Introduction

The Problem of Human Rights in the Face of Decolonization

Many of us know that human rights don’t work for the majority in the era of global capitalism, but we’re at a loss to think through alternatives. It seems as if to give up on the ideal of human rights is to invite further erosion of human rights. However, few in need of normative human rights, outlined in the United Nations 1948 Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR) and its amendments, can access them. To know they don’t work for the majority who would benefit from their safeguards, and yet to rely on them to do so—that is, to tick off as done those who cannot command those rights because the rights exist on paper—seems at least hypocritical, and at worst structurally violent.

Hannah Arendt famously identified the crippling paradox that accompanies the concept of human rights as both the manifestation of the (supposed) ubiquity and universality of human rights but at the same time their guarantor. Writing about the condition of statelessness between World War I and World War II, a condition that is increasingly not a state of exception in the contemporary moment, Arendt points out that, if a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the inborn and inalienable “rights of man,” come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided, whereas actually the opposite is the case. “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man” (1976, 300).

So those who should bear rights should not be in the position of pleading for such rights. When those who do not have rights seek recognition for rights, the fact is they must instantiate themselves as victims before the law to claim, paradoxically, the exalted position of the human, which was never supposed to have left them in the first place. As Arendt puts it here once again, “a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man.”

Such qualities, however, are not only not universally held, but also not universally believed to be what makes the human, as Sylvia Wynter reminds us (2003). They are based on a Western notion of the human that has a specific cultural development in the post-Enlightenment building of man as a subject-citizen who commands rights. They manifest an inherent bias that positions everyone and everything that is not embodied in that notion of “man” as outside the ambit of respect. Quality, in the context of the human, of human rights, then, refers not simply to characteristics, but also to a sense of superior quality. Further, this human does not represent the human; he is considered to be the human; and he is considered to be universally desirable. The values that inhere in human rights are historically, contextually, a part of a colonial narrative that shows up in contemporary life through capitalism’s adherence to those values.

It is said of Western European and American colonialism that whites colonized with the gun in one hand and the Bible in the other, justifying the former with the latter. This has an analogy in contemporary human-rights regimes, in which human rights are often used to justify supposed humanitarian interventions that are in fact undertaken with a view to acquisition of property through dispossession, either for the state itself or on behalf of its allies. (An example of this, the Australian Northern Territory Emergency intervention, is examined in some detail in chapter 5.) Following Wynter’s calling out of what she has termed the “genre of man,” this book argues for the unsettling of the “genre of the human” in which “human rights” are invested, and the calling out of the containment of the human by the genre of the human, which is aligned with but extends further than Wynter’s “genre of the human as man,” which I shall unpack shortly. Let me address the elephant in the room first: Why would anyone want to attack human rights?

The unsettling, or estrangement, of human rights may feel risky, because human rights comprise one of the most globally recognized conventions for an ethical sense of what it means to be human, even if that sense does not translate into adherence to the UNDHR and its amendments in actuality, and even though the concept of the human expressed in the declaration is consonant with colonialism. However, there is risk in not unsettling normative human rights, too. If there is no estrangement of normative human rights, there can be no thinking about what exceeds the human in its normative sense, no concept of that which I term the “effluent.”

“Man,” then, is not all humans. “Man,” following Wynter, rejects or conveniently overlooks the practices of slavery and the accumulation through dispossession of Indigenous land that got capitalism going in all its settler lineaments, and the exploitative labor practices that sustain it today. This “Man” undertakes to represent, or in Wynter’s terms, to “overrepresent,” those outside of Himself to Himself, meaning that, to Him, there really is no outside-of-Himself. Planetary wellness, it would seem, will not prevail without colonialist-capitalist “Man” acting on the call to disintegrate “His” toxic self-regard. The fact that Man is included in the threat of extinction is of no comfort, for without interruption, He determines not only His own extinction, but also that of the co-constituted subject: the human, the nonhuman animal, and the “environment” in relation.3 Effluence, as an extra-anthropocentric conceit, can drive the Anthropocene’s denouement into narrative reach. The effluent eye interrupts Man’s trajectory, making it a radically decolonial field of vision.

Why Do We Need the Concept of an Effluent Eye? What Is “It”?

