The Inhuman as Refusal

by | 7 Oct 2024

Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014)

The fourth roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as Refusal’, and was curated and chaired by Marie Petersmann. The two speakers were Juliana M. Streva and Sarah Riley Case.1[1]

Marie Petersmann: This roundtable focused on modes of existence that were never recognized as ‘human’ in the ‘humanist script’ (Wynter; McKittrick) and who, rather than accepting or demanding to be made legible and intelligible to it, affirm their exclusion and refuse being subjected to the ‘cunning of recognition’ (Povinelli). In so doing, these politics of refusal reject the liberal figure of the ‘Human’ in light of which the category of the subject is crafted, and re-appropriate ‘inhuman’ (Jackson; Yusoff) modes of being and becoming beyond or away from modernist ideals of a free, self-possessed, and autonomous subject.

The discussions focused on various forms of refusal as practices that reject and resist established norms, structures of power, or the modernist world as a given. Such practices are aimed at disordering, disrupting and dismantling norms and institutions that are foundationally unjust, oppressive and detrimental to certain groups or communities. By undoing the ‘human’ as a given, the ‘inhuman’ is affirmed as a premise for something else – a different mode of being and becoming with others.

The ‘inhuman as refusal’ can be understood in different ways. On the one hand, we find a refusal of the ‘inhuman’ categorization of those originally considered ‘less-than-human’ or ‘sub-human’ in White supremacist legal orders (as seen, for example, with the Black Lives Matter movement or Indigenous legal mobilizations). On the other hand, however, we find the ‘inhuman’ as emerging from a ‘refusal’ of the liberal ‘human’ subject – where the ‘inhuman’ is affirmed and re-appropriated by those once denied access to this category, and who today ‘refuse what has been refused to [them]’ (Harney & Moten). Put in more simple yet inevitably more reductive terms: on the one hand, we find a refusal of the ‘inhuman’ that dis-figures and re-configures being ‘human’, and on the other hand, a refusal of the ‘human’ that affirms and re-appropriates being ‘inhuman’. These different understandings of the ‘inhuman as refusal’ relate to distinct strands of critique (affirmative, dialectical, negative) and theoretical frameworks (Black optimism and pessimism, for example, in Black studies and radical thought). To discuss these themes and explore their potentialities and tensions, we were joined by two brilliant scholars: Juliana M. Streva and Sarah Riley Case.

The roundtable started with a very broad question to set the stage, asking Juliana and Sarah how the category of the ‘inhuman’ appears in their work, and whether they find it a useful heuristic that allows them to speak to modes of collective being and acting that exceed what the ‘humanities’ have to offer?

Left to right: Sarah Riley Case, ‘Unama’ki/Cape Breton’ (2018); Still from the film Quilombo, Continuum (2023), directed by Juliana M. Streva; Sarah Riley Case, ‘Occupation of Alcatraz’ (2015).

Juliana M. Streva: The category of the ‘inhuman’ permeates my work, perhaps implicitly, but fundamentally. As you described, Marie, the modern Western humanistic project, grounded in the fracture of body and flesh (Spillers) and the creation of skins and masks (Fanon), has been intricately intertwined with the colonial drive to master ‘the Other’, encompassing both living beings and more-than-human entities. This division between human and non-human – or as Sylvia Wynter puts it, between the selected and dysselected – lies at the core of the colonial slavery system of total violence. The concept of the inhuman and the analytics of raciality compose the grounds in which colonialism and racial capitalism are built upon, enforcing a White supremacist premise of being human (Wynter) and exposing the underlying foundations of modern juridical and ethical norms, as well as forms of subjectivation (Ferreira da Silva).

My research aims to excavate the role of law in the making of such a colonial in/human order, and more importantly, to learn with ongoing strategies and living tactics that resist it to radically transform it. In refusing to frame decolonization as a metaphor or merely as an academic concept, my work engages with the legacies of the quilombo as a lived experience, embodied knowledge, and a continuum of anticolonial struggles and world-making. Quilombo refers to movements led by Afro-diasporic subjects who historically escaped the plantation regime to exist and live together otherwise in the territory now known as Brazil. Similar to Black geographies and fugitivity, confluences have existed and continue to exist throughout the region now known as Latin America and the Caribbean, known as maroons, marronage, cimaronaje, cumbes, palenques, and more. Drawing inspiration from the Black Radical Tradition and on-the-ground practices of decolonization and abolitions, my work seeks to speculate on possible and impossible ecologies, legalities, poethics, and technologies enacted by the quilombo that have been activated and reinvented today. Instead of a fixed territory or a remnant community, as legally defined in the Brazilian Constitution, I propose to read the multifaceted notion of quilombo as practices of resistance and creation, as embodied gestures, as continuum movements.

