{"product_id":"9781452954677","title":"Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color","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 Title","offer_id":47165207838960,"sku":"9781452954677","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781452954677_p0.jpg?v=1763855031","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781452954677","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}