedures” to the “white man.”“Colonialist procedures” had been in-vented and implemented on people classi-fied as inferior or out-cast—closer toanimals than to Man or unbelievers, pa-gans, derailed by the Devil on uncivilized.Five centuries after the colonial matrix ofpower has been put in place and imple-mented in relation to non-Europeans, itwent back to Europe like a boomerang. Butthis time not so much in terms of economyand the transformation of human lives intocommodities, but in terms of the state andthe law.
Dispensable lives and bare lives aresubsumed—in the language of de-colonialprojects that I engage in here—as two di-mensions of the coloniality of being. Youhave to have the power of decision and ac-tion to be able to extract people from theircommunity and sell them as a piece of fur-niture and/or to expel them from yourcommunity even if they were, like you,German citizens but Jewish nationals in-stead of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche).Both have in common to be a consequence
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of epistemic imperial racism.8 In order tocarry on such projects, you have to be ableto make human beings to feel that they arenot quite human like you, either becausethey are a commodity (or exploited like an-imals) or because they are made into illegalor criminals that do not deserve to be in thepolity of citizens. Briefly, common to boththe economic legacy of slavery and the po-litical/legal legacy of the Holocaust, is theepistemic racism of the modern world: thecoloniality of knowledge. The coloniality ofbeing is a consequence of the coloniality ofknowledge (see above). Consequently, de-colonial projects have to start from the de-coloniality of knowledge and of being, inorder to de-colonize the economy and au-thority (e.g., political economy and politicaltheory).
Let’s now—after the clarificationsmade above regarding dispensable andbare lives—come back to Arendt’s alwaysinsightful observations. For Arendt slaverybecame a crime against humanity when itbecame “an institution in which some menwere ‘born’ free and others slave, when itwas forgotten that it was man who had de-prived his fellow-men of freedom, andwhen the sanction of the crime was attrib-
uted to nature” (pp. 297). The ethical andpolitical principle that freedom and sover-eignty consists in the “no right” for any hu-man being to enslave or disposes any otherhuman being of their rights, was one of thecrucial arguments of Ottobah Cugoano, inhis Thoughts and Sentiments about the Evil ofSlavery (1786). However, Cugoano’s argu-ment was out of the framework of Euro-pean political philosophy, the genealogy ofthought in which Arendt was dwelling. Cu-goano articulated de-colonial political phi-losophy but, as a Black, African ex-enslaved man, he did not have the ontolog-ical and epistemic privilege that wouldhave made his cause heard. The crux of thematter here is also that it is difficult to claimthe privilege of suffering, which is impliedin Arendt’s argument. Both Cugoano andArendt were arguing for the same humaninjustices and abuses against humans. Theywere doing it from the vantage points ofboth their language of political philosophy(Christian for Cugoano, secular for Arendt)and their own experiences as African sla-very and Jewish internal-colonial racializedsubjects. My subjectivity is not embeddedin African slavery or Jewish modern-colo-nial memories (since their expulsion fromthe Iberian Peninsula). But I want to joinforces with both arguments and, at thesame time, eliminate the claim of privileg-ing suffering, which Indigenous people inthe Americas, New Zealand and Australiaalso have. And of course we can extend thelist.
There are historical reasons in the for-mation and transformation of the modern/colonial world that made possible for Jewsin Europe to have access to education andto participation in the public sphere beforeracialized minorities in the colonies. Greatthinkers like Spinoza, Marx, Freud, theearly Frankfurt School, etc., were able toprotest in the political and epistemic do-mains. Africans and Afro-Caribbeans weredelayed in the process. W.E.B. Dubois, inthe US in the first half of the twentieth cen-
8 This specification is important. There is acommon argument that goes something likethis: Oh, well, after all Blacks (or Latinos/as, Na-tive Americans, Moslems, etc.) are also very rac-ist. Yes, it is often the case, and it has to beanalyzed. The starting point would be to distin-guish between imperial and subaltern forms ofracism, and go from there: if there are forms ofBlack and Latinas racism, be assured that theyare not imperial!!! Imperial racism goes beyond(although it embraces) the particular nation-state (of Christian Monarchy of the sixteenth toeighteenth centuries). There is a double dimen-sion in imperial racism, which starts in the colo-nies and reverts toward the national imperialterritory. We are witnessing this phenomenontoday with the immigration in the EuropeanUnion and the U.S. And certainly, the Holocaustwas part of it. Thus, the pertinence of Césaire’sobservation inverting the directionality ofArendt’s analysis. “Inverting” here means shift-ing the geography of reason, and thinking ana-lectically instead of dialectically or in uni-dimensional historical terms.