Sarah Riley Case: The ‘inhuman’ appears in my work in ways that align with your opening, Marie, and with Juliana’s engagement. I will elaborate from my perspective, which is intimate, because theory approximates reality, including the theoretical concept of the inhuman.

Juliana’s work alongside quilombo underscores that this concept, the inhuman, may expose a reality that is lived: the reality that Western epistemologies historically classified groups of people according to their relative proximity to, and deviation from, a presumed measure of the ‘human’ (liberal homoeconomicus), constructed through Euro-American values, with profound material consequences in the present-day lives of everyone (Wynter).

This lived reality is what Edward Said described in proposing that Orientalism treats an expansive group of people as ‘backwards’. It is what Franz Fanon documented in the colonizer’s use of the word ‘bestial’ to repress the colonized (language used recently by Israel officials to condemn Palestinians and used in discourses of antisemitism, as Usha Natarajan has remarked).

Black feminist thought exposes how such presumptions about the inhuman emerged under colonialism and slavery through (legal or lawlike) signifiers of race, gender, ability, and class, spreading globally, tying the past to the present and the future, such that we are each, now, variously implicated (Ferreira da Silva, Wynter, Weheliye). Hortense Spiller’s concept of ‘flesh’, which Juliana evoked, thus signifies that the (inhumane) Middle Passage is inside us all, by birth in the modern world, at an elemental level (Ferreira da Silva); and Fanon’s ‘peau noire, masques blancs’ laments the implicability of our psyches in categorical thinking.

I am particularly drawn to Sylvia Wynter’s work, which captures such nuances of the concept ‘inhuman’ as she traces the development of classifications, such as ‘non-human’ and ‘subhuman’, in post-Enlightenment science and economics that justified exploiting people for capital accumulation (distinguishing the enslaved from indentured laborers, for instance).

Despite the afterlives of these histories in the present (Hartman), Wynter, like those above, does not condemn us to violence. If Fanon called for a new humanity, Wynter observes multiple genres of being human, including and beyond the measure of liberal homoeconomicus whom Western men conceived. Juliana pointed us in this direction when she referenced Black fugitivity: the direction of living ‘otherwise’ (Sharpe) and ‘elsewhere’ (Tuck & Yang). I would add, my work aims to show that genres of being human have never ceased to exist en relation within the totality of this world (Glissant), including juridically. Although dehumanization persists, and is unravelling into ecological crises, subaltern people lead wayward lives as a praxis of being human (Hartman; Spivak; Wynter & McKittrick).


Left to right: Sarah Riley Case, ‘Guayguata/Annotto’ (2024); Still from the film Quilombo, Continuum (2023), directed by Juliana M. Streva; Sarah Riley Case, ‘Mississaugas of the Credit/Ajetance Treaty, No 19’ (2020).

Marie: It is beautiful how your work speaks to one another, and how you both engage with the notion of the ‘inhuman’ in different yet complementary ways. This roundtable on the ‘Inhuman as Refusal’ aimed to speak to and engage with distinct strands of theory and practice about the ‘inhuman’, yet also question how and to what extent refusal informs and shapes your understanding of what counts as ‘inhuman’. How do practices of refusal relate to your working with or against the ‘inhuman’?

Juliana: I have first to share how fascinated I am with all the entanglements and confluences among our works and sensitive perspectives, Sarah and Marie. As Sarah elucidated, Black fugitivity moves towards other forms of being in relation and world-making. It also brings to the forefront a politics of refusal. Historically, the quilombo emerged through the primary act of escape. Thus, fugitivity should not be seen as a cowardly reaction to avoid confrontation. Contrary to this common-sense view, fugitivity here refers to the outcome of a major process of refusal and dismantling of the colonial order. In the context of colonial slavery, flight, as elucidated by Beatriz Nascimento, is configured as ‘the first act of a man [sic] who does not recognize that he is the property of another, hence the importance of migration, the importance of the search for territory’ (1989). It constitutes the existential tactics taken by someone who refuses the imposed status of being owned by another. In this on-the-ground sense, fugitivity can be interpreted, both historically and conceptually, as a radical politics of refusal against and within the colonial definition and instrumentalization of the in/human.

