BOOK REVIEW
JULIA SUÁREZ-KRABBE
Race, Rights, and Rebels
Alternatives to Human Rights and Development from the Global South
New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. 224 pp.
In this ambitious attempt to examine modern concepts of ‘human rights’ and ‘development,’ Julia Suárez-Krabbe gives a compelling case of what decolonial scholarship really means as an intellectual tradition in contemporary critical studies and critical political theory.
Suárez-Krabbe’s work, Race, Rights, and Rebels: Alternatives to human rights and development from the global south, is a scholarly exposition on how decolonial studies can be used to interrogate and reclaim the enunciations of ‘human rights’ and ‘development’ in the contemporary time. By locating the alternative sources in understanding these concepts, it uses ‘decolonial historical realism’ to discover and understand the struggles, negotiations, dispositions, relations, continuities, and even misappropriations that give meaning to the ordering of things with its underlying perceptions and meanings from the Mamos of the indigenous peoples in Sierra Nevada de Santa Mara (Colombian Caribbean).
The author, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, is an academic of culture and identity at Roskilde University (Denmark) and an associate researcher at the Center for Social Studies at University of Coimbra (Portugal).
As a scholar, most of her works deal with advancing decolonial perspective and framework to understand race, knowledge, identity, indigeneity, among other things. She is popular most especially with
the contemporary usage and elaboration of concepts such as ‘mestizaje,’
‘pluriversality,’ ‘death project,’ to name a few.
‘Decolonial’ scholarship is not really new in the larger ‘post- colonialism’ scholarly tradition of Critical Studies. ‘Post-colonialism’
first emerged as a response to the initial interrogation made by early intellectual giants, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, among others, of the coloniality of knowledge, power relations, dispositions, practices, and outcomes. ‘Decolonialism’ furthers the skepticism of post-colonialism by reclaiming the ‘coloniality’ of things or allowing the colonized agency to be aware of his capturing and inciting this agency to act upon this ordering of things. This necessitates the discovery of not just the historicity of the struggles, triumphs, negotiations, adjustments, and articulations that were made between and among the colonizers, colonized, and those who are somewhere in between. It also demands a sense of change in the status quo.
The book begins with the discussion of the symbiotic relationship between ‘bad faith’ and the ‘death project.’ ‘Bad faith,’ as used by Suárez-Krabbe, comes from the conceptualization of Lewis Gordon in 1999 to pertain to the “choosing to believe and defend comfortable lies about other groups of people and about one’s own group” (2). Colonial power operates by concealing and defending its own ontological truth in the society. ‘Death project,’ on the other hand, speaks of the
“exercise of violence in coloniality, which targets the actual processes of life and the conditions for existence” (3). For Suárez-Krabbe, this relationship is an expression of coloniality in making sense and activating at the same time the concepts of ‘human rights’ and ‘development.’ In the first chapter, one can easily notice the depth in relating the notion of coloniality to the ontological and epistemological clashes between the ‘defensive struggles’ and ‘offensive struggles’ in the academe; the complex interaction of the spatial and temporal dimensions of reason in the way we comprehend and understand the problems and struggles of the other; the ambiguities of the colonized, as well as the mestizaje, creoles, and blacks, as the personified othered; the use of ‘decolonial historical realism’ as an approach to historicize the colonialism of the other; and, the encapsulation of the inquiry on colonialism through the juxtaposition of power and globalization.
Suárez-Krabbe elaborates the temporalities of reason in the first four chapters of the book. In her discussions, she clearly articulates the nuances of the interruptions that were made by the arrival of colonizers in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the sixteenth century and the
eventual activation of symbolic control up to the eighteenth century through the examination and interrogation of the efforts to localize globalism by the ontological and epistemological silencing of the peoples of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: Archuaco, Kankuamo, Kogi, and Wiwa. In these discussions, the readers will surely be impressed with how she was able to connect the nuances of race, on the one hand, and human rights and development, on the other, through the
‘six processes of extermination’ that led to the systemic negation of
‘rights’ across the world: widespread witch-hunts, Al-Andalus crisis, Jewish expulsion, American conquest, slave trade, exclusion of the Roma population (51-58). ‘Rights,’ according to Suárez-Krabbe, were conceptualized to activate the homogenizing project over ‘the othered’
peoples. In describing the “Villadolid debates,” for instance, she claims that it was:
centered on the question about the humanity of the indigenous peoples where the discussions pertained to criteria for rationality, private property, nearness to nature, religion, and economic organization. Indeed, the above recounting of the processes of extermination that took place in this early point in the history of coloniality provides the necessary contextual elements to understand how the law is tightly connected to the legitimization and exercise of appropriation and violence to the benefit of the colonizers;
the period of first modernity. (58).
In framing ‘development,’ one can easily sense the theoretical consistency of the work in the effort to probe the hegemonic globalized localism of the death project as seen in the ontological and epistemological values and biases among the contemporary development frameworks, paradigms, and even institutions. According to her, rights and development are conjointly connected since issues on rights, freedom, progress, among others are often used as standards as well as conditions toward development (98).
In the last four chapters of the book, Suárez-Krabbe expounds the other half of her discussion by making sense of how decolonization can work in and through Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. First, scholars will clearly observe this novelty in decolonial studies through her focus on the use of ‘andar’ (as borrowed from Luis Guillermo Vasco) or the effort to move, proceed, or to act on the part of the academic or scholar
in doing scholarly work on colonialism. This means that decolonial methodologies should be guided by the disposition to change and not to be held by the ontological and epistemological grip of hegemonic control of the coloniality (130-132).
Second, in debunking the singularized notion of humanity and the bias toward treating ‘the othered’ as a mere subject of inquiry, one can really spot the distinction of her work for the conceptualization of ‘common-unity’ as a way to understand the sense of equilibrium or perfect harmony or peace among the people of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and its surroundings. In this part of her discussion, the usage of the Mamos’ abstraction of reality and the articulation of the Law of Origin, among other things, gave a clear hearing or sincere listening of the silenced reality of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta by allowing the following core senses to be known: ‘freedom’ (which is the state of unity among all created by The Mother) (137-138), ‘interlocution’
(which is the effort to speak between equals) (138), the male Serankwa (as law and authority) and female Seynakun (as management and territoriality) (143-146).
Lastly, with the Law of Origin, Suárez-Krabbe distinctly makes a solid claim about the viability of an alternative to the dominant notions of human rights and development that perhaps future activists and ‘rebels’ might use in engaging contemporary political issues. As mentioned in the book:
The Law of Origin is an alternative to human rights and development. It involves freedom as practice of common- unity in the material realm, and this practice requires respect and love; that is, the practice of freedom requires justice. The Law of Origin requires a way of being in time, as well as a way of thinking together in common-unity. This is impossible to achieve if we solely rely on the frameworks of thinking intrinsic to hegemonic human rights and development.
Within these dominant frameworks, the tools available for change are limiting; they incarcerate the future. (151).
In summary, the book is indeed an ambitious attempt to revisit and interrogate our contemporary biases and prejudices toward
‘human rights’ and ‘development.’ With the effort to understand and give voice to the people of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, it has really problematized some of the fundamental ontological and
epistemological biases of modern thinking. For contemporary political theorists and critical thinkers, the book really gives an interesting articulation of decolonial scholarship through the privileging of alternative understanding of these concepts in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
ARJAN P. AGUIRRE
Ateneo de Manila University