Over the past three decades or so, criticism in various humanities disciplines has developed a literature of what Judith Butler calls the (un)“grievable,” the precarious, that which is seen as valued-less or valueless, less worthy of care, or even a (human) burden (2006, 2009). Simultaneously, Black studies have generated metonyms of the cusp between land and sea, with specific investments in the transatlantic slave-trade history embodying Blackness. Butler’s work may be seen to follow on the preoccupation in the 1980s with trauma theory that grew out of work on the Shoah/Holocaust. However, the movement toward the cusp, the border, and the littoral has at least some of its roots in Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 work on the mestiza and “Borderlands” (of the U.S.–Mexico border) and, subsequently, in Wynter’s identification of the concept “Western Man” (2003). “Western Man” incorrectly assumes himself to be the human carte blanche, with coloniality and whiteness embedded. What this hopelessly violent move obscures is its erasure of Indigenous, Black, mestiza, and biracial/multiracial consciousnesses, and with them, anticolonial care/love.4 Recent explorations in Black studies articulate this denial, specifically invoking the littoral. What lies beneath the Atlantic—dead slaves and their affect, actuality, and surviving vivacity under normative conditions of Black death—are invoked in Christina Sharpe’s 2016 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Tiffany Lethabo King’s 2019 monograph on the frictions and contiguities of Native and Black epistemologies uses the shoal, as neither land nor sea, to figure the relations between obliteration through slavery, on the one hand, and Indigenous genocide, on the other. The effluent, I propose, has the potential to look through a specific lens to see the connection between Butler-influenced thought and the Black littoral. The Effluent Eye undoes Western Man, Wynter’s “coloniality of being,” through an attack on one of its most cherished mechanisms for “accommodating” the embodied persistence of Blackness, Indigeneity, and supposedly worthless being into the colonialist-capitalist order: “human rights.”

I use what I call the effluent eye to reposition human rightness, to associate it with the rejection of the genre of “the human” that is central to normative Western “human rights,” to propose a human right-making with the possibility for rights other than those. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED online), effluence means “a substance that flows out of something” or “the action of flowing out.” I use the term to refer to that which exceeds the containment attached to the genre of the human: containment of the body by the brain, the state of its subjects and the power of human subjects over objects, as such containment is idealized in normative rhetoric of “human rights.” It would be spurious to use the term effluent as if it did not carry connotations of sewage, waste, and toxicity beyond a generalized leakiness. Effluvium is related to effluence, in that ex- e- and ef- all come from the Latin ex, meaning “out of,” or “from.” Effluvium is defined as “an invisible emanation,” especially “an offensive exhalation or smell” or a “by-product, especially in the form of waste” (OED online). Effluent subjects are not in and of themselves waste or toxic in a fundamentalist sense. They may, however, be toxic to the normative sense of the human, and therefore to human-rights regimes.

My contention is that the site of potential toxic relationality between normative human rights and effluent being, brought into view by the effluent eye, is itself of worth, because it manifests human right-making. Right-making is not simply against normative human rights, it is beyond or outside of normative human rights. I focus on communities that cannot and do not command the benefits of human rights, and may not even want to do so. Deploying an effluent point of view, it becomes possible to see what the resources or capacities of such communities may be; the effluent eye makes methodologies for affirming alternative practices of human right-making possible.

I own, and own up to, the effluent eye here, and all the risks it entails, through the deployment of a specific methodology that constitutes the novel territory of extra-anthropocentric human rights, practices of right-making that reject the centering of the human as the unit of value that trumps all other subjects in the making of ethical being. Human rightness, I propose, is achieved in practice in the absence of human dominion as the ideal. The art of governing oneself and others in forms of imperial containment, be it containment of the body by the intellect, containment of objects as instruments of human “development,” or containment of nation through sovereign-state decisions of inclusion and exclusion as humans are wont to do, is not an art of right-making, but an art of imperial forms of governance. This assertion is not a denial of the human, but quite the contrary. It is a setting of humans in relation to other forms of subjectivity, such as nonhuman animals and the environment, where the latter comprise a set of subjects in and of themselves. We cannot know these subjects intimately through an anthropocentric lens, but neither can we deny the relations we have with them because they are not human-like. Tracing these extrahuman relations is a step toward demythologizing human dominion in the making of human rightness.

What, then, do the effluent eye and effluent being look like? What is our subject? I embark here on an exercise in description that will be, I hope, a useful outline whose dimensions will be robustly demonstrated in the chapters that follow this introduction. The outline may look at times like a characterization or a phenomenology, but it is neither. A characterization presupposes an identification, and a “phenomenology” presupposes the possibility of “science . . . concerned with the description and classification of its phenomena, rather than causal or theoretical explanation” (OED online).

The effluent is not a subject in the Saussurean sense; “it” does not conform to the subject of semiotics, or of Louis Althusser or Michel Foucault. “It” is not even appropriately referred to by that pronoun, although that is the best I have here to stand in for the effluent. The effluent has subjectivity but not identity. “It” is emergent and decomposing, or decaying, and is never fully graspable as an identity fixed across time. The effluent comprises processes in which the emergent can be the decaying and the decaying can be the emergent. The effluent is a prophetic and poetic that is not able to be envisioned or controlled by the technologies of surveillance, of law, of subjectification.