In the aftermaths of slavery, a politics of refusal implies not only an epistemic and ontological disruption with the Plantationocene but also a methodological one. As Frantz Fanon suggests, ‘[w]e shall break with tradition’ and to ‘leave [Western] methods to the botanists and mathematicians’ (1952). This is because the Western definitions of the Human and Man have also been linked to a system of validation and legitimation of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Hence, fugitivity and refusal operate from within and against the in/human, demanding instances of un-learning, un-doing, and re-worlding, creating spaces where political imaginations otherwise can germinate. Denise Ferreira da Silva refers to this active and purposeful Black feminist gesture of refusal as ‘hacking’, wherein the intentional mis-understanding, mis-reading, mis-appropriation that enables a process of ‘de\composition’ and ‘radical transformation that exposes, unsettles, and perverts form and formulae’ (2018). Such sociogenic processes (Fanon; Wynter) and method-making (McKittrick) are entangled with an ultimate reconfiguration and rearticulation of the normative fields of law, economy, and politics.

Sarah: Juliana’s remarks acknowledge ways of life that the concept of ‘refusal’ may refer to – ways of life that make resistance, fugitivity, dismantling, and reconfiguring tangible. I will elaborate on the latter, generative aspects of her remarks – how people who refuse to suffer create ‘spaces where political imaginations otherwise can germinate’, as Juliana puts it. I see the creation of these spaces as a praxis of being human, which returns us to the theme of the inhuman.

In Sylvia Wynter’s early thought she proposed that maroons across the Caribbean rehumanized themselves from the dehumanization that slavery entailed through the acts of refusal that Juliana describes (escaping the plantation to establish separate communities). Wynter focused on the reimagining of earth, and human relations, that accompanied such acts, which refused capitalist exploitation. She considered millennial movements similarly, such as Rastafarianism, intuiting her later theories about genres of being human that exceed, and refuse, universal Western ‘Man’ (liberal homoeconomicus) including his inhuman Other.

Although I was once apprehensive about the word ‘rehumanization’ (as it might imply that dehumanization can be successful), through Wynter, I appreciate that people re-invent what it means to be human, as a praxis, because humanness is biological and a myth of our making (Fanon’s sociogeny, referred to by Juliana) (Wynter & McKittrick). Refusing the inhuman entails a constant prefiguring of what being human could mean, like the infinite universes of quantum physics, which are all possible and real.

Despite a common-sense meaning of the term, ‘refusals’ are therefore not dialectical, not a mere response to domination (Hartman). Resistance to oppression, alone, is an unbearable fate for those who suffer, as it binds us to harm, to negation, to the supposed inhuman, including in academic relationships (Tuck). Hence, Audra Simpson, whose work attends to the concept of refusals, has described Mohawk/Kanien’kehá:ka refusals in terms of sovereignty.

For me, Black feminist and Indigenous theories of refusal may work against and with the concept of the inhuman, as Marie anticipated, insofar as a position outside of universal Man may foster spaces where, to return to Juliana’s words, ‘imaginations otherwise can germinate’. Still, from a subaltern perspective, refusals must also exceed negation, including a binary premise of the ‘inhuman’ (or the ‘posthuman’, for that matter). Liminal spaces that break from such theoretical devices could be ‘demonic grounds’ (Wynter; McKittrick), where heretical praxes of being human(here, simply, bios and mythos) are possible. From these grounds, we may even venture into dark places where liberal homoeconomicus dares not go: the realms of plants, soils, ancestors, magic… (Jordan; Jackson).

Beatriz Nascimento in a still from the film Quilombo, Continuum (2023), directed by Juliana M. Streva.

