Abstracts
Abstract
Presented as a thought experiment, this essay urges readers to (re)consider how critiques of the colonial concept of man (as a rational being) can disrupt and expand dominant ontologies to birth creative reimaginings of rights talk and protections, especially since rights discourses privilege rationality as the marker of full humanity. The same claims used to debunk animal rights can also be used to debunk human rights, especially for humans lacking a certain cognitive capacity or will. As evident throughout history and in the present, not all flesh and bodies (including hominine ones) are worth the same, notwithstanding aspirational and humanist rhetoric and rights bolstered by colonial and theological concepts. Some “humans” have been and continue to be equated with the savage and with animality — casting doubt on the universal applicability of rights talk as currently framed and deployed. Discussing the potential for animal rights would reconstitute and strengthen human rights — for it would force scholars, activists, judges, lawyers, students and professors to rethink the basis for global and local human rights regimes in light of creative jurisprudences and ontologies not based exclusively on Judeo-Christian or Western paradigms and worldviews. Such project also challenges coloniality and colonialism — the foundational paradigms of “modernity” and existing rights talk. The essay ends with some notes and suggestions on reimagining the human as an important step in demystifying human rights as a universal, eternal paradigm that protects all flesh equally, if at all.
Keywords:
- coloniality,
- human rights,
- animal rights,
- hierarchical constructs,
- ethical imagination
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Appendices
Biographical note
A scholar with wide-ranging interests, César “CJ” Baldelomar is Assistant Professor of Theology at Saint Mary’s College of California (Moraga, California, USA). Previously, he was Visiting Lecturer in Religion at Mount Holyoke College and an adjunct professor at Boston College, where he earned his doctorate in Theology and Education. CJ was a Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellow and a Commonweal Synodality Writing Fellow. CJ’s research blends critical theory (especially postmodernism and poststructuralism) and decolonial thought, exploring how knowledge production (epistemology, theory and scholarship) and consumption (teaching and learning) inform the formation of identities (ontologies) and communities. CJ is at work on his first book, Fragmented Theological Imaginings, to be published by Convivium Press in late 2024 as part of the New Horizons in Hispanic Catholic Theology series. He currently serves on the board of the Spirituality and Sustainability Global Network and as Book Review Editor for Religious Education.