Our North is the South: A New Human Rights Agenda?

by César Augusto Baldi

It has become more or less acceptable in the critical field, when working with contributions from Latin America, to use the map created by the Uruguayan Joaquín García in 1943 that shows the South facing upwards. It is not often recalled that, already in 1154, Al Idrisi had anticipated the convention of placing the South of maps at the North, not only in relation to Latin America but also, cartographically, in relation to Mercator and his famous projection. 

The fact of being born in Ceuta brings to mind that this remains as a colonial enclave of Spain, and having died in Sicily, this should indicate that to date Italy also had a Muslim presence. It doesn’t seem coincidental, then, that Islamic heritage is constantly being repressed, even in “Theories on the South” that were popular in recent years.

In fact, “theories on the South”, are still a debated field and can have context in Said, as is generally known, as well as in works that existed ten years previously, in Anour Abdel-Malek, an Egyptian. And even in Brazil, there is the pioneering work of, for example, Guerreiro Ramos, a Black man from Bahia, which examines the need for a sociology that is not “canned,” but relevant to the national reality. At times, paradoxically, the North was searched for seeds of theories that were present, but ignored by the canon, in the South itself.

According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the South is a metaphor for suffering caused by sexism, capitalism and colonialism; in the work of Raewynn Connel, it is a moment of peripheralization of knowledge, that is, the recognition that the international “scientific” agenda also works on the assumption that “data” collection is done in the colonies, but the theorizing is done in the mainlands.

It is the South, according to her, and Southern theory, whereas according to Boaventura it is “epistemologies of the South”; to this end, for the trans author (Connel), the South has specific locations —Latin America, India, Africa, Iran, and, paradoxically, Australia. The logic, then, is to divide up colonialism by the effects on scientific production. The South, for Connel, is about relationships of authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, support, appropriation between institutions, intellectuals in both the city and the peripheral areas. This is not the time to be critical of such positions. It often happens that in the South’s eagerness to obtain what the North has produced, the contributions of Aníbal Quijano are overlooked by the modern-colonial process and the creation of a theoretical matrix beginning in 1492, with the invention, simultaneously, of America, Europe, and, then, the racialization of Indians, Blacks, and Moors in the same process.

It would be interesting to create new colonial categories to describe the prevailing processes and theories. This is something that Spinoza, who was born after Holland ceased being a Spanish colony, did with a concept of God that, being the only one, ends up being a new vision that is completely distinct from the Jewish tradition. It is not by chance that his discussions on natura naturans and natura naturanda were controversial.

Perhaps Spinoza was post-colonial avant la lettre who needed to be recovered. More than this: if Critical Theory, according to the Frankfort School, was practically produced by Jewish intellectuals and considering the increasing context of religious fundamentalists, it would not be a hypothesis to revisit the knowledge that was overlooked, silenced and suppressed by this theory, especially in Benjamin, who, based on an unorthodox Marxist view, also worked on the theme of religion  and messianism, is this too difficult to be accepted by critical theory even today?

In any event, it is interesting to note that concern over the non-imperial South often overlooks scientific production “South of North.” The Parti des Indigènes de la République [Indigenous Party of the Republic] in France, is an example of a theoretical, political, and epistemological movement anchored in anticolonial struggles and immigration, critical not only of the racialization of Muslims and Blacks, but also the survival of colonial structures in France.  Therefore, they are based neither on Marx, or the Enlightenment, but, rather, on the “values of the Republic.” It is not coincidental that they attribute great importance to the works of Angela Davis and Malcom X, the latter being a Black man and Islamist, defender of the transnational struggle for dignity.

The same can be said for the invisibilization of Black Marxists in the Caribbean. This region not only set up coloniality (Hispaniola comprises two sides of the island that today is home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti), but remains as a geographical space made up of 17 countries and 11 foreign colonies. The work of the group headed by the Caribbean Philosophical Association merits recognition, in the sense of “creolizing” the canon, using Fanon, Glissant, Lamming, Césaire and others to rethink Hegel, Rousseau, etc. Perhaps Fanon’s less known works that were recently published could open up new themes for discussion. In Asia, many years ago, both Syed Alatas and Vineeta Sinha include, in sociological approaches, the contributions of Harriet Martineau, Rizal and Ibn Khaldun, demonstrating that sociology does not only have white “founding” fathers – Marx, Weber and Durkheim.

