April 9, 2024 12:00pm - 1:30pm
This talk traces the under-explored development of rights of mankind in the early Space Age and its role in what I call the colonization of humanity: the reconstruction of human beings as a human race embodied and extended through outposting. Codified in the Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 to inhibit states’ militaristic colonization of space, these rights redefined humanity as a spacefaring race, from the free exploration and use of outer space as the “province of mankind” to the designation of astronauts as “envoys of mankind.” After examining the OST framework alongside historical colonial projects and contemporaneous frameworks in interstellar communications and science fiction, I consider the contribution of human rights to the emergence of a new regime of anticolonial colonialism and speculative racial politics.
Prince Grace is an artist-researcher and doctoral candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University whose work explores the more-than-human futures of race, colonialism, and political community. His dissertation traces how the development of human rights systems from World War I through the early Space Age transformed human beings into a “human race” with a collective identity, interest, and birthright. His research has been supported by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Kaplan Institute’s Public Humanities Program at Northwestern, the Social Science Research Council, the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, and Tankstation.