{"pk":20034,"title":"What Could Human Rights Do? A Decolonial Inquiry","subtitle":null,"abstract":"It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights \nvis-à-vis \ndecolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical energy around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"Human Rights, Édouard Glissant, Right to Opacity, Decolonial Theory, Enrique Dussel"}],"section":"Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Benjamin","middle_name":"P.","last_name":"Davis","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2020-12-16T11:43:30-08:00","date_accepted":"2020-12-16T11:43:30-08:00","date_published":"2019-12-31T16:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/transmodernity/article/20034/galley/9950/download/"}]}