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Paper short abstract

This paper connects proto-colonial legal and scientific species-making in 18th-century Senegambia with the unweaving of ecological and social relations, and explores griot storytelling as antigenocidal reweaving that challenges genocidal hierarchies embedded in international law.

Paper long abstract

This paper situates the genealogies of international legal thought within the targeted unweaving of relational worlds in 18th-century proto-colonial Senegambia, where emergent legal and natural sciences produced hierarchical, racialised and gendered conceptions of the human and more-than-human. Through historical analysis, I trace how species-making operated as a form of relational unweaving, diminishing ecological, social and sensorial ties in ways that prefigure enduring extractive and epistemic violences. These violences resonate with contemporary formulations of genocidal unweaving: the systematic fraying of relationalities that sustain water, land, language, kinship and life itself.

Foregrounding the lifeworlds and storytelling practices of griots (jeliw), whose gender-nonconformity and wordsmithery were integral to Senegambian worldings, the paper attends to practices of relational (re)weaving that persist despite legal and colonial orders of classification and control. Griot storytelling appears as a form of antigenocidal labour, a reiterative reweaving of social and more-than-human relations that resists the ontological and epistemic violences of species-making.

In dialogue with the panel’s emphasis on genocidal durations and the (im)possibilities of refusal, care and return, I argue that transspecies/ecorelational justice must confront law’s complicity in unweaving relations it (sometimes, selectively) purports to remedy. Rather than presuming law’s salvific capacities, this paper urges serious engagement with embodied, situated practices of world-making that persistently reweave relations targeted by hierarchical orders, offering pathways towards refusal and enduring relational survival.