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tury and the great congregation of Africansand Afro-Caribbean thinkers aroundPrésence Africaine, in the fifties, launched apowerful collective discourse of whichCLR James, Aimé Césaire and FrantzFanon, among others, bear witness. Thehistorical reason is indeed the colonial/ra-cial matrix of power as it worked in differ-ent global (e.g., national/imperial)designs—from the Spanish Christian Em-pires to the British and French seculartransformations, to the post-colonial impe-rialism of the US. In the historical logic ofthe colonial matrix of power, indigenouspeople in the Americas, and Afro-descentsin the Spanish and Portuguese ex-colonies,where left behind people from Afro-de-scent in the French and British Caribbeanand in the U.S. The differential of coursecannot be explained by the degree of intel-ligence of the ethnicity involved, but by theracial-ontological and racial-epistemic dif-ferences implicit in imperial/global de-signs—who among the racializedpopulation, and why, had access to educa-tion? But it is explained also by the internalimperial difference: of the racialized popula-tion who had no choice but to learn the im-perial language, those who fell underFrench and English imperial rules (andlearned French or English) made a quickerand stronger intervention in the intellectualarena and in the politics of scholarship.
Let’s move on and see how dispensablelives in the economic colonial order joinbare lives in the political order of the na-tion-state.
IV. INTERNATIONAL LAW, LAND, DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES
Césaire’s perception of the Holocaust,quoted above, bringing together dispens-able and bare lives, provided the connec-tion between the economic order(dispensable lives, lives as commodity—e.g., enslaved Africans yesterday; today,
enslaved women, traffic of children, trafficof human organs, etc., or those sacrificed tothe economic and political order—e.g., in-vasion of Iraq) and the political order (e.g.,the Holocaust). In the economic order, hu-man beings are pulled out from their com-munity and transported as any othermerchandise. In the political order, humanbeings are expelled from their communityand left bare, to their own destiny (e.g., ref-uges) or eliminated (e.g., Jews, Gypsies).Césaire’s observation that the white man’sburden, in the Holocaust, was to endure thecrime against white people without neces-sarily noticing that Hitler was applying inEurope the same principles that Europeoriginally applied to their colonies (inAmerica, in Asia, in Africa), brings togetherdispensable and bare live. The-interconnec-tion between both comes together in West-ern cosmology in the history ofInternational Law.
International law is an invention of thesixteenth century to cope with the realitiesof an unexpected enlargement of the worldand the sudden awareness, for Europeanstate officers, merchants and intellectuals,of—for them—unknown people. Whilerecords of the Europeans’ bewildermentand effort to accommodate into Christiancosmology those who were not accountedfor in the Bible exist, records of Incas’s andAztecs’s equal bewilderment do notabound. In spite of the unbalanced archivalmaterial from both sides of the spectrum(the diversity of European’s reactions andresponses versus the diversity of Aztec’sand Inca’s reactions and responses), wecould confidently assert that both parties(in their diversity) tried to understand andaccommodate the stranger into their owncosmology. However, European’s imperialdesigns prevailed over the Incanate and theTlatoanate, and knowledge in Europeanlanguages (based on Greek and Latin) pre-vailed over knowledge in Indigenous lan-guages (Aymara, Quechua, Aztec,Tojolabal, Maya-Quiché, etc.). And with it,
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European subject and subjectivity took con-trol of the colonies pushing aside subjectiv-ities formed through centuries in Anáhuac,Tawantinsuyu and the Yucatan Penin-sula—coloniality of knowledge goes handin hand with coloniality of being and theformation of the colonial matrix of power.
Modern/colonial (e.g., from the Re-naissance to WWII) International law wasformulated first in the School of Salamanca.The debate on the distinction between IusNaturalis and Ius Gentium was a concern al-ready within Western Christians: the emer-gence of Christian Kingdoms (Spain,Portugal, France and England) contestedthe authority of the Pope and the legacies ofRoman Emperors. Ius Gentium, in Franciscode Vitoria, for example, was necessary tounite Western Christians’ dispensing at thesame time of an Emperor and the Pope as“rulers of the globe” (orbis). In the same Eu-ropean context, Juan Ginés de Sepúlvedapublished in 1529, exortación al EmperadorCarlos V para que, hecha la paz, con los prínci-pes cristianos, haga la Guerra contra los turcos.One of the central issues of the debate wasabout just and unjust wars. The key issuehere is that the debate was one sided: Otto-mans and Muslims had no say in the debatethat was from, by and about Christian “re-ligious security.” Muslims may have hadsomething to say regarding the war and vi-olence Christianity directed against them.When Juan Ginés de Seplveda extended hisexhortation to declare war against Indians,this was not because Indians were menac-ing Western Christians and invading Span-ish territories but, on the contrary, becauseIndians presented a difficulty for the peace-ful expansion of Christianity. Sub-SaharanAfricans were also not invited to the de-bate, even if the Portuguese had been in-vading their territory pulling out andenslaving a significant part of the popula-tion.