Marie: These multiple re-workings and openings of being ‘in/human’ as praxis, of being translated into or refusing being made transparent as a ‘subject’, and the re/de/compositions of the ‘world’ of modernity that transpire therefrom, are all processes that stand in particular relations to law. Some refuse a liberal legal ordering of relations (to the self, to others, to non- or more-than-humans), others are jurisgenerative in their own ways. Can we – and do you – pre-figure a legality that could attend to these processes and their unfoldings?

Juliana: Marie, as legal scholars, I guess the question of law has been haunting us. By sensitively considering the quilombo legacies encapsulated in a politics of refusal – one that is not merely a response to domination, as Sarah importantly highlights – a similar question arises that is directly entangled with yours: what are the im/possibilities involved in either utilizing or refusing the ‘master’s tools’ (Lorde) – liberal and colonial constructs, or, paraphrasing Sarah’s last point, the places where the liberal homoeconomicus dares to go – as a means to abolish in a generative way the world as we know it?

This inquiry poses inherent tensions. On the one hand, there is a drive to assert agency, or sovereignty as Sarah mentions regarding Indigenous theories of refusals, and reshape the liberal system by transforming institutions and discourses from within. This entails challenging dominant fictions of rights, contesting political regime of representation, disrupting museum circuits, disputing academic positions, etc. – in sum, challenging the existing institutions from within them. On the other hand, there is a palpable risk of succumbing to the mechanisms of capture created by colonial and liberal orders, which instrumentalize, tokenize, and depoliticize Black, Indigenous and queer struggles for liberation and radical re/de/compositions of the world. This risk is present even in the manipulation of benevolent narratives such as the ones around ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’, often used to justify token gestures of ‘giving space’, ‘giving visibility’, and ‘giving voice’ (Mombaça). Such actions reinforce privileged positions situated within the Whiteness pact (W. Mills; Bento) instead of significantly contributing to structural, and as Sarah mentioned, generative transformations.

It is precisely within this friction that my work speculates on refusal and fugitivity as movements against colonial institutions, which are also operating from within and beyond them. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney acknowledge, ‘there is no outside, refusal takes place inside and makes its break, its flight, its exodus from the inside’ (2013). This dilemma was particularly prominent during the conversations I had with elected Black activist-politicians holding legislative seats in the city of São Paulo. Members of both the ‘Mandata Quilombo’ and ‘Quilombo Periférico’ have been activating the verb ‘aquilombar’ to characterize their engagement with institutional politics and the state.

The attempt to escape from within does not entail a naive or overly optimistic view of liberal institutions. Instead, the primary challenge lies in acknowledging the inherent constraints and potentialities of strategies performed both in political mandates and grassroots movements. This does not imply the institutionalization of quilombo within the ossified structures of the neocolonial nation-state. Quilombo tactics and technologies are in constant flux, and if co-opted by institutional politics, they risk diluting their radical legacy of contestation and reinvention. Thus the movement is not to institutionalize the quilombo, but to aquilombar the institutions.

Can law transcend the confines of in/human dynamics and confront the foundations of the colonial order? If we consider the postcolonial legal order in the world as we know it, it appears unlikely. However, I would rather prefer to not have a closed answer to this question and to leave it open to germinate. In our current alarming political climate, this speculation appears to be an ongoing process of reinvention, a spiral temporality where we must learn with the ancestral past and present (Martins; Krenak; Bruzaca et al.) in order to transform the impossible into reality (Trouillot). Anticolonial, Black, and Indigenous onto-epistemologies, tactics and strategies are vital to escaping from within, against, and most importantly, beyond the ongoing juridical, economic, and political apparatus of ge-no-ci-de, femicide and ecocide.

Sarah: Again, Juliana’s contributions resonate with me. I will close by drawing connections to my own desire for ‘ecclesiastical’ ways of being human that refuse imperialism and diminish violence (Wynter & McKittrick), which might also answer Marie’s thoughtful question about law and prefiguration.

Juliana’s words led to the otherwise and elsewhere, escape and fugitivity, speculation and gestures, and other imaginaries of reprieve from oppression. They also illustrated practices that seek to realize such imaginaries: anticolonial tactics and strategies. I agree that tactics and strategies operate within and against existing structures, because we cannot fully delink from the world that we are born into. I want to rest, nonetheless, with Juliana’s mention of the beyond – as an imaginary and a practice.

