Professor Louiza Odysseos (University of Sussex) presents on 'After rights, after Man? Sylvia Wynter, sociopoetic struggle and the “undared shape”'.

Decolonial and post-colonial critiques have shown how rights naturalise a normatively white, Western bourgeois, and appropriative subject, while negating other forms of being and subjectivity. Given the disquiet around rights and their subject, reimagining the subject of rights calls on us to think ‘after rights?’. Thinking ‘after rights?’, and insisting on the question mark, I argue, entails seeking the ‘undared shape’ (Aimé Césaire) of rights untethered from the figure of sovereign Man. Sylvia Wynter’s historical-philosophical critique of Man, and search for the human ‘after Man’, are central for understanding the colonial-modern order and the role of rights within this. Extending Wynter’s orientations, I first analyse how rights are implicated in modernity-coloniality’s material and symbolic violences. Second, I examine Wynter’s amplification of sociopoetic struggles – those wide-ranging modes of sociality and cultural, survival practices – by Man’s enslaved and colonised Others. Such struggles aimed to displace Man as locus of colonial-modern structures, forging new meanings and modes of world-making untethered from this hegemonic figure. Importantly for rights and world politics scholarship, sociopoetic struggles work with abolitionist-reparative intent towards modernity-coloniality and its master subject. Finally, I consider what renarrating the human outside Man's horizon – as abnormative, insovereign and anti-individualist praxis – means for human rights.

About the speaker

Louiza Odysseos is Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies. She is Co-Director of The Centre for Rights, Reparations, and Anti-Colonial Justice and a member of the international steering group of the Resistance Studies Network, a global inter- and multi-disciplinary community of scholars and activists. Louiza joined Sussex in 2006, having taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She holds a BSc in Foreign Service [magna cum laude] from Georgetown University, Washington DC and an MSc [Econ] and PhD in International Relations from the LSE. She is the editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights on After Rights? Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics (October 2024). She has co-edited a book on Heidegger and the Global Age with Rowman and Littlefield in 2017, and is the author of many other articles and chapters on the intersections of critical theory and international relations.