Another Time for Another Law: Black Women and the Ancestral Grounding of Social Theory

This article proposes that the classics of social theory be approached as ancestors rather than founding fathers, and it draws out the consequences of this shift for the relationship between social theory and the normative grounding of human rights. Distinguishing classicality, the regime that recognizes intellectual authority through exemplarity, retrospective consecration, and accumulated reception, from ancestrality, a principle of relation to a past that persists through embodiment, invocation, and reworking, the article argues that intellectual production and theoretical recognition are distinct processes governed by different conditions and unfolding in different times. Drawing on Leda Maria Martins’s notion of spiral time and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique of colonial universality, it develops this argument through two figures who theorized from positions excluded from the very orders they addressed: Maria W. Stewart, who in nineteenth-century Boston grounded the judgment of injustice in communal bonds independent of legal recognition, and Esperança Garcia, whose 1770 petition to a colonial governor turned the language of law against the order that denied her standing. Read as ancestors rather than founders, both reveal that the normative order depends on a remainder it cannot recognize, and that this remainder is where another grounding for rights becomes possible. The argument bears directly on contemporary critiques of the colonial constitution of human rights.