Coöperism 7.1/13 | "Édouard Glissant’s Right to Opacity in Practice" (Nov. 29, 2023)

A lecture and discussion with Benjamin Davis and moderator Souleymane Bachir Diagne. Readings on Édouard Glaissant are available here: cooperism.law.columbia.edu/ch...
Wednesday, November 29, 2023, Columbia University
In several places across his work, the Martinican poet, novelist, and essayist Édouard Glissant calls for a “right to opacity,” which he vaguely explains as that which protects diversity across humankind. In this way, Glissant’s right to opacity could be understood as a standard cultural rights claim. But in his 1997 Treatise of the Whole World, Glissant adds about the right to opacity, “Let it be a celebration.” Because activists and lawyers frequently invoke rights claims, the traditional sites of human rights practice are often thought to be oppositional protests and international courtrooms. How, then, could a rights claim be a celebration? In this talk, I will suggest that recent prayer camps at Standing Rock and on Anishinaabe treaty land in northern Minnesota expand how we understand theories of cultural rights. When the celebrations at prayer camps are included as sites of practicing rights, critical theory gains a wider imaginary for understanding and transforming the relationship between the state and social movements. Further, attending to the orientations at the camps, ordinary citizens are called to live differently in our everyday lives. I will ultimately suggest that these rights claims, as first situated amidst the land, are part of honoring what Glissant calls “a modern form of the sacred.” Thought this way, the right to opacity resonates with the German critical theorist Ernst Bloch’s radical reading of natural law as connecting right and revolution, law and utopia. And thought this way, the right to opacity could be a tool to connect and organize across struggles that, without a larger guiding framework, by and large remain fragmented and unconnected performative assemblies.