Allow me a thought experiment in which I put W. B. Yeats’s “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” together with Marlene Nourbese Philip’s 2008 Zong! Yeats’s poem points to the effluent. Yet, because it affirms Crazy Jane’s ability to respond, and indeed her response to the Bishop, it is contained within the realm of what Butler calls the “speakable”: it is comprehensible as a lyric. Yet it is haunted by unspeakability, as Butler claims the speakable is:

To move outside the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject. To embody the norms of speakability in one’s speech is to consummate one’s status as a subject of speech. Impossible speech would be precisely the ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the “psychotic” that the rules that govern the domain of speakability produce, and by which they are continually haunted. (1997, 133)

In the Yeats poem, both the persona Crazy Jane and the entire lyric point toward the unspeakable but are contained within the speakable.

Here we note that the poet grasps the fact that the effluent is not in and of itself toxic, or waste. Note the proximity between “love” and “the place of excrement” and between the “whole” and “the rent,” the latter juxtaposing wholeness to the female body as commodity, or rentable, in the pun on “rent” as both that which is let and that which is torn asunder. Further, the Bishop’s reference to the “sty” renders Crazy Jane a pig, in a proximity she affirms rather than denies. Yet the politics and poetics of the effluent are not valent in the poem, for Crazy Jane has a coherent voice: if the Bishop does not listen to her, that doesn’t mean the reader/listener can’t “hear” her. The Bishop and Crazy Jane are identifiable, discrete subjects involved in discourse. Readers are not in doubt about this as they read the discourse.

Philip’s Zong! is a poetic sequence based on the Zong massacre. The captain of the vessel Zong, having apparently gone off course with slaves on board bound for the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America, determined that there was too little water on board for crew and slaves, and ordered the killing of between 132 and 150 slaves on and in the days following November 29, 1781. The historical record is famous and became even more so after Philip’s publication and performance of her poetic sequence on the event. The owners of the Zong had insurance on the slaves and attempted to claim it, whereupon the insurance company refused to pay up, not on the grounds that the slaves were murdered, but on the grounds that the ship’s company was not in danger of death by dehydration. The court records state that one slave managed to climb back on board, and some threw themselves overboard when they heard the cries of the others drowning.

Philip has three sources for her text: an ancestor’s story, coauthored by Setaey Adamu Boateng; the extant record of the court case between the owners of the ship, the Gregsons, and the insurers, Gilberts; and the unnamed voice of one of the perpetrators. At first Gilberts were ordered to pay the indemnity for the slaves, but the subsequent case ascertained that the ship owners were at fault for hiring a captain who did not navigate correctly, and thus ordered the drowning of the slaves without due cause. The case records that the judges accepted the condition of slavery: “It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property. This therefore was a throwing over of goods, and of part to save the residue” (211; citation from the original case heard in 1783; emphasis added). The judges did not accept the claim of the necessity of the “throwing over of goods” due to the demonstrably poor condition of the ship and the evident and catastrophic failures of leadership in navigation and other decision-making processes.

Zong! uses the words of the court case as a word hoard to, as Philip puts it, tell the story that cannot be told. She takes the words from the court document to refer to the event in formations of the fugue, both in its musical form and in the form of the subject who has suffered a trauma and is amnesiac, not being able to recover themselves. The fugue is defined by the OED as:

1. Music

   a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.

2. Psychiatry

   a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

Zong! is a “non-lyric.” There is no consistent I or you through the sequence. The poems are incantations, with masses of space between the words, set as crests and bases of waves visually on the page, and bearing

             wwww  w                                      a

w wa                           wa                                   t

            er                                  wa                               te

     r                                                   wat

                      er                                               wa  ter

           of                          w

                            ant

As Philip-as-poet observes, and as at least one reader has observed, the (de)composed slaves decompose the subject, be it the I-who-writes or the I-who-reads. If the subject is in a fugue state, the body of the dead slaves cannot be exhumed, disinterred: the subject charged with doing that disinterring is itself reflexively rendered decomposed, incoherent. The poet writes in “Notanda” (the afterword in Zong!) that:

The poems resist my attempts at meaning or coherence and, at times, I too approach the irrationality and confusion, if not madness (madness is outside of the box of order), of a system that could enable, encourage even, a man to drown 150 people as a way to maximize profits—the material and the nonmaterial. Or is it the immaterial? Within the boundaries established by the words and their meanings there are silences; within each silence is the poem, which is revealed only when the text is fragmented and mutilated, mirroring the fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans, their customs and ways of life. (195)

And this is the experience of (at least) one reader of the Zong! sequence:

I think: it takes courage to keep reading; the courage to step overboard into meaninglessness has been stripped away; terror is deep. Philip is asking us to step overboard (willingly, we can choose) and experience the loss of what contains us (language, its rules, its customs), the safety of structures we’ve inherited—no, not safety, how dangerous it is to imagine that language is safe. I think: how language is set up in my guts and bones, how I have been taught (since I learned to read on Dick-and-Jane primers) to trust it, and how it lives in my skin (which is olive, but white for all intents and purposes) in my cells and nervous system, invisible, framing my points of view. Philip’s own distrust of language forces her to pull it apart, to expose it, draw attention to its insides, to the stories/silences/murders/massacres that have been hidden there. (Klonaris 2011)

