ABSTRACT
Analyzing the debates that took place during the 1794 Paris Convention that abolished slavery in the colonies, after the visit of the Black Jacobins from St Domingue, I confront two competing universalities seeking to determine “the human”: i) the color-blind universality of “Man,” in the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and (ii) the color-conscious universality of “Black,” written in the 1804 Imperial Constitution of Dessalines. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s (2004) critique of Hannah Arendt’s (1951) notion of the right to have rights, and inspired by both Walter Mignolo’s “Who speaks for the human in ‘human rights’?” and Sabine Broeck’s “The legacy of slavery: White humanities and its subject. A manifesto,” this chapter grounds the decolonial critique of the universality of the human rights discourse in a more rigorous examination of its modern/colonial historical context of emergence. The chapter delves into understanding the notion of the “human” and showing its intimate relationship to politicized being. It rejects the distinction between “human” (as bare life) and political animal. By engaging the debates of how the human becomes political and claims rights, this chapter illuminates the political life. I here focus on the geopolitical conflict between different racial projects, as different revolutionary contexts and emancipatory horizons clash, in their efforts at reaching universality.
