ABSTRACT
Yet, Lorde does not just challenge the logic of ‘military humanitarianism’ abroad (Weizman) while exposing simultaneous ‘unseen’ violence at home. Neither does she simply reveal the incompatibility of international Human Rights and grassroots social justice struggles, or its poor record of enactment on behalf of victims of atrocities, either. When she laments that ‘We are raped of our children/in silence’, and calls systemic violence a form of genocide, Lorde shows that fundamentally different understandings of violence, humanity, and rights across time and geopolitical spaces define the limits of our perception of violence and genocide, and that these, in turn, shape our political and legal responses to such human rights crises.4 While mass exterminations that demand humanitarian intervention underwrite hegemonic Human Rights, other kinds of brutality – acts of retribution for acts of decolonial, economic, and political disobedience; and violence, which is often systemic, ‘quiet’ (Lorde), or ‘slow’ (Rob Nixon),5 but still brutal in its targeting of queer communities, of people
of colour, or of the poor – are not seen as violence at all, and thus not acknowledged as needing a remedy through international legal instruments.