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” demonstrates Butler’s speakable haunted by the unspeakable, where there is the grammar of the Dick-and-Jane primer, what Philip calls “the box of order” (2008, 192) that points to, but cannot admit of, its own incoherence. In the case of Zong!, however, the unspeakable is haunted by the speakable. The speakable cannot admit that the human cannot be slave. The impropriety of the fact that the human is a slave can be glossed within the speakable only as coincidental, relegated to a subordinate clause: “It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property.” How to speak the unspeakable of the reality of the nonbeing of the slave as human becomes Philip’s calling, her prophetic and poetic voice, in which the decomposed and the emergent coexist. Philip is a poet of the effluent, in large part because she consistently balances the ethical imperative to tell the story against the ethical imperative not to resurrect its enslaved victims as whole, to substitute for their violated being in an unscrupulous politics of body-snatching. Here “body-snatching” is my term for the practice of overwriting the dead, the violated, by presenting a fantasy of their health and well-being—their speakability as normative subjects—in the place of the ethical imperative to mourn-with (not to assume to be like) offered by the apprehension of suffering and dead embodiment. In an effluent reading, denials of the devastation wrought differentially on different places on land and in the sea and in space, and on distinct human beings and nonhuman animal beings, indeed form a practice of body-snatching. Such denials constitute a fantastic delusion of communal well-being.

Now I can return to a description of the effluent without, I hope, sounding too obscure, since the effluent is analogous to that which escapes our “regular box of order” or Butler’s “unspeakable.” Effluence has subjectivity, but is not a discrete subject and cannot therefore be fetishized. It can be, as we have seen, both emergent and decomposing, as in the effluent subjectivities of the Zong’s drowned, who emerge in the counter(f)actuality of Philip’s poetics. It is a constellation of relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and the “environment,” both alive and dead, where the environment is in scare quotes because it tends to be read as an anthropocentric word: that which surrounds humans, who are at the assumed center of it, is the environment. Effluent relations obtain in the energy of co-constitution through mutual care, or love. In a profound irony, the word zong is a mutilation of the Dutch zorg, meaning “care,” the original name of the slave boat of Philip’s poem (Webster 2007, 287).

Yet it is not a complete irony, for we cannot know what bounds of care persist in and on the Zong, from those who preferred to throw themselves overboard rather than see their companions drown alone, to Philip’s loving fugue creation, Zong! The effluent is not an identity or character in and of itself. It is the relation between the sea, the drowned, and Philip (and even Philip’s care to represent a perpetrator in the sequence) that brings the effluent constellation into emergence despite, or maybe even because of, physical decay. The effluent can be, and is, harmed by the sovereign state and colonialist-capitalist relations, yet it cannot be contained by the structural violence of those constructs. Even the writing out in the legal documents of human being as slave cannot control or censor the effluent subjectivity that emerges from Philip’s poetics, in which humans’ trajectory as slaves is not denied, but affirmed by entirely exceeding their status as such. Effluent being does not rely on the state and its associated apparati for care (say, the courts) and is often either entirely hostile to state sovereignty or regards the state anywhere on a scale from nuisance to irrelevant. The nation is anything but sacrosanct.

The effluent is not congruent with Butlerian disposability or the ungrievable because it has its own sovereignty and value, which is not that of colonial capitalism or the sovereign state. Indeed, I have argued, Philip’s Zong! manifests a methodology and an aesthetics for grieving the ungrievable. The effluent is not productive of goods in the capitalist sense: it refuses the instantiation of the human as sovereign subject and object and refuses its attendant economics of commodification. This is one of the effluent meanings of those who were drowned and those who willfully followed them into the sea. The dead, in this context, end their commodification-as-slaves in the very act of dying.

The effluent may exceed the human and includes the human. However, it is not an all-inclusive company. The effluent is not naïve. It lives alongside colonial-settler imaginary, but is at home with itself. It is not an exotic looking for colonialist-capitalist converts or knowledge translation of itself into the ruins of, or ruinous, colonial capitalism. One can imagine, for example, how a superficial reading of the effluent could result in a seek and find of discrete “unspeakable” subjects that would then be fetishized for their supposed unspeakability, like so many Sarah Baartmans put on display for the normative, orientalist eye in a pornographic frenzy of liberal pity. Such pity is also a form of body-snatching, since the pity is seen to rehabilitate the subject of the spectacle, while instantiating the spectators as the generous accorders of the subjectivity at stake.

