Local Flows: The Pleasure-centric Turn in Human Rights Advocacy in South Asia

Rakhshan Rizwan

doi:10.1163/22112596-02201003

Abstract

This paper examines localized activism conducted through Anglophone Kashmiri literary fiction and by South Asian feminist social justice movements such as Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter , in order to analyze the emergence of a pleasure-centric model of human rights advocacy in the South Asian region. Life narratives and testimonies foregrounding bodily pain, torture and victimization are ubiquitous within international human rights advocacy campaigns. South Asian activist movements have, however, suggested an alternative to this suffering-centered mode of advocacy; they foreground the effectiveness and emotional resonance of narratives of pleasure instead. This paper builds on existing scholarship focusing on the way in which insights from human rights activism conducted in local cultural contexts can be translated back to the global and how they can in turn potentially transform international practices of human rights advocacy, rather than always the other way around.

Highlights

The post-Cold War decade of the 1990s has become recognized as the ‘decade of human rights’ and human rights advocacy.[1]
This paper examines localized activism conducted through Anglophone Kashmiri literary fiction and by South Asian feminist social justice movements such as Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter, in order to analyze the emergence of a pleasure-centric model of human rights advocacy in the South Asian region
This paper builds on existing scholarship focusing on the way in which insights from human rights activism conducted in local cultural contexts can be translated back to the global and how they can in turn potentially transform international practices of human rights advocacy, rather than always the other way around

Summary

Introduction

The post-Cold War decade of the 1990s has become recognized as the ‘decade of human rights’ and human rights advocacy.[1]. Rizwan and peoples and their societies, as well as within the regime, peoples and their societies’.14 By building on these existing critiques of the ‘top-down’ model of the global diffusion of human rights, this paper will examine the suffering-centered normative model of international human rights advocacy and trace its translation, as well as transmutation, in two different local contexts. Mirza Waheed’s novel, ‘The Collaborator’, a work of Anglophone fiction composed by an author of Kashmiri descent, will be examined in detail.[18] this paper will draw connections between local activism in Kashmir, and contemporary feminist movements in Pakistan and India such as ‘Girls at Dhabas’ and ‘Why Loiter’, both of which articulate and advocate for a human rights discourse using narratives and notions of pleasure rather than of bodily pain, suffering and victimization. In the second part of the article, they explore contemporary feminist movements in India and P akistan in order to further adumbrate the model of ‘pleasurecentric’ advocacy at work, and to outline its specific features and advantages

Administered Kashmir

Graves with more than two bodies

Conclusion