For a cosmopolitics of relation

Essay by Malcom Ferdinand

The fact that everything is connected to the whole doesn’t necessarily make it possible to think about how the whole becomes a world or to think about the issues of equality and justice. Having the same «Creole» identity, recognising oneself as queer or as a human-animal, is not enough to make a world. In the same way, recognising oneself as a part of the mountain is not enough to prevent the exploitation of nature and non-humans. As necessary as these relational ontologies and aesthetics are, the world is the fruit of an acting together. Worldly-ecology requires a cosmopolitics of relation. How, at the end of colonisation and slavery, can a polis (a city) be established between humans and non-humans, even though not everyone will adopt the same aesthetics and ontologies?

This cosmopolitics of relation has two poles. It unfolds, firstly, in the political space that singularly connects human beings to each other. If the different constitutions of gender, social class, political allegiance, or ethnic origin impact what actions are possible, then acting together reveals something more than the mere reproduction of identities and community affiliations. In such a way that it becomes possible to recognise each other as companions of a single world held in common, not because it belongs to each other, but because it holds each other together. This means a world that does not discriminate according to religion, gender, skin color, national origin, or difference. This primary focus follows from the theoretical and pragmatic awareness that the politically organised world remains the condition for thinking and acting ecologically among human beings. It is because there is a space, a city between human beings, that the destruction of ecosystems and the industrialisation of animal flesh can become a political problem that requires humans to grant rights to and accept obligations towards non-humans.

At the second pole, a political composition shapes the ways that non-humans participate in the world. The differentiated participation of non-humans in the world does not develop in the same way that human political participation does, such as the institution of a political community between humans and non-humans. At issue here is the impossibility that these non-humans might contradict their representatives and spokespersons, demand rights, make a demand for equality, and initiate legal proceedings. I propose that we think of these forms of community as a world of humans with non-humans. The distinction being made by the terms «between» and «with» indicates the different natures of the spaces established, on the one side, between humans and among themselves and, on the other side, between humans among themselves and non-humans. In this sense, by a worldly-ecology I mean the preservation of a world between humans and with non-humans. Animal diplomacy, collective human/non-human compositions, the recognition of the legal status of ecosystems, animals, and of this wild part of the world are ways to account for the existence and interests of the non-humans within a common world. The ambition of this cosmopolitics of relation remains guided by the following question: how can a world be composed from the Earth, from its constitutive plurality of others and their multiple ontologies? Its starting point assumes the joint recognition of the historical violence and destruction caused by the colonial and environmental fractures of the last five centuries.

Fulfilling this ambition means constructing the bridge of a worldwide justice that goes beyond the modern double fracture and brings together humans and non-humans, past and future. From the slave ship to the spaceships of Star Trek, the bridge is both that space where different beings and species meet and that in-between space that connects the shores of the past to the shores of the future. Beyond the legal technicalities, justice makes it possible to create this common scene that, in being accountable, offers the means for becoming aware of the plurality of humans and non-humans on this worldly bridge, their histories and their futures. In contrast to egocentric navel-gazing, the world’s umbilical paths commit us to recognise our existence within networks of organic, material, political, and imaginary relationships with those who came before us and with those who will come after us. Bodies are the bearers of yesterday’s world and guarantors of the world of tomorrow. The construction of this bridge to the world participates in the fight against global warming, against the use of nuclear energy, against lasting pollution of the planet, and for the recognition of non-human rights. Climate justice involves confronting past emissions – the gases that are warming the planet today were emitted decades or even hundreds of years ago – and the future consequences of that warming.

However, it is important that this trans-generational justice is pulled out of the impasse of modernity’s colonial and environmental double fracture. Following the umbilical paths of the world will reveal that we also carry the weight of racism, the inequalities of capital from birth, and modernity’s colonial and slave-making past.