Modern/colonial international lawcame to light in the Christianity’s doublebind: to defend themselves in Western Eu-
rope and to justify their conquest of theNew World.
Francisco de Vitoria’s sustained reflec-tions on ius naturale (natural right) and iusgentium (people’s right/nation’s right) andhis concern with order as a way to achievejustice, were followed (without direct refer-ence) by Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenthcentury, in his reflections of perpetualpeace and cosmopolitanism. “Without di-rect reference” doesn’t imply that Kant wascheating or that he was a dishonest scholarthat plagiarized Vitoria. I am saying some-thing else: Vitoria and Kant are in the sameframe of mind, the same logic and subjec-tivity of modernity/coloniality and that issimply why Kant was concerned aboutsimilar issues two centuries after Vitoriaand that is why (although he could haveadopted a position closer to Sepúlveda orLas Casas) his view of things was closer toVitoria. Instead, Marx (also indirectly) fol-lowed in a Kantian-Hegelian world the po-sition adopted by Las Casas. And DonosoCortés, when he wrote Liberalismo, Social-ismo and Catolicismo (1852), followed thelegacies of Ginés de Sepúlveda and placedhimself vis-à-vis the legacies of Vitoria/Kant and Las Casas/Marx.
International Law is an integral part ofcoloniality: it legalizes the rhetoric of mo-dernity while simultaneously enforcing thelogic of coloniality. It was prompted by the“discovery” of unknown lands and un-known people; and by traffic of enslavedAfricans to the New World. In 1979, U.O.Umozurike, from the University of Nigeria,published a report on International Law andColonialism in Africa. The book was pub-lished by Nwamife Publisher Limited, inEnugu, Nigeria. Given the book-marketand the trade-names of European and USscholars and intellectual, the book did notget much attention, beyond a numericalminority interested in the topic. In the1990s Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, an Africanpolitical theorist based at John HopkinsUniversity, followed up on the issue re-
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viewing international law in the modern/colonial world from the histories of colonialAfrica and the colonial experience of Afri-cans. For the purpose at hand, here is alengthy paragraph that would help us inunveiling the interconnections between in-ternational law, dispensable and bare lives:
As a constituent element of West-ern culture, the law of nations hasbeen integral to a discourse of in-clusion and exclusion. In this re-gard, international law has formedits subject and objects through anarbitrary system of signs. As rheto-ric of identity, it has dependedupon metaphysical associationsgrounded on religious, cultural, orracial similarities and differences.The legal subject, for the most part,has been composed of a Christian/European self. In contrast, the Eu-ropean founders of the law of na-tions created an opposite image ofthe self (the other) as a legal object.They materialized this legal objec-tification of non-Europeansthrough a process of alterity. Theother has comprised, at once, non-European communities that Eu-rope has accepted as its mirror im-age and those it has considered tobe either languishing in a develop-mental stage long since surpassedby Europe or moving in historicalprogression toward the model pro-vided by the European self (Gro-vogui, 1996, 65).
The simultaneous epistemic process ofinclusion/exclusion, led first by Christiantheology, later on by philosophy and sci-ence, and lately by political economy sup-ported by political theory, of whichinternational law was and continues to be akey instrument, is at the historical founda-tion of the modern/colonial world, of mo-dernity/coloniality and of imperial
capitalism. Francisco de Vitoria in Sala-manca, Spain, in the mid sixteenth century;Hugo Grotius in the Netherland at the be-ginning of the seventeenth century; andSeraphin de Freitas, in Portugal, criticallyresponding to Hugo Grotious, constitutethree pillars of International Law in the his-torical foundation of the modern/colonialworld. Subjects whose subjectivities andsensibilities have not been formed by theEuropean memories of Greece and Rome,of Greek and Latin, and by its modern im-perial languages (Italian, Portuguese,Spanish, French, German and English), be-gan to be constructed, in the European dis-course of international law, as legal objects.“Legal objects” have been stripped of theirlanguage, religions, families, communities,sensibilities, memories—in sum, legal ob-jects became, for European internationallaw, not only bare but above all dispensablelives. If non-European people were and aretargets of commodification of human lives,they are also targets to be outlawed. As le-gal objects, non-European subjects had nosay in International Law, unless theyagreed with the terms stipulated by Euro-pean law-makers.