The effluent constellates its subjectivity through affirmation, not the politics of recognition. Liberal societies use recognition, as critics from Kelly Oliver to Alexander Weheliye have demonstrated, to accommodate those who claim to have suffered violence through expecting them to instantiate themselves (once again) as victims by begging those “valuable”/grievable within the hierarchy to recognize their suffering. Where “gross human rights violations” (GHRVs)5 have been committed, survivors are often looking for recognition of the unimaginable, which belongs, categorically, to the realm of the unspeakable. Oliver (2001, 15) also uses Dori Laub’s formulation: to bear witness to ourselves, to develop an “inner witness,” we need to have had experiences of ourselves as having been listened to, affirmed; we can see ourselves as valuable only if we have seen others seeing us as valuable. Elsewhere I have traced the mechanics of how witnessing before an authority that cannot see a victim as of worth can become an exercise in denial of worth. One sees the authority bearing witness to oneself—the victim-on-show—in a manner completely not coincident with one’s sense of self. This creates traumatic fracturing in the very act that is supposed to “rescue.” Can one explain effluent values to an authority, be it state or court, that cannot conceive of effluent value in the first place? What does it mean if the state has indeed inflicted GHRVs and it is to the state that one appeals for one’s rights? Or, as a sexual assault survivor once put it to me in Soweto in 1996 (and I have heard several versions of this since working in the field of sexual assault care delivery), “how do you report police to police?” Ultimately, effluent subjectivity rejects the demands of normative human-rights regimes to instantiate oneself as a victim (again) to obtain rights one should have “enjoyed” in the first place but clearly did not; otherwise the violation would not have been, in the most practical of senses, doable.

The value the effluent creates and attracts is outside of colonial capitalism, involving Indigenous labor and embodied capacity outside the value of the normative subject as producer and/or consumer. In this sense, the confines of colonial capitalism produce threats to the effluent, not capitalism’s proposed “necessity,” which the effluent (literally and otherwise) does not buy. For example, categorically unrepaid subventions from Aboriginal lands and slavery were indeed “necessary” to get global capitalism going, but this does not amount to the necessity of capitalism, just as the fact that the court in the Zong case glosses over the decision to capitalize humans as immaterial does not render the question settled, to use the term in both its colonial and monetized terms.

I turn now to the question of zorg or care in the sense of health, in relation to the effluent. How the effluent constitutes care in relation to normative public-health assumptions is a preoccupation of this monograph. If the effluent eye can see bounds of care that are extra-anthropocentric, such a vision is not coincidental with normative public health, which assumes the physical well-being of humans and their survival as paramount. The difficulty this presents to the effluent eye is that such an eye can envision situations in which death is preferable to colonized or enslaved life. Some of us might not find surprising the acts of the slaves who jumped in voluntarily after their drowning companions in the Zong history, possibly owing to the unimaginability and distance of the event, in the sense that Oliver cites the “unimaginable” (2001, 1). Yet the unimaginability of the Indigene who is forced to “choose” between physical health and cultural death is constituted by the notion that settler colonialism is a healthy environment; and this is itself premised on the assumption that survivability in settler colonialism is always of benefit. So, for example, when I asked some doctors (not all!) in the Centocow region of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) why they did not, or refused to, understand why HIV patients refused to take their highly active antiretroviral drugs (HAART) consistently, what lay at the heart of the matter was often the refusal of dual usage (of Western and traditional methods) as in any way beneficial, owing to the contamination of Western ideals with Indigenous practices, as well as to some youths’ penchant for selling HAART in exchange for hallucinogenic alternatives. Bearing in mind that adult male unemployment for Blacks for the entirety of South Africa in the first quarter of 2022 was 38.6 percent, one has to ask: What, from the perspective of capitalist economics, do these young men coming from the remote, rural areas of KZN have in store for them? What, from a capitalist perspective, are they “saving themselves” for? This is a question I take up in detail in chapters 3 and 4. For the moment, however, it is sufficient to propose that the effluent eye affirms the emergent not-yet-subject, in this case youth who have not yet discovered their worth in noncapitalist terms, and whom the colonialist-capitalist view sees as always already waste before “it” (even) emerges as a vector of effluent subjectivity.

Public health, then, is not a good if the “public” in “public health” cannot affirm effluent being. Being effluent is not a state of cruel optimism. Effluent subjectivity living alongside colonialist-capitalist conditions has embodied knowledge that such conditions are harmful to effluent life. For example, effluent being might look like “spending time,” as in wasting time in the sense of not producing capitalist value, but the very concept of spending time is nonsense within effluent being.6 When effluent subjectivity, fragmented by colonial capitalism, is forced to view “itself” as spending time, as can happen (as when such subjects are assumed to be “lazy”), effluent subjectivity may well value physical self-harm as enjoyable, or even as a harm reduction strategy against colonial capitalism, as I argue in the final chapter. Effluent being embraces harm reduction rather than utopianism, optimism, or pessimism, because it lives alongside both possibility and extinction, to the point where they can be seen as one and the same within a range of ways to be. The effluent eye can see effluent subjectivity valuing being-with over surviving (like the Zong slaves who willed their own drowning) and valuing being per se rather than being like. For, “being like” is key to the triangulation that makes the possession of objects a competition between subjects to be wealthier than, to be more like, where “more like” indicates not a fixed goal, but a constantly desiring subject, which is capitalism’s ideal and can be thought of as capitalism’s object. Think, for example, of how the basic structure of desire in advertising is mimetic: we desire an object because someone else desires it as well. The fact that there is no object in the formulation “to be like” is the clue that being like has no fixed object in the endless desiring with no “enough,” the endless desiring of objects that makes capital accumulation “work.” This “work” is very different from the Indigenous and other forms of effluent labor that I explore in the following chapters. Before we get that far, however, let me outline why I see the human right to health as a doomed strategy for health in the current era.

