Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 18

found operating outside the borders of the United States.
Conclusions and the Questions They Raise
But indeed, perhaps this is precisely the type of language that should be deployed in
the American subaltern. The poisoning of the Flint River was one in a series of
catalysts that brought about a renewed hope and fight for minority rights in the
United States. And, more and more, these movements and activists are framing their
struggles firmly within established human rights language. The international
institutions responsible for disseminating and monitoring human rights progress in
the world offer a complex, sophisticated and dizzying architecture. And it is perhaps
within the human rights apparatus that certain levers can be exploited. This paper
first explored the ways in which Flint, Michigan, and the existence of environmental
violence, is emerging as a “Third World” space in the United States. International
legal scholarship offers complementary support in unraveling this problem, but more
work is needed to more closely examine Flint as a decolonised Third World space. A
second discussion regarded the types of language and the narratives that coalesce
around an emerging subaltern like Flint. This exploration evaluated how these stories
help to justify socially and politically impoverished spaces as naturally and eternally
so, thus framing them as concretely abnormal and peripheral. A third and final
exploration was made tracing the evolution of human rights language and discourse,
and highlighted the need to bring this same language to bear on emerging First
World subalterns.
But, more broadly, is there transformative potential within these complex
socio-politico-legal regimes? Particularly considering that some of the original human
rights regime pioneers had suspect motives. For example, Jan Smuts, a self-
identified racist and apartheid defender, who wrote partially the preamble of the UN
charter, is a main character in the authorship of contemporary rights discourse. How
does one resolve this internal paradox in the rights regime? There are others, too,
that fit into this paradoxical category. Must we abandon the efforts as tainted and
disingenuous? Or can we retain the spirit of the texts and the ideas, with a firm
recognition of the human flaws therein? Smuts, who once claimed that ‘earlier
civilizations have largely failed because that principle was never recognized,