Necessary fictions: Indigenous claims and the humanity of rights

Abstract

Indigenous right insistently challenges the surpassing arrogations of sovereign right. In so doing, it affirms dimensions of being‐together denied or stunted in sovereign modes of political formation. This force of Indigenous right is amplified here through legal and literary instantiations. These, in turn, uncover the continuously created and fictional quality of rights, revealing them to be necessary fictions.

Keywords:

• Indigenous rights
• Indigenous literatures
• law
• Mandela
• fictions

Acknowledgements

This paper combines presentations at two conferences, one on “Post/Colonial Cultures: Legality and Legitimacy” held at the University of Portsmouth on 19 June 2008, and the other on “Human Rights: Theory, Narrative, Postcoloniality” held at Cornell University on 16–17 October 2009. Looked at another way, the paper would not exist without the generosity and guidance of, respectively, Alex Tickell and Elizabeth Anker, in involving me with these conferences. Another essential ingredient was the intellectual companionship of Kathleen Birrell, Chris Lloyd, and Maria Carolina Olarte Olarte.

Notes

1. See the Acknowledgements for details.

2. See Arendt, Chapter 9. The present paper will remain focused in this frame and challenge it from within, as it were. This is not to ignore the now extensive international enforceability of human rights (see Steiner, Alston, and Goodman chaps 8–10). That this enforceability is of fairly recent vintage excuses Arendt (see Agamben 126–27).

3. See Bailey.

4. These and other like uses of human rights are considered in Fitzpatrick, “Terminal Legality?”.

5. See Bailey.

6. The terms continue to be taken from Derrida here. Fully fledged apartheid was not introduced until 1948. That could be seen as a re‐founding but, in any case, the founding is not simply an isolated coup “back then” but a continuing “performative act” (cf. Derrida, “Laws of Reflection” 18, original emphasis).

7. This disavowal may also help avoid the controversy over whether the author about to be invoked, José Mariá Arguedas, is authentically Indigenous (Murra ix–xiii).

8. See the Acknowledgements for details.