The “Human” Right to Health: A (Failed) Containment Strategy

The United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (UNHCHR) dictates that the World Health Organization (WHO) constitution of 1946 envisages “the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being” (United Nations General Assembly 1948). The first problem is with the concept of health as an attribute of human beings exclusive of the environment. If you are already living in an area of environmental degradation, where fracking, for example, or bad air quality, undermines your health and you do not have the resources to move, any health care you may be able access is geared toward ameliorating the symptoms of degraded environment and is not a cure as such. Indeed, the UNHCHR and the WHO make their division between the “human” and a human-manipulated environment clear in their explanation that the words “the highest attainable” do not mean that humans have a right to be healthy, in part due to governments’ inability to control directly “socio-economic conditions.”

Good health is influenced by several factors that are outside the direct control of states, such as an individual’s biological makeup and socioeconomic conditions. Rather, the right to health refers to the right to the enjoyment of a variety of goods, facilities, services, and conditions necessary for its realization (Office of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, 2008).

Good health, the text implies, means people have an improved standard of life through capitalist labor and the goods it provides. There is no mention of the reverse: that being poor and having work could indeed degrade one’s health through exploitative labor practices. Here, access to health as a right, as a concept, cannot comprehend intergenerational experiences of “environmental” contamination. Further, the exclusion of the state as playing a role in socioeconomic conditions, alongside genetic factors, naturalizes the state as “off the hook” where socioeconomic conditions are concerned, as though capitalism itself were as natural as genetic expression. (Of course, the UNHCHR shows its age in assuming that what it calls biological makeup cannot be manipulated.)

The implication is clear: settler-colonial capitalism is the implicit framework within which the human is thought of in the UNHCHR and its related documents. This means that the “inalienable” right to health is fundamentally linked to the right to work, where labor is registered as work within the capitalist system. Much labor is, therefore, not accorded the category of work. Indeed, Indigenous nonsettler populations, such as hunter-gatherers—think of Inuit in Canada or the Khoi-San in sub-Saharan Africa or Indigenous peoples in Australia—are often regarded as “lazy” (even though, when they do take up positions within capitalist systems, they have also been considered to be interlopers, in the wrong place, or “exceptional”).

The absent concept in the U.N. approach is the environment, not as that which surrounds the Human and over which He has no control, but in terms of a co-constituted subjectivity that we can call the human, the nonhuman animal, and “inanimate” matter in relation. This absence is also evident in narratives addressing both the relation between human and nonhuman animal, on the one hand, and that between landscape and its abuse, on the other. Both elisions depend on the post-Enlightenment split of the human from that which is other to the human, or of subject from object. This split, a profound threat to the United Nations’ stated goal of attaining equitable health services across race, class, and gender, depends on anthropocentrism, where anthropocentrism refers to a human-centered, or “anthropocentric,” point of view. In philosophy, anthropocentrism can refer to the point of view that humans are the only, or primary, holders of moral standing. Anthropocentric value systems thus see nature in terms of its value to humans. While such a view might be seen most clearly in advocacy for the sustainable use of natural resources, even arguments that advocate for the preservation of nature on the grounds that pure nature enhances the human spirit must also be seen as anthropocentric (Padwe 2013).

Here we can begin to see that the anthropocentric view and the subject who inhabits the UNDHR coincide. However, radical critique in terms of both the character of the subject in the UNDHR and the subject of anthropocentrism demonstrates that the subject in each case refers not to all humans, but to what Wynter calls the “genre” of the human or the genre of “being human” (2003, 269). The problem of the Human of the Anthropocene is the same as the problem of the genre of man in Wynter’s work, which has its roots in the Fanonian critique of European Man. To reprise the dilemma in Arendt’s terms, those who should bear rights (Mankind) should not be in the position of pleading for such rights. When those who do not have rights seek recognition for rights, as I noted earlier, they have to instantiate themselves as victims before the law, paradoxically, in order to claim the exalted position of the Human, which was never supposed to have left them in the first place.