A new agenda for discussing human rights should be considered, starting with the discussions that these theories have created new fields of research. Some of these are highlighted here:

1. The discussions on methodology do not include, in practice, questions on race and gender for knowledge, subject-object relations, and they continue to understand, in “practice”, the subject as white, hetero and masculine. For no other reason than the difficulty, on the part of academia, to accept that blacks study racism, gays, and lesbians, LGBT issues, etc. The epistemological white, heterosexual, and masculine privilege is never questioned in other spheres of discussion.
2. Non-normative sexualities are still seen colonially in academia, giving them little attention as sexualities especially the forms of “transit” existent in colonial times, in the context of Abya Yala, and even today, as well as in religions of African origin. Horswell’s work (“Decolonizing the sodomite: queer tropes of sexuality in colonial Andean culture”) on the decolonization of the sodomite, is, on this point, a catalyst to this all-import discussion. Gender, is, then, non-normative sexualities that continue to be the great “South” in social sciences.
3. The need for discussion that Mbembe calls the “Politics of Viscerality:”new forms of resistance linked to the rehabilitation of the affections, emotions, passions. The new imaginaries of struggle seek the “rehabilitation of the body” and not merely presence “in public space”. For no other reason, as Rita Segato points out, new forms of violence are communicative in relation to bodies.
4. The proliferation of discussions on self-determination, democracy law, mutual support, assemblies, horizontality, in recent years, occurs simultaneously with the obscuring of the contributions made by anarchists and libertarians. The 15-M case is an example: The ascent of Podemos occurred at the same time that no one considered that both in this movement and in the fight against Francoism, the views of libertarian and anarchists had a strong substratum in Spain. What absences did this super-presence of Marxist line generate to fight against capitalism, sexism and racism? Remember the same in relation to Bolivia: The rise of the indigenous cannot be viewed separately from the strong anarchist presence between leaderships, something that has already been analyzed in the Workshop on Andean Oral History, by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Remember that Emma Goldmann already discussed human trafficking back in 1900, and Louise Michel, as Antoní Aguilló correctly points out, not only participated in the Paris Commune, but questioned the patriarchate and the colonial situation. Anarchism is still a South in human rights critical theories.
5. How bodies are constructed not only in sex-gender logic, but also as humans and non-humans and how this changes with new technologies is still a burgeoning field. The works of Butler, in relation to different forms of vulnerability identified issues that, in India, have already been tackled by Upendra Baxi.
6. How new oralities change scientific knowledge have still not received the attention it deserves in the field of human rights, which ignores indigenous, African and Islamic knowledge as being orals.
7. How the discussion on human rights is still associated with secularism and women’s liberation.
8. How discussions about human rights need to decolonize the concept of religion and secularism, something that that has been broached by Islamic feminists, to the extent that rethinking secularism as normative and a form of discipline and order, by the State, the religious presence of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. In Brazil, secularism continues, often seen as a separation of State and religion (in this case, mainly the Catholic Church) not realizing that this theoretical model does not take into consideration the significant presence of religions of African origin in the country.
9. The efforts of Alatas and Sinha merit special attention in the field of human rights, reclaiming endogenous theories in Latin America. These are not minor inputs that the canon has delegitimized or ignored in recent years: Abdias do Nascimento, Lélia González, Beatriz Nascimento, Clóvis Moura, Guerreiro Ramos and, in part, Ruy Mauro Marini and Vânia Bambirra.

A discussion on human rights must break the “steel cage” that the liberty-equality-fraternity triad, in reality an avatar of the French Revolution flag, left revived coloniality.

Dr César Augusto Baldi is advisor to the Brazilian Regional Federal Court 4th Region since 1989. His publications include “Direitos humanos na sociedade cosmopolita” [Human Rights in a Cosmopolitan Society] (Ed. Renovar, 2004) and “Aprender desde o Sul” [Learn from the South] (Ed. Forum, 2015).

Translated from Portuguese by D. Philips with additional edits by ‘Anonymous’.

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