Let’s return now to Aimé Césaire.When he stated that Hitler had applied tothe White Man what Europeans had previ-ously created to deal with non-Europeanpeople (excepting the “mediators” whoplayed into the game of imperial rules,from the Africans who captured and soldother Africans to be enslaved, to more con-temporary industrial and politicians in ex-Third World countries who sell their soul toIMF or private corporations in the US.,France, Germany, Spain, etc., and opentheir pockets), international law was cer-tainly implied in his dictum: InternationalLaw that served to convert non-Europeansubjects into legal objects was now put atthe service of the nation-state in order to le-gally expel non-ethnic Germans from thenation-state. Césaire made this statement in1955. The statement (and his Discourse on
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Colonialism) clearly shifted the geographyof reason: international law was seen fromthe consequences of its implementation.Three years before, Carl Schmitt publishedThe Nomos of the Earth (1952), in which heclearly stated the Eurocentered nature ofInternational Law. Both statements, Cé-saire’s and Schmitt’s, occupied distinctiveseats in the geo-politics of knowledge.Schmitt was not concerned about the colo-nies and the colonial world in the process—during those years—of struggling for liber-ation, but with the crisis in Europe and,more particularly, of Germany. However,Schmitt had to take European colonies intoaccount. Césaire was not concerned withEurope and Germany, but with the colo-nized world and people converted into le-gal objects. However, he had to take Europeand Germany into account. De-colonialityof knowledge and of being starts from theshift that is illustrated in Césaire’s state-ment. And it follows by recognizing thecontribution, although partial, that Schmitthas made from the perspective and interestof Europe to critique Eurocentrism in inter-national law.
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
The larger frame in which the racialformation of the modern/colonial worldhas to be understood should take accountof the context of concurrent transforma-tions of Christianity and the emergence ofthe Atlantic economy—an economy of in-vestment and accumulation of wealth(wealth of nations for Adam Smith) that wecall “capitalism” (after Karl Marx). Thesetwo concurrent moments could be summa-rized as follows:
a) The Christian detachment betweenGod’s heaven and people’s earth; a de-tachment unfamiliar to co-existing “re-ligions” such as Judaism, Islam, andthe so-called (by Spaniards) “non-reli-
gions” of Aztecs and Incas in the NewWorld; and certainly not among Bud-dhist and Hindus;
b) “Secularization” was able to detachGod from Nature (which was unthink-able among Indigenous and Sub-Sa-haran Africans, for example; andunknown among Jews and Musilms).The next step was to detach, conse-quently, Nature from Man (e.g.,Frances Bacon’ Novum Organum, 1620).“Nature” became the sphere of livingorganisms to be conquered and van-quished by Man;
c) As Christian Theology became theprivileged and imperial locus enuncia-tionis, it prepared the terrain for twocomplementary articulation of racism,illustrated in the two triangles above.One was founded on Christianepistemic privilege over the two majorcompeting religions (Jews and Mus-lims), a privilege founded on the de-tachment (I mean detachment and notmerely a “distinction between the tworealms” which was common amongother religions, even among the non-re-ligions spirituality of Aztecs and Incas)between God’s heaven and people’searth. The other was founded on the“secularization of the theological de-tachment”: when the detachment be-tween God and Man becamesecularized in the detachment betweenNature and Man, then racializationwas located in the “natural” markers ofhuman bodies and “purity of blood”became the biological and naturalmarker (Indians, Blacks, Mestizas, Mu-latas) of what was before the marker ofreligious belief (Jews, Moors, Conver-sos, Moriscos);
d) The emergence of secular “Jeweness”in Eighteenth Century Europe trans-formed religious “Judaism”: the believ-er became, simultaneously, a citizen; acondition that was not open to other
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“religions.” One, because Muslims,Buddhists, Hindus or Incas, were notEuropean residents at the time and,second, it was the complicity betweenChristianity and secular Christian Eu-ropeans who managed to negotiate,maintaining imperial control, Christianbelievers with European secular citi-zens;
e) Last but not least, all of these wenthand in hand with the consolidation,during sixteenth and seventeenth cen-turies, of homo economicus imperiali. Ifhomo economicous, in the West, could betraced back to the thirteenth century,homo economicous imperiali, in the West,is without a doubt the transformationprompted by the economic change ofscale opened by the conquest of theNew World and the subsequent mas-sive exploitation of labor. Secular Jew-ness joined secular Euro-Americaneconomic practices (e.g., imperial capi-talism). The major consequence of thecomplicity between secular Jews andEuro-American economic and politicalpractice ended up in the constructionof the State of Israel—what Marc Ellisdescribes as “Constantine Jews.”
Anti-Semitism today is clearly a conse-quence of the historical collusion betweenWestern (neo) liberalism and secular capi-talism, backed up by Christianity, on theone hand, and Constantine Jews,” on theother.