The values that inhere in “human rights” are historically, contextually, a core part of colonial narratives that emerge in contemporary life in capitalism’s adherence to those values and in the fact that settler colonialism is not confined to history. Wynter emphasizes her own and others’ exclusion from the category of the human on the basis of their race (Blackness) and their gender (not male): “Our struggle as Black women has to do with . . . the displacement of the genre of the human of ‘man’ ” (288). Wynter proposes that, “because of this overrepresentation by the Genre of Man, which is defined in the first part of the title [of Wynter’s article] as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation” (260). Wynter’s use of “unsettling” means not just awkward or uncomfortable, but in my reading also refers to the colonial character of human rights. This colonial character of human rights has generated the imperial mode in which pandemics are thought of: the anthropocentrism, xenophobia, and lack of global rather than national scales of pandemic-talk are no match for twenty-first-century pandemics taking place in conditions of increasing “hypercapitalism.”7 Effluence, as a methodology that navigates between categories, rather than being addicted to them, is required instead.

Thinking pandemic through the lenses of the genre of the human and the national is radically inadequate. A further, related barrier to our concept of health obtains in the ways in which we live in the contemporary world. Fifth-wave public-health theory rejects framing health challenges that current, globalized communities face as events that can be addressed from within extant conceptions of public health. These challenges are best understood, fifth-wave public-health advocates argue, not as diagnoses, so much as symptoms of the unsustainable ways of living promoted by late-capitalist political, material, and sociocultural practices of being in the world. These ways of being and the (failed) promises attached to them form a “fifth wave” of public-health challenges, in which public-health interventions per se have diminishing returns in an environment in which the ways of being in the world to which late capitalism habituates humans are themselves the ailment, not the secondary “infections” they produce. Overwhelming poverty, substance (ab)use, malnutrition, overnutrition/obesity, and other stress-related illnesses have their drivers in working conditions and gaps between rich and poor. Or as Peter Hanlon and his coauthors put it, a “fifth wave” in public health is necessary to address these health issues, which are occurring in a context where society is also facing challenges created by “the broader problems of exponential growth in population, money creation, and energy usage” (2011, 30). In this context, as with environments directly damaged by extractive ecologies, accessing health is more likely to mean harm reduction than cure, since one cannot live outside of colonialist-capitalist damage, even if it is affecting one’s health negatively.

This changes our reading of character from the well-worn narrative path of assessing individual moral failures and virtues to one of affirming persistence8 in the face of the structural violence of global capitalism. Even more radically, in some instances, such persistence can mean availability to be harmed in situations where the choice not to persist may be seen as preferable to sustaining life. Indigenous communities such as that depicted in Alexis Wright’s 2006 epic Carpentaria (Waany/gi communities of the southern part of the Carpentaria Peninsula, Australia) do not read substance abuse and self-harm as inherently pathological, a series of “bad choices” on the part of individuals.9 I address questions of substance use in the settler colony in chapter 4 and explicate Carpentaria as an exemplary right-making artifact in chapter 5. For the moment, let me observe that the model of character that reads health as a personal responsibility and outcome, as is the case in the conventional bildungsroman and its mutually sustaining narrow medical model of morality, glosses over inequitable living conditions as an aspect of fate. This model ignores health-choice disablement10 among Indigenous populations. Carpentaria, among other works of fiction dealing with Indigenous health in settler contexts, suggests that the cult of individual choice is a complicit practice, enabling ignorance of the construction and conditions of residential school experiences and labor for Indigenous peoples as both racist and a trajectory of harm.

Access to heath as a right cannot correct intergenerational experiences of “environmental” (including climate change) or settler-induced exploitation or slavery or their intersection, which sit at the nexus of vectors of harm. Extractive industries’ exploitation of land and both nonhuman and human animals is part and parcel of the same coin. Further, since national and international organizations motivate for such exploitation, they too can be described as extractive industries. Black Lives Matter strikes a chord (or discord) precisely because, within Wynter’s “genre of man,” Black lives are perceived as matter: and those who have lived as Black/Brown matter and those of us who bear conscientious witness to that nonmattering know it and explicitly acknowledge it.

Effluent thinking that enables a decolonial context for viewing the relations between history, disease, human and nonhuman animals, and the “environment” equips us to understand the pandemic phenomenon in all its complexity. Here I give a (very) brief rehearsal of the geneses of HIV, SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus), and 2019-nCoV, concentrating on the case of HIV because we have a good historical sense of its trajectory, to underscore this point. The question of a decolonial history of medicine is the central topic of chapter 2. Here I touch on that history to contextualize the need to reject the category of Man in reading pandemic disease and to instantiate what I call the effluent eye in its stead.

HIV has its genesis in the Kinshasa region, between 1910 and 1930, when the virus jumped the species boundary from its simian origins, initially probably because of bush hunting. (The reservoir populations of HIV are the red-capped mangabey [Cercocebus torquatus] and the greater spot-nosed monkey [Cercopithecus nictitans]; the transmission species is chimpanzees [Pan troglodytes], who prey on monkeys.) What drove its spread, however, was the rapid growth of Leopoldville, which was under the direct, personal ownership of Leopold II of Belgium up to 1908 and was subsequently a Belgian colony until 1960. Indentured laborers were being captured to produce rubber, railways were built, sexually transmitted infections were high (at one point, Leopoldville had a male to female population ratio of 2:1), and public health campaigns inoculating natives against diseases such as sleeping sickness involved the reuse of needles. (The inoculations had to do with keeping a labor force active, rather than concerns over the population health of native families as a social unit.) The setting was the perfect storm for a virus migrating from its reservoir population in the south of the Congo to Kinshasa and subsequently to Brazzaville up the river.

