Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

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Description

Crystal Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, she illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century.

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.