The Novel of Human Rights

The Novel of Human Rights PDF Author: James Dawes
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The Novel of Human Rights defines a new, dynamic American literary genre. It incorporates key debates within the contemporary human rights movement in the United States, and in turn influences the ideas and rhetoric of that discourse. In James Dawes’s framing, the novel of human rights takes as its theme a range of atrocities at home and abroad, scrambling the distinction between human rights within and beyond national borders. Some novels critique America’s conception of human rights by pointing out U.S. exploitation of international crises. Other novels endorse an American ethos of individualism and citizenship as the best hope for global equality. Some narratives depict human rights workers as responding to an urgent ethical necessity, while others see only inefficient institutions dedicated to their own survival. Surveying the work of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Nathan Englander, Francisco Goldman, Anthony Marra, and John Edgar Wideman, among others, Dawes finds traces of slave narratives, Holocaust literature, war novels, and expatriate novels, along with earlier traditions of justice writing. The novel of human rights responds to deep forces within America’s politics, society, and culture, Dawes shows. His illuminating study clarifies many ethical dilemmas of today’s local and global politics and helps us think our way, through them, to a better future. Vibrant and modern, the human rights novel reflects our own time and aspires to shape the world we will leave for those who come after.

The Novel of Human Rights

The Novel of Human Rights PDF Author: James Dawes
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Novel of Human Rights defines a new, dynamic American literary genre. It incorporates key debates within the contemporary human rights movement in the United States, and in turn influences the ideas and rhetoric of that discourse. In James Dawes’s framing, the novel of human rights takes as its theme a range of atrocities at home and abroad, scrambling the distinction between human rights within and beyond national borders. Some novels critique America’s conception of human rights by pointing out U.S. exploitation of international crises. Other novels endorse an American ethos of individualism and citizenship as the best hope for global equality. Some narratives depict human rights workers as responding to an urgent ethical necessity, while others see only inefficient institutions dedicated to their own survival. Surveying the work of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Nathan Englander, Francisco Goldman, Anthony Marra, and John Edgar Wideman, among others, Dawes finds traces of slave narratives, Holocaust literature, war novels, and expatriate novels, along with earlier traditions of justice writing. The novel of human rights responds to deep forces within America’s politics, society, and culture, Dawes shows. His illuminating study clarifies many ethical dilemmas of today’s local and global politics and helps us think our way, through them, to a better future. Vibrant and modern, the human rights novel reflects our own time and aspires to shape the world we will leave for those who come after.

Human Rights, Inc.

Human Rights, Inc. PDF Author: Joseph R. Slaughter
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823228193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of “world literature” and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call “the free and full development of the human personality.” Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism. Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature—imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.

The Modes of Human Rights Literature

The Modes of Human Rights Literature PDF Author: Michael Galchinsky
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319318519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This sophisticated book argues that human rights literature both helps the persecuted to cope with their trauma and serves as the foundation for a cosmopolitan ethos of universal civility—a culture without borders. Michael Galchinsky maintains that, no matter how many treaties there are, a rights-respecting world will not truly exist until people everywhere can imagine it. The Modes of Human Rights Literature describes four major forms of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter to reveal how such works give common symbolic forms to widely held sociopolitical emotions.

The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law

The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law PDF Author: Jenny S. Martinez
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195391624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

The Idea of Human Rights

The Idea of Human Rights PDF Author: Charles R. Beitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199604371
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

Technologies of Human Rights Representation

Technologies of Human Rights Representation PDF Author: Alexandra S. Moore
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438487118
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The speed of technological development, from cell phones to artificial intelligence, opens up exciting new opportunities for promoting human flourishing. It also raises grave risks, threatening not only personal privacy and dignity but also our collective survival. Technologies of Human Rights Representation brings together three fields of research critical to securing our future: changing technologies, human rights, and representation. For each of these fields, this book asks key questions: How can we open the black box of technological advances so that we can more fully understand their effects upon our lives? What can we do to make sure that these effects align with the values of human rights? And how does the way we talk about technology and rights—from military reports and corporate marketing to human rights reports and poetry—amplify or diminish our capacity both to understand and to control what happens next? Contributors from anthropology, communications, criminology, global studies, law, literary and cultural studies, and women and gender studies bring diverse methodological approaches to these crucial questions.

Mobilizing for Human Rights

Mobilizing for Human Rights PDF Author: Beth A. Simmons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885108
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analysis and case studies that the ratification of treaties generally leads to better human rights practices. She argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.

Rights from Wrongs

Rights from Wrongs PDF Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780465017133
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A noted legal scholar examines the source of human rights, arguing that rights are the result of particular experiences with injustice and looking at the implications in terms of the right to privacy, voting rights, and other rights.

Human Rights and Social Work

Human Rights and Social Work PDF Author: Jim Ife
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139511084
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Now in its third edition, Human Rights and Social Work explores how the principles of human rights inform contemporary social work practice. Jim Ife considers the implications of social work's traditional Enlightenment heritage and the possibilities of 'post-Enlightenment' practice in a way that is accessible, direct and engaging. The world has changed significantly since the publication of the first edition in 2000 and this book is situated firmly within the context of present-day debates, concerns and crises. Ife covers the importance of relating human rights to the non-human world, as well as the consequences of political and ecological uncertainty. Featuring examples, further readings and a glossary, readers are able to identify and investigate the important issues and questions arising from human rights and social work. Now more than ever, Human Rights and Social Work is an indispensable resource for students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Dignity in Adversity

Dignity in Adversity PDF Author: Seyla Benhabib
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745659713
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The language of human rights has become the public vocabulary of our contemporary world. Ironically, as the political influence of human rights has grown, their philosophical justification has become ever more controversial. Building on a theory of discourse ethics and communicative rationality, this book addresses the politics and philosophy of human rights against the background of the broader social transformations that are shaping the modern world. Rejecting the reduction of international human rights to the Trojan horse of a neo-liberal empire's bid for world power, as well as the conservative objections to legal cosmopolitanism as encroachments upon democratic sovereignty, Benhabib develops two key concepts to move beyond these false antitheses. International human rights norms need contextualization in specific polities through processes of what she calls 'democratic iterations.' Furthermore, such norms have a 'jurisgenerative power,' in that they enable new actors to enter fields of social and political contestation; they promote new vocabularies for public claim-making and anticipate a justice to come. Ranging over themes such as sovereignty, citizenship, genocide, European anti-semitism, the crisis of the nation-state, and the 'scarf affair' in contemporary Europe and Turkey, this major new book by one of our leading political theorists reflects upon the political transformations of our times and makes a compelling case for a cosmopolitanism without illusions.