Being right-with: On Human Rights law as unfreedom

Through a critical multi-directional reading of the Nyanzi obscenity cases, this paper develops the notion of being right-with, a conceptual lens, that underscores what happens when individuals turn to human rights law and other legal processes and proceedings to address injustices by the state. Being right-with is a regulative and coercive idea within human rights law that animates a violent irrepressible police drive. I use being right-with to assert that when individuals make rights claims under human rights law (however radical those assertions might be) they are still imbricated within a mode of liberal humanist subjecthood that is always conceptually unfree.

In trying to move away from this conceptual and dialectical trap of being made right-with and unfree under liberal humanism, this paper tentatively considers Black feminist theorisations of care and freedom “to-come”, as well as Glissantian opacity to explore the concept of being with elsewhere as a way of articulating practices of Black life that make freedom elsewhere possible.