On the (geo)politics of belonging: Agamben and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the significance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben in order to do so. UNDRIP provides means for developing a comparative framework for conceptualizing the situation of Indigenous peoples globally, focusing on the ways they defy settler-state norms and expectations of what constitutes politics and governance. Reciprocally, the essay addresses how UNDRIP reframes Agamben's notion of exception by emphasizing less the eradication of sovereignty than the recognition of simultaneous, interlacing sovereignties whose terms may not be commensurate and whose nonexclusivity troubles a notion of jurisdictional closure – the a priori coherence of ‘domestic’ space on which the exception depends. Note on contributorMark Rifkin is Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of four books: Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (Oxford 2009); When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford 2011); The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (Minnesota 2012); and Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minnesota 2014). He also co-edited the collection ‘Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity’ (a special issue GLQ). He recently served as President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.Notes1 For the text of the Declaration, see United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (New York: United Nations, 2008). A copy can be found at http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. On the history of the Declaration and the process by which it made its way through the UN system, see S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Clare Charters and Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Making the Declaration Work: The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2009); Maivân Clech Lâm, At the Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination (Ardsley, New York: Transnational Publishers, 2000); Karen Engle, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Alexandra Xanthaki, Indigenous Rights and United Nations Standards: Self-Determination, Culture and Land (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).2 UN, ‘Declaration', 1.3 Ibid., 4. This article recycles language found in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.4 For varying definitions of ‘settler colonialism', see Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai'i (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008); Alyosha Goldstein, ‘Where the Nation Takes Place: Proprietary Regimes, Antistatism, and U.S. Settler Colonialism', SAQ 107, no. 4 (2008): 833–62; Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, ‘Decolonizing Antiracism', Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2004): 120–43; Sherene H. Razack, eds., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native', Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2000): 387–409.5 While many scholars have critiqued the international human rights system for its imposition of Euro-American norms and its use as a vehicle for forms of imperial and neocolonial authority, I want to suggest that UNDRIP indexes and helps to open up potentials for political imagination and maneuver. For examples of such critique of human rights regimes more generally, see Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).6 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (1996), trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).7 UN, ‘Declaration', 4, 5.8 Ibid., 10, 12.9 His theory of the exception appears in its most developed form in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003), trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For critiques of Agamben's notion of ‘state of exception' for the ways it can efface routine modes of (racialized) abjection, see Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).10 Agamben, Means Without End, 40–41.11 Ibid., 40.12 Ibid., 42.13 Ibid., 31.14 Ibid., 113.15 UN, ‘Declaration', 6, 2.16 Agamben, Means Without End, 3–4.17 Ibid., 10.18 Ibid., 67.19 Ibid., 21.20 Ibid., 10.21 On this point, see Simone Bignall, ‘Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming Community', in Agamben and Colonialism, ed. Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 261–284.22 For examples of such scholarship, see Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Jessica Cattelino, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Engle, Elusive; Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).23 On the Declaration as acknowledging Indigenous ‘culture', see Lorie M. Graham and Siegfried Wiessner, ‘Indigenous Sovereignty, Culture, and International Human Rights Law', SAQ 110, no. 2 (2011): 403–28; Xanthaki, Indigenous Rights.24 Agamben, Means Without End, 57.25 Ibid., 58.26 UN, ‘Declaration', 5, 7–8.27 Ibid., 3.28 Ibid., 13.29 On using such relations as a basis for thinking Indigenous studies beyond triangulations through settler-states, see Chadwick Allen, TransIndigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).30 UN, ‘Declaration', 14.31 Ibid., 3.32 Agamben, Means Without End, 40–41.

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