As Oliver Pybus and his fellow authors point out, “despite the importance of geography for infectious disease epidemiology, the effects of global mobility upon the genetic diversity and molecular evolution of pathogens are under-appreciated and only beginning to be understood” (2015, 1). In 2003, I was about to start work with colleagues in South Africa on the HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence (GBV) project. Our “kickoff” meeting was held in the Toronto area. Much to the surprise of some of us, the South African contingent’s supervisor, Eleanor Preston-Whyte, was reluctant to let them attend, because Toronto was the locus of a spiraling pandemic at the time. (The surprise shows just how biased the global North and West is about perceiving disease as generated in the Global South, rather than “at home.”)

SARS-CoV first appeared in China’s Guangdong province in November 2002. On March 12, 2003, the WHO issued a global alert, warning of atypical pneumonia spreading among hospital staff. Three days later, WHO named SARS and put out an emergency travel advisory: the disease was spreading throughout the world by people using air transport. The areas affected included, at different moments, Hong Kong, Toronto, several areas of mainland China, and Taiwan. Horseshoe bats are suspected to be the reservoir species of SARS-CoV, although masked civets are identified as the transmission species to humans, possibly in wet markets.

Since 2003, there have been four small outbreaks of SARS. However, the WHO warns that “these events demonstrate that the resurgence of SARS leading to an outbreak remains a distinct possibility” (2003). In January 2020, a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was identified as the cause of an outbreak of viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China. The disease, later named coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), subsequently spread globally. In the first three months after Covid-19 emerged, nearly 1 million people were infected and 50,000 died. It is relatively clear that bats are (once again) the reservoir species for SARS-CoV-2, but we do not yet know what the transmission species to humans is: it could be bats themselves or, as is more likely, an intermediate species, or sets of intermediate species. Bats have long been known as an important reservoir for many zoonotic viruses, including rabies virus, Hendra virus, Nipha virus, Ebola virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, and the beta coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome). The key to both zoonotic (transmission to human) and anthroponotic (transmission to nonhuman animals from humans) prevention is to determine how reservoir populations, transmission species, and the infected interact to prevent the spread of infection. For example, it was originally thought that pangolins, the most traded nonhuman animals globally, may have been the transmitters of Covid-19 to humans. However, the virus in the pangolins reveals that their disease was transmitted to them by humans, probably while hunting, selling, or butchering the pangolins. Thus conclude the scientists:

Our study suggests that pangolins are natural hosts of Beta coronaviruses. Large surveillance of coronaviruses in pangolins could improve our understanding of the spectrum of coronaviruses in pangolins. In addition to conservation of wildlife, minimizing the exposures of humans to wildlife will be important to reduce the spillover risks of coronaviruses from wild animals to humans. (Liu et al. 2020)

A similar train of thought on required research comes from those working on the pathway of SARS between bats, civets, and humans:

The genetic diversity of coronaviruses found in bats highlighted our poor understanding of viruses in wild animals. . . . There is an increased possibility of virus variants crossing the species barrier and causing outbreaks in humans as people come into closer contact with wild animals. . . . It is likely that in the emerging path of SARS-CoV, there are still other species missing between horseshoe bats and masked palm civets. One way of revealing possible links and suspects is to look at the ecological circles of both bats and masked palm civets. Alternatively, constant survey of wild animal species for SARS-CoV-like viruses should provide further information on animal reservoirs. (Shi and Hu 2008)

In my 2020 and 2022 studies on the pandemic, I used the term “zoonoses” in scare quotes because a decolonial, nonanthropocentric approach enables us to see these zoonoses as actually reverse zoonoses or zooanthroponoses (passing from human to nonhuman animals) at the systemic level: that is to say, it is the role of Man in global “development” that has brought these diseases to bear through the concentration of human and nonhuman contact in zones under ecological stress. A successful vaccine for Covid-19 is merely a solution to the novel coronavirus that causes it; more will follow, precisely because the ecological stress on human and nonhuman environments is growing as the physical contact zones between species are shrinking. Human–nonhuman-animal–environment ethics are required to conserve the compound subject. Until these three subjects are understood as co-constitutive along lines of intimacy that materialize as both care and enjoyment, colonial capitalism and its cult of Anthropocentric fetishism cannot but result in ever increasing waves of “zoonotic,” or rather anthroponotic, disease. But this requires thinking of the human as an effluent subject, rather than the logocentric “Man” that Wynter targets. Let us begin with this effluent eye and let us turn it on that categorization that most troubles logocentric Man’s coherence: (His) death, or His dependence on body-snatching His and others’ embodiment.