Declaration as Disavowal: The Politics of Race and Empire in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718780697
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718780697

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(1) 57 –81

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718780697

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Article

Declaration as Disavowal:

The Politics of Race and

Empire in the Universal

Declaration of Human

Rights

Emma Stone Mackinnon1

Abstract

This article argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),

by claiming certain inheritances from eighteenth-century American and

French rights declarations, simultaneously disavowed others, reshaping the

genre of the rights declaration in ways amenable to forms of imperial and

racial domination. I begin by considering the rights declaration as genre,

arguing that later participants can both inherit and disavow aspects of what

came before. Then, drawing on original archival research, I consider the

drafting of the UDHR, using as an entry point the reception of the NAACP’s

Appeal to the World petition, edited by W.E.B. DuBois. I reconstruct

conversations within the drafting committee about the right to petition,

self-determination, and the right to rebellion, and the separation of the

Declaration from the rights covenants, to illustrate the allegiances between

US racial politics and French imperial politics, and their legacies for our

contemporary conceptions of human rights.

Keywords

declaration, genre, disavowal, human rights, Universal Declaration of Human

Rights

1Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Emma Stone Mackinnon, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago,

5828 S Universite Ave, Pick Hall, Fourth Floor, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

Email: em724@cam.ac.uk

780697PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718780697Political TheoryMackinnon

research-article2018

58 Political Theory 47(1)

When the United Nations General Assembly ratified the Universal Declaration

of Human Rights in December 1948, it provided the latest entry in the genre

of the rights declaration, a genre historians often described as starting with

the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the

Rights of Man and Citizen.1 While the documents share a good deal, the

UDHR also broke from its predecessors in important ways, and when describ-

ing their relationship, other historians emphasize not shared form but concep-

tual discontinuity. Eighteenth-century declarations announced national

independence and self-determination, principles that anticolonial movements

in the twentieth century, drawing on those declarations, would attempt to

carry forward. The UDHR, this story goes, was something different, setting

forward human rights, and the respect of those rights by national govern-

ments, as an object of international concern.2

But neither story fully captures how the genre of the rights declaration has

both been defined by and given shape to contests over the concept of human

rights. I worry that the discontinuity story assumes what it purports to explain:

how and why human rights and self-determination came to appear as distinct

and separable conceptual legacies. The premise that individual and group

rights are prima facie distinct is belied by their combination in those eigh-

teenth-century declarations; the challenge of how such rights relate is better

understood as an animating tension for the genre of the rights declaration. At

the same time, those who reject the argument for discontinuity and instead

offer a story of gradual expansion risk treating the idea of human rights as

necessarily in tension with, rather than at times abetting, imperialism and

domination. Instead, we should read the UDHR not as simply breaking with,

but rather as actively disavowing, alternative legacies of earlier rights decla-

rations—legacies which anticolonial actors were, in the same period, trying

to carry forward.

In what follows, I reconsider what it means to treat the rights declaration

as a genre. In the first part, drawing together material from literary and politi-

cal theory, I argue that by participating in a genre, carrying it forward, later

documents recast it, making certain continuities apparent and others illegible,

reshaping the ways in which concepts like human rights are understood and

mediated. Through such contestation, rights declarations can refuse to

acknowledge—can disavow—aspects of the legacies of prior declarations,

refiguring the genre so that certain inheritances appear conceptually and his-

torically discontinuous.

In the second part, I turn to the writing of the UDHR, reading the docu-

ment in the context of the questions to which it responded, particularly those

questions related to racial and imperial politics in France and the United

States. I reconstruct select backstage machinations, focusing on the French