Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 06/2010

Necessary fictions: Indigenous claims and the humanity of rights

Peter Fitzpatrick

February 2010

Human Rights & Human Welfare (University of Denver)

Abstract

To begin, not propitiously. When checking whether my title ‘Necessary Fictions’ was being used elsewhere, Google revealed that it was going to be used in a future talk, and by me. It transpired mercifully that this use was going to be quite different to the present which suggested the prospect of a new academic genre: same title, different paper; rather than the standard combination of same paper, different title. Fortuitously, that contrast gave me the leitmotiv for this talk – that things ostensibly the same can be different, and that things ostensibly different can be the same.