Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

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The 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 Writing Human Rights, Crystal Parikh uses the international human rights regime to read works by contemporary

Reviews

"Clearly passionate and committed, Crystal Parikh has read broadly and deeply into this very exciting topic and opens up a range of provocative questions."David Palumbo-Liu, author of The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age

"In this ambitious study, Crystal Parikh shows how the literature of writers of color has always been preoccupied with what are now called human rights. Her wide-ranging and urgent readings, written with the precision and care of a passionate literary and social critic, reminds us of how much literature matters in imagining and demanding justice and humanity."Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Refugees and The Sympathizer

"Crystal Parikhs Writing Human Rights is a timely and ambitious work that makes an impassioned claim for both reclaiming and problematizing contemporary human rights discourse. Parikhs work serves as an important model of an engaged and probing mode of writing for our contemporary moment when democratic faith and norms are being thrown into question."Contemporary Political Theory

Author Bio

Crystal Parikh is associate professor at New York University in the departments of Social and Cultural Analysis and English. She is author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literaturesand Culture and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature.