Honing a Critical Cultural Studies of Human Rights (original) (raw)
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Honing a Critical Cultural Studies of Human Rights, by R. Coombe
Communicative and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(3): 230-246 (special issue on human rights), 2010
A critical cultural studies of human rights has yet to emerge as an interdisciplinary field of study. Despite the proliferation of scholarly work in legal philosophy and law and humanities over the past decade, we have seen little by way of sustained dialogue between critics of rights or conversations between rights critics and theorists of culture. Nonetheless, the characteristic approaches, concerns, concepts, and methods of cultural studies are both appropriate and necessary in a global policy environment that has put increasing emphasis upon cultural identity and cultural resources in both rights-based practices and neoliberal governmentalities, suggesting new avenues of inquiry.
Human Rights as Subjectivity: The Age of Rights and the Politics of Culture
Millennium - Journal of International Studies
This article seeks to open up the question of the foundation of human rights by reference not to their philosophical origins but their political function. I argue that attempts to ground human rights in objective fact (such as 'human nature') or in pure reason (as 'self-evident') are futile, but more importantly are unhelpful in the broader project of protecting those rights that are recognised as 'universal'. A more useful approach is to conceptualise human rights as a discourse in which the human being is constituted and reconstituted as the subject of rights. Allied with this theoretical analysis is the political project of establishing the conditions for meaningful conversation about human rights. More than any philosophical insight, this is the ultimate precondition for their recognition.
3 Skeletons in the Closet? Approaching Human Rights through Culture
A mí me parece que muchos artistas estamos trabajando ya no sobre las dictaduras evidentes, pero sí sobre dictaduras que existen en este mundo contemporáneo. Éstas ya no son tan visibles, los dictadores están en otros lados, no los reconocemos y se nos escapan continuamente"-Gabriel Calderón Memoria y derechos humanos (166)
The Cultural Relativist Critique of Human Rights: politics and problems
The idea of human rights originated during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) formulated the idea that natural rights — to life, liberty, and property — arise from natural law, a code of rules which derives legitimacy from human reason. For Locke and the French social reformer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), these natural rights predate governments; by organising society into states, human beings do not surrender these rights, but only give up the right to enforce them. The ideas of Locke and Rousseau enjoyed prominence during the American and French Revolutions in the latter part of the 18th century. The natural and self-evident rights of mankind were embedded in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. For Thomas Jefferson, a participant in the drafting of all those documents, human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In the 21st century, human rights are generally understood as being anchored in the concept of human dignity, rather than in notions of divine or natural law. The central premise of human rights is that every human being, regardless of their cultural, social or economic background, is entitled to the same basic rights and freedoms. Human rights are not ‘privileges’, and so they cannot be granted or revoked. Human rights are therefore conceived of as inalienable and universal. In practice, however, the implementation and protection of universal human rights is often complex and problematic. In particular, the idea of universal human rights has been challenged by cultural relativists, on the basis that the claim to universal applicability reflects a form of cultural imperialism or hegemony. Relativists hold that the universal human rights discourse originates from Western philosophical positions which conceptualise the individual as the fundamental political actor, rather than the collective or communal units privileged in many non-Western traditions. Human rights discourses can only make universalist claims, argue cultural relativists, because of the global political ascendency of the West. In response, universalists accuse relativists of allowing politically and socially repressive practices, which subordinate individual wellbeing to collective utility, to be justified and legitimised on the basis of cultural difference. This essay accepts that the human rights discourse originated in Western thought, but it rejects the notion that the attempt to establish universal human rights norms, particularly in the post-war era, is a form of Western imperialism. Rather, this essay argues that the opponents of universal human rights exploit the principles of state sovereignty and self-determination – legal constructs designed to protect weak political collectives from stronger ones – in order to mount their arguments. It holds that the cultural relativist critique of universal human rights is often advanced by actors seeking to maintain insidious and violent power imbalances within the political systems of certain states. This essay argues that such criticisms generally reflect calculations of political interest rather than consistent ideological opposition to the adoption of foreign (i.e. Western) values.
