When Research Dismantles Comfortable Truths
The essay “Scenes of Modernity or the History of Barbarism: For a De(s)colonial Human Rights Education,” by Carlos Henrique de Lucas, inaugurates the new section of Revista Espirales: Horizontes Insurgentes (Insurgent Horizons). The choice could not be more symbolic. The text, which revisits modernity from the viewpoint of the silenced, is a necessary editorial gesture.
Carlos Henrique de Lucas poses an uncomfortable question: What happens when we shift our gaze away from the European narrative and confront modernity from the perspective of the victims of progress? The answer traverses four historical scenes—from colonial violence in the Americas to the horror of Nazi extermination camps—to reveal a pattern. Something we call civilization has, according to the author, always walked hand-in-hand with barbarism.
The research evidences that Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, women, and other subalternized populations were treated as obstacles to be eliminated or forcibly molded. Violence, therefore, was not a historical deviation; it was fundamental, it was the project. And it still echoes in the social, political, and epistemic structures that persist in the 21st century.
By inaugurating Horizontes Insurgentes, De Lucas’s essay reaffirms the role of research as a tool for denaturalization. To read this work is to understand that no narrative is neutral, that all history has multiple voices, and that some of them were silenced precisely because they reveal the other side of modernity.
The value of the research lies in the gesture of illuminating what was concealed, questioning what seemed certain, and inviting the reader to see the past not as a pacified memory, but as a field of contention. In a time marked by simplifications, works such as this broaden the horizon and rise up against oblivion.
