“Satan is Black” – Frantz Fanon’s Juridico-Theology of Racialisation and Damnation

Abstract

Recent critical legal scholarship has shown the significance of colonialism for emergence of modern international law.1 Paralleling, sometimes interweaving, with this post-colonial/decolonial reading has been a “religious turn” in which scholars highlight the persistence of the theological-political within the ostensible secularity of law.2 Frantz Fanon has much to offer both lines of scholarship. This article revisits the work of Fanon so as to illuminate the significance of his understanding of colonized/racialized identities as “damned” for contemporary juridical scholarship. Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, when read alongside the canonical literary account of the “fall,” John Milton’s Paradise Lost, offers an account of the juridico-theological process constructing an ideal of “humanity” through turning particular subjects into deific surrogates and others into the “damned.” This article develops understandings of postcolonial/decolonial international law, international law and political/juridical theology as well as critiquing the “humanitarianism” of contemporary international legal discourse. Moreover, it helps to establish the necessity of reading Fanon as a thinker of cross-disciplinary significance.

Follow Your Leader – I Prefer not to: Slavery, Giorgio Agamben and Herman Melville

“…62 Kojo Koram would see the assimilation of Satan to blackness as also deeply embedded in international law and argue for embracing it in the spirit of the Satan presented in John Milton's Paradise Lost. 63 The Haitian revolutionaries themselves however did not believe they were worshipping the devil, which is what matters in this context, indeed if anything they expressed the very opposite view to Robertson's. In the book that follows Buck-Morss' article above, she cites Baron de Vastey's words: "Our Haitian painters depict the Deity and angels black, while they represent the devil as white."…”

Race and Racism: Black Existential Philosophy for Peace Studies

“…As Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2016) notes, international law and human rights are in theory two separate domains, but in practice, in many cases, they function together. Contemporary studies reveal the intricacy of colonialism in the development of international law (Anghie, 2004;Pahuja;Koskenniemi, 2011;Suarez-Krabbe, 2016), its theological foundations (Supiot, 2017;Koram, 2017), and, from a Marxist perspective, the relation of international jurisprudence with the colonial seizure of lands and extraction of resources in the emergence of global capitalism (Marks, 2008). As Kojo Koram points out, the latter approach, although of decisive importance, does not enable to fully grasp "the theological undercurrents that anchor the Euro-modern concept of 'humanity' that persists into the contemporary moment", and is at the basis of human rights and international law (Koram, 2017: 3).…”

“…In this setting, rather than Hugo Grotious, Francisco de Vitoria is considered to be one of the earliest contributors to the creation of modern international law, and the initiator of "The School of Salamanca", also known as the "seconda scholastic", which encompassed several generations, including Jesuits like Luís de Molina or Francisco Suárez, (Koram, 2017), the aforementioned master of Descartes. For Vitoria, a humanist and a professor of law at the University of Salamanca, and a Dominican fray like his coetaneous Bartolomé de Las Casas, for Vitoria the question of colonial human difference and the legitimation of imperialism played an important role in his thought on sovereignty, just wars, natural rights, and also on trade.…”

“…Each one of these orders not only has an inbuilt racialised notion of the human at its heart but also conveys an inability to examine the implications of interdependence in terms of a requirement of mutual care and mutual vulnerability where vulnerability is unevenly distributed and experienced. (Niang, 2020: 334) Concurrently, to the analysis of the question of race and racism in the field, its history and its absence, there is also a growing scholarship from different parts of the globe and distant from mainstream positions that show how race and colonialism shape theories of governance and the state (Thompson, 2015;Gruffydd Jones, 2015); unveil concealed histories global colonial relations (Persaud, 2015;Krishna, 2015;Knox, 2015); shed light on the racist and colonial dimensions of liberal peace (Sabaratnam, 2018); build new approaches to international relations beyond Eurocentrism (Bilgin, 2008;Grovogui, 2006: Koram, 2017Bendix, Müller and Ziai, 2020); start from anticolonial struggles and take seriously the theorization of the colonized as actors in shaping the contemporary world (Gruffydd Jones, 2011;Shilliam, 2011Shilliam, , 2015Bogues, 2011;Getachew, 2020). Thereby this scholarship challenges underlying issues and dominant tropes in international relations: the notion of the human, the organization of knowledge production, the history and the self-understanding of the field, conceptual and theoretical paradigms.…”