What is it about?
This chapter focuses on how concepts of the human/body emerge from or are infused by colonial legal knowledge and logics. Racialisation – the main technology of imperial power – provides the primary point of entry into this analysis, with an understanding of the ways in which other axes of human categorisation/hierarchisation are implicated in the colonial constitution of the human.
Featured Image
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The contours of the category “human” have been profoundly shaped by colonial knowledge systems therefore, Euro-modern legal knowledge necessarily is underpinned by and furthers the production of this “Europe’s human” within its corpus. So, this chapter explains how this production enables the creation of racialised capital and other social constructions of colonial conditions of life, with focus on how anti-Blackness particularly, underwrites the evolution of colonial logics and the selective destructiveness of Euro-modernity as it is inscribed by and on the human/body.
Perspectives
The chapter argues that law contains an inherent self-incapacitation to protect life, as Euro-modernity is coded instead to protect the conditions that produce bare life and for the interests of capital accumulation.
Dr Foluke Ifejola Adebisi
University of Bristol
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth, March 2023, Policy Press,
DOI: 10.51952/9781529219401.ch003.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