Beyond Sovereignty: New Cultural Imaginaries of Human Rights
2020
This introductory essay examines the role of sovereignty (both state and individual) in structuring normative human rights as well as major critiques of sovereignty in contemporary scholarship. The authors take up Theophilus Marboah’s diptych of sea traffick—an eighteenth-century slave ship diagram juxtaposed against Massimo Sestini’s aerial photograph of a boat of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean—to consider the need for alternative conceptions of human rights that might address deep historical and structural forms of belonging and unbelonging; the rise of xenophobia, neoliberal governance, and securitization that result in the purposeful precaritization of marginalized populations; ecological damage that threatens us all, yet whose burdens are distributed unequally; and the possibility of decolonial and posthuman approaches to rights discourses. The essay considers how different forms, materials, perspectives, and aesthetics might contribute to the...
Toward a Multicultural Conception of Human Rights
In Hernández-Truyol, Berta (Ed.), Moral Imperialism. A Critical Anthology. New York: New York University Press,, 2002
FOR THE PAST few years I have been puzzled by the extent to which human rights have become the language of progressive politics. For many years after World War II human rights were part and parcel of Cold War politics, and were so regarded by the Left. Double standards, complacency toward friendly dictators, defense of trade-offs between human rights and development—all made human rights suspect as an emancipatory script. Whether in core countries or throughout the de- veloping world, progressive forces preferred the language of revolution and socialism to formulate an emancipatory politics. However, now that those approaches are decidedly out of favor, those same progres- sive forces find themselves resorting to human rights to reconstitute the language of emancipation. It is as if human rights has been called upon to fill the void left by socialist politics. Can the concept of human rights fill such a void? My answer is a qualified yes. The tension,however, lies in the fact that in very crucial respects human rights poli- tics is a cultural politics. We can even think of human rights as symbol- izing the return of the cultural and even of the religious at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But to speak of culture and religion is to speak of difference, boundaries, particularity. How can human rights be both a cultural and a global politics? My purpose here, therefore, is to develop an analytical framework to highlight and support the emancipatory potential of human rights politics in the double context of globalization on the one hand, and cul- tural fragmentation and identity politics on the other.
This paper offers an introduction to the anthropology of human rights. Human rights articulate a universal set of claims, but they are usually not universal in their application and their empirical effects are uncertain. Instead, the outcomes of struggles over human rights are often local, temporary, and limited. While doctrinally, human rights are orientated towards the institutions of the nation-state, their influence is often more social and normative than legal or legislative, in that they shift cultural attitudes and moral norms rather than lead to definite political or legal victories. The paper calls for the ethnographic study of the social life of rights, and socio-cultural anthropologists are well-placed to understand how the moral discourse of human rights overlaps with, but is not confined to, political institutions and the law. Anthropologists have also provided insights into how a political ideology forged in the crucible of the American and French revolutions has come to have such a significant impact on decolonization and post-colonial politics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and how the conception of human rights has in turn been shaped by its global extension over the last half-century. Adopting a global perspective that integrates law and society, anthropologists provide a profound understanding of this universal language that announces that all persons possess inalienable rights because of their common humanity. Keywords: anthropology of human rights, human rights, legal anthropology, the social life of rights
The cultural dimensions of human rights advocacy in the
2010
Wendy Brown has commented on the importance of recognising the 'interval' between theory and politics, and working in the space between. 1 She advocates refusing the 'dichotomy between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, the intellectual and the practical'. 2 Brown's comments seem particularly apposite for the project of analysing human rights advocacy. There are significant gaps between the academic debates on human rights, the actual language and protocols of the bodies devoted to ensuring the achievement of basic human rights, the language of activists, and the ways in which these issues are discussed in the media. These issues are compounded in a transnational frame where people must find ways of communicating across differences of language and culture. 3 In this paper, I will consider some case studies of human rights advocacy in the media with a particular focus on strategies for communication between different cultural frames and discourses. By 'cultural frames and discourses', I am referring not just to so-called national cultures and languages, but also to the cultural and discursive practices associated with particular institutions.