After Homo Narrans
Botany, International Law, and Senegambia in Early Racial Capitalist World-making
By Vanja Hamzić
Gorée slave Island, Senegal, courtesy of Unsplash
The making of the human as ‘we’ know it - as a distinct species, homo sapiens, that appeared around 300,000 years ago on a continent that came to be known as Africa - invokes nowadays an ordinary Enlightenment imagery, replete with such (r)evolutionary actions as the flaking of crude stone tools, the discovery of fire, and the invention of the wheel. The warm and fuzzy platitudes of our common ancestry notwithstanding, this story has been born out of the violence of an explicitly hierarchal view of life – with some humans seen as more worthy or advanced than others, and with all other forms of life subservient to the preservation of those selected forms of human existence.
The reductive, hierarchical ‘human’ forcible sexing, gendering, and racialising regimes sought to advance stood in stark contrast to eighteenth-century West African conceptualisations of human, non-human, and more-than-human existence in nature.
Critical studies of the human and its environment have long quarrelled with this originatory narrative, debunking at various stages its foundational presumptions: that there is or should be a vertical scientific view of ‘human types’, or ‘civilisational progress’, or of human and non-human life. Less frequently such studies questioned our distinct speciation – our self-designation as a species – or considered the way this watershed moment in a would-be scientific understanding of the human coincided with numerous other forms of onto-epistemic violence and subjugation of diverse forms of life, human or otherwise. Whilst critiques of the making of the Enlightenment (hu)man abound, they rarely centre on the two axes of the Enlightenment project: that of international law and the racialised gender binary.
My chapter in International Law and Posthuman Theory seeks to address this glaring gap in the existing scholarship, by engaging an emergent science of categorisation and speciation, and its reverberations and affordances in European international law, in the long eighteenth century. I focus on a distinct material locale – that of ‘proto-colonial’ Senegambia in West Africa – to reveal a circum-Atlantic capitalist economy of enslavement in the making, and its attendant forcible sexing, gendering, and racialising regimes. The reductive, hierarchical ‘human’ such regimes sought to advance stood in stark contrast to eighteenth-century West African conceptualisations of human, non-human, and more-than-human existence in nature. I dwell, in particular, on the example of Senegambian Mande bards, or griots (jeliw, sing. jeli), and their increasingly precarious lifeworlds to underline the importance of storytelling as a mode of survival and resistance to environmental, gendered, and racial capitalist violence.
According to Sylvia Wynter such oppressive, racial capitalist worldings – the figurations of the human as onto-epistemically divisible and governable along the imposed racialised, gendered, sexed, classed, abled, and other fault-lines – were either explicitly legal or lawlike. My chapter, in turn, reveals that eighteenth-century international law’s technologies of subjectivation relied precisely on such worldings and touted them as both universal and natural. Against the abiding violence of racial capitalist Man - the Christian homo politicus gradually morphing into the colonial-Enlightenment homo oeconomicus – Wynter proposed a turn to “the human as a figure on the horizon, rooted in anticolonial struggle and thought”: the storytelling insurrectionary homo narrans. Following Aimé Césaire’s clarion call to decentre the colonial and postcolonial natural sciences in our understanding of humanity Wynter’s homo narrans served to remind us of the foundational power of storytelling. Because the stories we tell ourselves co-create the worlds past, present, and future we learn to inhabit, they can trouble “an order of knowledge that is indispensable to the continued reproduction of our present neoliberal/neo-imperial, secularly biocentric, global order of words and of things”.
The present racial capitalist order of knowledge was forged in eighteenth-century natural and legal sciences, and ‘practised’ far and wide, such as the French and English fortified trading posts in Senegal and the Gambia. It was also resisted there and then, including by gender-nonconforming jeliw through their worlding of the storytelling Senegambian human, non-human, and more-than-human. My chapter calls for new, materialist figurations of posthuman homo narrans, away from legal or lawlike biocentricity. It argues, with Donna Haraway, for “thick copresence” of earthlings in time(s) – situated, entangled, and worldly – but, instead of her “multispecies storytelling” it attends to the problem of (Enlightenment, colonial) species-making in the first place. A substantive, decolonial ‘turn to history’ and other abiding temporalities can be productive for posthuman theory and other critical studies of the human and the environment for a range of reasons, not least because it calls into question the ordering implicit in the ‘human-as-species’ that centres in perpetuum only certain forms of life and provides for continuously exploitative views of nature.
The challenge for posthumanist critique concerned specifically with law might be twofold. First, how should we include material, localised, multiple senses of the past in any ongoing re-worldings and re-imaginations of the present and the future, to rethink temporalities and recount anew, rather than ‘recover’, insurrectionary times? Second, how should we critique law’s manyfold complicity in systemic world-destroying and worldmaking projects - such as that of racial capitalism - without succumbing to the false promise of law’s salvatory powers? Whilst modes of capitalist commodification may change, there seems little hope that international law will ‘evolve away’ from being one of its chief helpers. The way Enlightenment international lawyers legitimised and naturalised the colonial difference – inclusive of the racialised gender binary – did not substantially differ that much from international law’s role in upholding and reproducing cisheteropatriarchy today. If working towards law’s withering away – or law’s abolition – remains a constant of radical politics, so, too, should an understanding of law’s continuously violent role in sustaining deeply hierarchical and contingent forms of natural life.
Vanja Hamzić is Reader in Law, History, and Anthropology at SOAS University of London.
This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
