Romancing Human Rights

Romancing Human Rights PDF Author: Tamara C. Ho
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485392X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the “high status” of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho’s Romancing Human Rights maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of “on the ground” facts, Ho’s groundbreaking scholarship—the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma—brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, film, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights—and in the process offers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologies—regionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship. Weaving together the fictional and non-fictional, Ho’s gendered analysis makes Romancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for those with an interest in fields of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

Romancing Human Rights

Romancing Human Rights PDF Author: Tamara C. Ho
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485392X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the “high status” of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho’s Romancing Human Rights maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of “on the ground” facts, Ho’s groundbreaking scholarship—the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma—brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, film, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights—and in the process offers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologies—regionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship. Weaving together the fictional and non-fictional, Ho’s gendered analysis makes Romancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for those with an interest in fields of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

The Debasement of Human Rights

The Debasement of Human Rights PDF Author: Aaron Rhodes
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039801
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The idea of human rights began as a call for individual freedom from tyranny, yet today it is exploited to rationalize oppression and promote collectivism. How did this happen? Aaron Rhodes, recognized as “one of the leading human rights activists in the world” by the University of Chicago, reveals how an emancipatory ideal became so debased. Rhodes identifies the fundamental flaw in the Universal Declaration of Human of Rights, the basis for many international treaties and institutions. It mixes freedom rights rooted in natural law—authentic human rights—with “economic and social rights,” or claims to material support from governments, which are intrinsically political. As a result, the idea of human rights has lost its essential meaning and moral power. The principles of natural rights, first articulated in antiquity, were compromised in a process of accommodation with the Soviet Union after World War II, and under the influence of progressivism in Western democracies. Geopolitical and ideological forces ripped the concept of human rights from its foundations, opening it up to abuse. Dissidents behind the Iron Curtain saw clearly the difference between freedom rights and state-granted entitlements, but the collapse of the USSR allowed demands for an expanding array of economic and social rights to gain legitimacy without the totalitarian stigma. The international community and civil society groups now see human rights as being defined by legislation, not by transcendent principles. Freedoms are traded off for the promise of economic benefits, and the notion of collective rights is used to justify restrictions on basic liberties. We all have a stake in human rights, and few serious observers would deny that the concept has lost clarity. But no one before has provided such a comprehensive analysis of the problem as Rhodes does here, joining philosophy and history with insights from his own extensive work in the field.

Romance and Rights

Romance and Rights PDF Author: Alex Lubin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604730595
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954 studies the meaning of interracial romance, love, and sex in the ten years after World War II. How was interracial romance treated in popular culture by civil rights leaders, African American soldiers, and white segregationists? Previous studies focus on the period beginning in 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned the last state anti-miscegenation law (Loving v. Virginia). Lubin's study, however, suggests that we cannot fully understand contemporary debates about “hybridity,” or mixed-race identity, without first comprehending how WWII changed the terrain. The book focuses on the years immediately after the war, when ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality were being reformulated and solidified in both the academy and the public. Lubin shows that interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites, was a testing ground for both the general American public and the American government. The government wanted interracial relationships to be treated primarily as private affairs to keep attention off contradictions between its outward aura of cultural freedom and the realities of Jim Crow politics and anti-miscegenation laws. Activists, however, wanted interracial intimacy treated as a public act, one that could be used symbolically to promote equal rights and expanded opportunities. These contradictory impulses helped shape our current perceptions about interracial romances and their broader significance in American culture. Romance and Rights ends in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, before the civil rights movement became well organized. By closely examining postwar popular culture, African American literature, NAACP manuscripts, miscegenation laws, and segregationist protest letters, among other resources, the author analyzes postwar attitudes towards interracial romance, showing how complex and often contradictory those attitudes could be.

Humanitarianism and Human Rights

Humanitarianism and Human Rights PDF Author: Michael N. Barnett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108836798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Explores the fluctuating relationship between human rights and humanitarianism and the changing nature of the politics and practices of humanity.

