{"product_id":"writing-human-rights","title":"Writing Human Rights","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights are usually understood and applied in a global context with little bearing on the legal discourse, domestic political struggles, or social justice concerns within the United States. In \u003ci\u003eWriting Human Rights\u003c\/i\u003e, Crystal Parikh uses the international human rights regime to read works by contemporary American writers of color—Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, Ana Castillo, Aimee Phan, and others—to explore the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political communities emerge.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Pairing the ethical deliberations in such works as \u003ci\u003eBeloved\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eA Gesture Life\u003c\/i\u003e with human rights texts like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, she considers why principles articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties—such as the right to self-determination or the right to family—are too often disregarded at home. Human rights concepts instead provide writers of color with a deeply meaningful method for political and moral imagining in their literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAffiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century. In the absence of domestic human rights enforcement, these literatures provide a considerable repository for those ways of life and subjects of rights made otherwise impossible in the present antidemocratic moment.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Minnesota Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Product","offer_id":54222684127576,"sku":"9780816697069","price":27.5,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780816697069__67655b1929827.jpg?v=1741160419","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/writing-human-rights","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}