Book Launch for Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

Sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, The Contemporary Literature Series in the Undergraduate Program in English, and the Colloquium in Postcolonial, Race, and Diaspora Studies.

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: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Crystal Parikh (NYU Departments of English and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis) 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.

Parikh 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 Beloved and A Gesture Life 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.

Affiliating 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.

Join us in celebrating the publication of this important volume with:

Crystal Parikh, Associate Professor, NYU Departments of English and Social & Cultural Analysis

Joseph Keith, Associate Professor & Chair, Binghamton University Department of English

Alexandria Ramos, PhD Student, NYU Department of English