Human Rights in Global Politics

Human Rights in Global Politics PDF Author: Timothy Dunne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521641388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
There is a stark contradiction between the theory of universal human rights and the everyday practice of human wrongs. This timely volume investigates whether human rights abuses are a result of the failure of governments to live up to a universal human rights standard, or whether the search for moral universals is a fundamentally flawed enterprise which distracts us from the task of developing rights in the context of particular ethical communities. In the first part of the book chapters by Ken Booth, Jack Donnelly, Chris Brown, Bhikhu Parekh and Mary Midgley explore the philosophical basis of claims to universal human rights. In the second part, Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Martin Shaw, Gil Loescher, Georgina Ashworth and Andrew Hurrell reflect on the role of the media, global civil society, states, migration, non-governmental organisations, capitalism, and schools and universities in developing a global human rights culture.

The Twilight of Human Rights Law

The Twilight of Human Rights Law PDF Author: Eric Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199313458
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Countries solemnly intone their commitment to human rights, and they ratify endless international treaties and conventions designed to signal that commitment. At the same time, there has been no marked decrease in human rights violations, even as the language of human rights has become the dominant mode of international moral criticism. Well-known violators like Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan have sat on the U.N. Council on Human Rights. But it's not just the usual suspects that flagrantly disregard the treaties. Brazil pursues extrajudicial killings. South Africa employs violence against protestors. India tolerate child labor and slavery. The United States tortures. In The Twilight of Human Rights Law--the newest addition to Oxford's highly acclaimed Inalienable Rights series edited by Geoffrey Stone--the eminent legal scholar Eric A. Posner argues that purposefully unenforceable human rights treaties are at the heart of the world's failure to address human rights violations. Because countries fundamentally disagree about what the public good requires and how governments should allocate limited resources in order to advance it, they have established a regime that gives them maximum flexibility--paradoxically characterized by a huge number of vague human rights that encompass nearly all human activity, along with weak enforcement machinery that churns out new rights but cannot enforce any of them. Posner looks to the foreign aid model instead, contending that we should judge compliance by comprehensive, concrete metrics like poverty reduction, instead of relying on ambiguous, weak, and easily manipulated checklists of specific rights. With a powerful thesis, a concise overview of the major developments in international human rights law, and discussions of recent international human rights-related controversies, The Twilight of Human Rights Law is an indispensable contribution to this important area of international law from a leading scholar in the field.

The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia PDF Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Sustaining Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century

Sustaining Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Katherine Hite
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421410128
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A historical look at the fight for human rights in the last century with applications to conditions today. These essays take a much-needed look at the course of human rights strategies rooted in the last century’s struggles against brutally repressive dictators. Those struggles continue today across Latin America. Augmented by the pursuit of broader political, cultural, labor, and environmental rights, they hold accountable a much wider cast of national governments, local governments, international agencies, and multinational corporations. In Sustaining Human Rights in the Twenty-first Century, some of the Western Hemisphere’s leading human rights experts shape and bolster new approaches, from the concepts of rights to transnational efforts, by placing the struggle for rights in historical and comparative perspective. The contributors provide an historical framework, describe formal and legal institutions, and discuss the citizens’ movements and conceptions of citizenship that produce distinct kinds of political identities and struggles.

Inventing Human Rights: A History

Inventing Human Rights: A History PDF Author: Lynn Hunt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393069729
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“A tour de force.”—Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book Review How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.

Human Rights and Revolutions

Human Rights and Revolutions PDF Author: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461637511
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Now in a revised and updated edition with added original chapters, this acclaimed book provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex links between revolutionary struggles and human rights discourses and practices. Covering events as far removed from one another in time and space as the English Civil War, the Parisian upheavals of 1789, Latin American independence struggles, and protests in late twentieth-century China, the contributors explore the paradoxes of revolutionary and human rights projects. The book convincingly shows the ways in which revolutions have both helped spur new advances in thinking about human rights and produced regimes that commit a range of abuses. Providing an unusually balanced analysis of the changes over time in conceptions of human rights in Western and non-Western contexts, this work offers a unique window into the history of the world during modern times and a fresh context for understanding today's pressing issues. Contributions by: Florence Bernault, Mark Philip Bradley, Sumit Ganguly, Greg Grandin, James N. Green, Lynn Hunt, Yanni Kotsonis, Timothy McDaniel, Kristin Ross, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Alexander Woodside, Marilyn B. Young, David Zaret, and Michael Zuckert