Decolonizing dignity

Few concepts in the western theoretical canon warrant decolonial scrutiny more than that of dignity. This paper begins from the well-known bifurcation between a hierarchical dignity-as-status and the more universal concept of dignity that rose to prominence in the mid-twentieth century, before then opting for a less trodden but more productive rupture that emerged simultaneously in the global explosion of anti-colonial resistance and its theoretical elaborations. Among these, the decolonial Caribbean couplet of Aim & eacute; C & eacute;saire and Frantz Fanon offers a powerfully decolonized formulation of dignity that sets out from the racial exclusion of the colonized from humanity, offering an alternative that is both more concrete than its Eurocentric counterpart and firmly anchored in struggles against the indignity of the colonial world. This subterranean concept of decolonial dignity, I argue, resurfaces in a remarkably clear form decades later in Mexico's Zapatista insurgency, which both posits and exemplifies a dynamic and material notion of dignidad rebelde, or dignity-in-rebellion.