Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (original) (raw)

Crystal Parikh's Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color is a timely and ambitious work that makes an impassioned claim for both reclaiming and problematizing contemporary human rights discourse. As a literary critic with explicitly political concerns, a thinker interested in counter-hegemonic ideas but one who doesn't abandon the quest for ethical life, Parikh issues a challenge to contemporary political theorists interested in thinking through radical critique and racial justice during our reactionary times. Human rights discourse, as has well been documented and thoroughly discussed, is nothing short of complex. On the one hand, since the end of the Second World War, it has been a crucial tool for the most vulnerable people to mobilize against the horrors authoritarianism, domination, exclusion, and violence. On the other hand, it has historically been coopted for dangerous ends-just think of invocations of humanitarian intervention, US's wars for spreading democracy and peace abroad, and all the efforts associated with neoliberal privatization and financial austerity. Critics thus insist that human rights are ineffective at best, or nothing more than instruments of hegemony at worst. They are seen as powerful words on paper that only matter to the extent they are truly secured, but are usually proclaimed by states to mask their own geopolitical interests in the pursuit of free market capitalism and political order-rather than democracy. The upshot here is that human rights have very little to do with making life more livable for the poor, women, people of color, and the disabled. Parikh's work insists that such pessimism, while historically justified and intellectually understandable, relies on a narrow notion of human rights. In her view, we haven't fully appreciated the political potential in the meaning of both humanity and rights precisely because we haven't fully engaged the terrain in which these two terms have been most fruitfully explored, namely what she calls