Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Clearly passionate and committed, Crystal Parikh has read broadly and deeply into this very exciting topic and opens up a range of provocative questions."—David Palumbo-Liu, author of The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age
"In this ambitious study, Crystal Parikh shows how the literature of writers of color has always been preoccupied with what are now called ‘human rights.’ Her wide-ranging and urgent readings, written with the precision and care of a passionate literary and social critic, reminds us of how much literature matters in imagining and demanding justice and humanity."—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Refugees and The Sympathizer
"Crystal Parikh’s Writing Human Rights is a timely and ambitious work that makes an impassioned claim for both reclaiming and problematizing contemporary human rights discourse. Parikh’s work serves as an important model of an engaged and probing mode of writing for our contemporary moment when democratic faith and norms are being thrown into question."—Contemporary Political Theory
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: The U.S. Good Life, the UN World, and the Human Rights Record
UN International Bill of Human Rights; Toni Morrison, Beloved
1. Other Humanities: The Bandung Spirit and the Right to Self-Determination
UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; Ernest Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
2. “Come Almost Home”: The Impossible Subject of Human Rights
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
3. “A Globe within Him”: Security at the Borderline of War and Torture
UN Convention against Torture; Susan Choi, The Foreign Student
4. Regular Revolutions: The Feminist Travels of Human Rights
UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies
5. Being Well: Minor Subjects and the Right to Health
UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth; Ana Castillo, So Far from God
Conclusion: An Aesthetics of Kin and the Rights of the Child
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
