This paper will show how the idea of global citizenship is linked to the racial configurations of the modern world and hence with the limits of humanity. It discusses how the racial hierarchy of human existence, originating in the Renaissance and prescribed legally during the Enlightenment, established current (white-male-Christian-Western) ...
(Show more)This paper will show how the idea of global citizenship is linked to the racial configurations of the modern world and hence with the limits of humanity. It discusses how the racial hierarchy of human existence, originating in the Renaissance and prescribed legally during the Enlightenment, established current (white-male-Christian-Western) European notions of who is Human and who is lower in that hierarchy, thereby designating citizenship, one of the most important legacies of modernity. I analyze key literature and its critique, in order to map discursively the role played by the Haitian Revolution in how modernity established racialized global definitions of citizenship from the perspective of the (trans) Atlantic World(s) (Gilroy 1993). For this purpose, I compare some narratives from each axis of the slave trade’s triangle which will be represented respectively by two nation-states: Africa (Ghana and Namibia)/the Caribbean (Haiti and the Dominican Republic)/Europe (France and Germany).
The central thesis of decolonial thought is that coloniality is not a state of affairs opposed to modernity and preceding it, but an integral part of the processes of modernization themselves. The experience of European expansion and colonization is crucial to understand the emergence of the main institutions of modernity between the 16th and 19th centuries. In the same way, all the processes of modernization of the peripheries have been mediated by the “cultural logic” of colonial heritage.
In post-colonial studies neither the ideology of modernity nor the black pits that hide its rhetoric are ever questioned. Decolonial thinkers counteract the evolutionist narratives of the social sciences that have hidden the mutual dependency between modernity and coloniality, presenting the latter as an unwanted subproduct of the first. In this sense, decolonial thinkers make a clear difference between colonialism and coloniality. Walter Mignolo establishes that what he calls “the rhetoric of modernity” (progress) is always accompanied by the “logic of coloniality” (exploitation). Decolonial thinkers analyze asymmetries in global definitions of citizenship in relation to coloniality. The decolonial approach establishes an epistemic turn by means of expanding the scope of investigation into the world, instead of keeping it within “the discipline”.
Decolonial thinking differs from post-colonial theory or post-colonial studies in that these are circumscribed within the legacy of French post-structuralism. Post-coloniality is a product of (post) modernity. De-colonial thinking, on the contrary, finds its roots in Afro and Indigenous histories of maroon and independence movements and communities.
The paper discusses the connection between racism and the figure of the citizen not only from the perspective of the theories, rules, laws and social structures that created them, but also from the perspective of the resistance to them, and the Haitian Revolution is only the tip of many icebergs in this regard. According to Laurent Dubois (2005) we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution and therefore accountable to its ancestry, my aim is to analyze this predicament as a citizen of the Dominican Republic; as a racialized non-citizen of a European nation: Germany and as a member of the Diaspora of the African continent.
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