Abstract

MALDONADO-TORRES, Nelson. On the Coloniality of Human Rights. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [online]. 2017, n.114, pp.117-136. ISSN 2182-7435.  https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.6793.

The universality of human rights is delimited by what is considered to effectively constitute the state of being human in the first place. In addition to a secular-line that separated the divine from the human, the hegemonic modern Western concept of the human emerged in relation to an onto-Manichean colonial line that often makes human rights discourse inefficient for addressing modern colonialism, or complicit with it. For any decolonization of human rights to occur, there needs to be a decolonization of the concept of the human. Frantz Fanon's prayer to his body in Black Skin, White Masks offers a basis for building a decolonial humanism and humanities that counter the coloniality of human rights and serve as propaedeutics for any effort to make human rights relevant for decolonization.

Keywords : coloniality; colonialism; decolonization; Frantz Fanon (1925-1961); human rights.

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