This world-ship’s bridge is environmental, but also social, political, and imaginary. It should not be forgotten that climate justice was inspired by the movement for environmental justice in the early 1980s, when Black and other racial minorities in the United States demanded justice in their fight against «environmental racism» as they faced unequal exposure to toxic pollutants. If it is possible to think about a trans-generational justice regarding climate change (in environmental terms), then it is all the more necessary to do so for modernity’s colonial legacy. The various social, community, political, and legal attempts to confront today’s modern world with its colonial legacy also contribute to the construction of the-’s bridge. At work are at least three types of construction efforts.

First and foremost, there are the struggles of the world’s indigenous peoples for their dignity, their right to maintain their human and non-human communities and to preserve their way of life. From the opposition to the Keystone oil pipeline in the United States and Canada, to the demands for justice from the people of Polynesia following French nuclear tests, to the struggle of the Lenca community led by Berta Cáceres in Honduras against the Gualcarque River dams, these communities have been the victims of several different episodes of colonisation and land dispossession. The Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2007 not only affirms that indigenous peoples have the right to be treated with dignity but equally condemns the colonial forms of predation to which they have been subjected since the fifteenth century. One can no longer maintain the naive attitude of celebrating native lifestyles, the Pachamama, Inuit myths, and Native American cosmogonies, without at the same time acknowledging the modern colonial history that has relegated these peoples to the margins of the world.

A second type of construction effort, the demands for reparations for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, also raises this world-ship’s bridge of justice. These demands have been present since the period of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and have echoed strongly in the last twenty years. Historically, not only were the claims of the enslaved denied, but quite the opposite, in France, Great Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, former masters were compensated, being given compensation for their «losses». As well as the reflex to suppress the history of slavery in Europe and the Americas on the deceitful grounds that this history would constitute an injunction to repent, these contemporary demands are received and rejected principally from a technocratic perspective: the crime is ancient and therefore past the statute of limitations; the damage is incalculable. However, these two technocratic refutations do not hold up. Crimes against humanity are imprescriptible according to international law, unless we once again deny the humanity of those who suffered the crime and reproduce the same gesture that dehumanised the slave-making colonists.

Finally, the third type of construction effort, this bridge of justice is also sought in the demands for the restitution of those art objects and human body parts that were stolen by the European colonial powers in Africa and that are today exhibited in galleries or stored in the holds of Europe’s museums and libraries. The deforestation and extractivist industries that hit Africa from the fifteenth century to the present day are just the other side of this colonial constitution. Restoring these objects is part of creating the world-ship’s bridge.

Building this bridge of justice in the face of the ecological storm requires that a political place for ecosystems and non-humans is recognised, but it also requires political recognition of the genocides, enslavement, and colonisation that made this destruction of the world and the Earth possible. To keep only the environmental side of this trans-generational justice amounts to building this bridge with gaping holes left in it, holes where some will be thrown, thus reproducing slave-making holds. This bridge requires a decolonisation of the institutions of the Global North. From universities to museums to states and through religious institutions, confronting the ecological tempest also means confronting modernity’s colonial and slave-making constitution. It is no longer possible to maintain this double fracture, where agreements to fight global warming are signed, where commitments are made to limit pollution and preserve biodiversity, while only a few gentle words slip out about the consequences of colonial history, when it isn’t a deafening silence that is kept instead. This effort to build a bridge of justice must also make room to recognise the history of the collective domination of women, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and people with disabilities. A worldly horizon can be projected into the future from the bridge of justice. Stopping the transmission of pollutants and toxic chemical compounds to children through our umbilical cords must go hand in hand with stopping the transmission of misogyny, racism, and social injustice through those same cords. The world-ship is to be constructed here and over there. Carried by yesterday’s struggles, the rigging of today’s world-ship allows us to draw the horizon of a world of tomorrow.

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Excerpt from «Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World», Malcom Ferdinand, 2022
Translation from French by Anthony Paul Smith
English translation Polity Press, 2022