For me, the ‘beyond’ means prefiguring emancipatory ways of being human, all possibility and real. In Indigenous and abolitionist movements, the concept of prefiguration conveys the fact that, in the present, we embody our pasts and futures (Coulthard; Akbar et al; Kaba; Maynard & Betasamosake Simpson). This understanding disrupts Western linear time and progress narratives by fusing ends and means. If prison abolition is a politics of care (Woodley), we must be care-ful in our relationships, which conjures (Pryse & Spillars) a parallax reality – although, prisons are no less oppressive. Subaltern people and allies will seek to break with legacies of the past by strategizing for the future; yet we must also prefigure (p/re/figure) these desires today within our capacity.

Being human ‘otherwise’ may then not only be possible for separate communities of marronage, who do engage dominant institutions, as Juliana says. It may be possible among people, globally, who foster small economies, living places and further ways of being that exceed capitalist relations – for example, dwelling on ‘capture land’, the widespread ownershipless settlements that have dotted the Jamaican landscape since the abolition of slavery (Goffe). Being human otherwise may be possible in encampments, liberation zones, blockades, marches, dress, arts, music, conversations, walks, gardens (plots), classrooms, and such ordinary experiments in freedom that are speculative and imperfect (Walcott, Hartman, Sharpe, Moten & Harney; Wynter; McKittrick; Betasamosake Simpson).

When it comes to the possibilities for law, it is therefore important to ask, ‘which law?’, since ‘law’ often presumes that of liberal homoeconomicus with his law-less inhuman. There are, however, co-existent ‘lifeworlds of law’ (Mills) within, against and beyond oppression. Some seek economic redistribution, some divestment from prisons, decent work, the end of genocide… There is law that straddles Indigenous ‘resurgence’ and genuine ‘reconciliation’ (Ibid.). Such ecclesiastical genres of lawmaking have a right to opacity from cooptation (Glissant). They also anticipate that others can re-root in earthways and responsible human relations (Mills). We all existentially depend upon this possibility of what being human could mean: ‘the setting up of juridico-economic architectures of redress’ (Ferreira da Silva, 85).

Left to right: Sarah Riley Case, ‘Bodhi (Awakenings)’ (2018); Still from the film Quilombo, Continuum (2023), directed by Juliana M. Streva; Sarah Riley Case, ‘Prières et grâce’ (2014).


[1] Sarah is grateful to Jeffrey Kennedy for listening and for sharing his thoughts on this topic.


Sarah Riley Case is an Assistant Professor of Slavery and the Law, Critical Race Theory, and Black Life at the McGill Faculty of Law. Her work crosses over law, history, conceptions of justice, representations of nature, and the arts. Her publications include Looking to the Horizon: The Meanings of Reparations for Unbearable Crises (2023), which explores Caribbean reparations claims for slavery, colonialism and climate change; and To Protest for Black Life during the Pandemic: Resistance and Freedom in a Settler State (2024), which considers qualities of protest, including presence, care, and calling for abolition, inspired by Black feminism. She was co-curator of Thoughts of Liberation (2020), which put Black women poets, scholars, artists, and activists in conversation.

Juliana M. Streva is a transdisciplinary legal researcher, writer, and independent filmmaker, born and raised in Brazil. Her work speculates on legal theory, history, antiracist, feminist and anticolonial ecologies, poethics, and worldmaking. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, member of the Fung Global Fellows Program on ‘Colonial Residues’. Her publications include the edited volumes Displacing Theory (2024), O Quilombismo Reader (2022), and the book Corpo, Raça, Poder: Extermínio Negro no Brasil (2018). She has directed and produced the films Quilombo, Continuum (2023) and Mulheres em Movimento (2020).

Marie Petersmann is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at LSE Law School. Her research combines legal theory with political ecology and ecological philosophy, with a particular interest in practices of refusal and resistance against new frontiers of extractivism. Her project Anthropocene Legalities: Reconfiguring Legal Relations within More-than-human Worlds is funded by a Dutch NWO Veni grant (2022-2025). Her book When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide was published with CUP in 2022. She is currently editing (with Dimitri Van Den Meerssche) a volume on Underworlds: Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering, to be published in 2025.

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