Reframing Cultural Studies: Human Rights as a Site of Legal-cultural Struggles

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. This project has benefited from financial support from the Research and Postgraduate Studies Committee of Lingnan University, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project #: DR09B2). 2. See B.S. Turner, “Introduction: Rights and Communities: Prolegomenon to a Sociology of Rights,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 31 (1995): 1–8; M. Waters, “Human Rights and the Universalization of Interests: Towards a Social Constructionist Approach,” Sociology 30 (1996): 593–600; A. Woodiwiss, Globalization, Human Rights and Labour Law in Pacific Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. R.P. Claude and B.H. Weston, “International Human Rights: Overviews,” in Human Rights in the World Community: Issues and Action, 2nd ed., ed. R.P. Claude and B.H. Weston, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 1–14; J. Foweraker and T. Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); W. Kymlicka, “Human Rights and Ethnocultural Justice,” in Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship, ed. W. Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69–90; J. McCamant, “Social Science and Human Rights,” International Organizations 35 (1981): 531–52. 4. T.E. Downing, “Human Rights Research: The Challenge for Anthropologists,” in Human Rights and Antropology, ed. T.E. Downing and G. Kushner (Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, 1988): 9–19; J. Schirmer, “Universal and Sustainable Human Rights: Special Tribunals in Guatemala,” in Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. R.A. Wilson (London: Pluto Press, 1997): 161–86. 5. J. Donnelly, “The Social Construction of International Human Rights,” in Human Rights in Global Politics, ed. T. Dunne and N.J. Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 71–102; R.J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6. M. Freeman, Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press): 77–8. 7. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, “From Resistance to Renewal: The Third World, Social Movements, and the Expansion of International Institutions,” Harvard International Law Journal 41, (2000): 529–78; Balakrishnan Rajagopal, “International Law and Social Movements: Challenges of Theorizing Resistance,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 41 (2003): 397–433. 8. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Neoliberal Governance: The World Social Forum as Subaltern Cosmopolitan Politics and Legality,” in Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César Rodríguez-Garavito (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Human Rights as an Emancipatory Script? Cultural and Political Conditions,” in Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (London: Verso, 2007); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The World Social Forum and the Global Left,” Politics & Society 36 (2008): 247–70. 9. Upendra Baxi, “Universal Rights and Cultural Pluralism: Constitutionalism as a Site of State Formative Practices,” Cardoza Law Review 21 (2000): 1183–210; J.N. Erni, “New Sovereignties and Neoliberal Ethics: Remapping the Human Rights Imaginary,” Cultural Studies 23 (2009): 417–36; David Kairys, The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, 3rd. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Julie Mertus, “From Legal Transplants to Transformative Justice: Human Rights and the Promise of Transnational Civil Society,” American University International Law Review 14 (1999): 1335–89; Austin Sarat, The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 10. See Tawia Ansah, “A Terrible Purity: International Law, Morality, Religion, Exclusion,” Cornell International Law Journal 38 (2005): 9–70; Larry Cata Backer, “Reifying Law—Government, Law and the Rule of Law in Governance Systems,” Penn State International Law Review 26 (2008): 511–20; Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; Brent Pickett, “Foucaultian rights?,” The Social Science Journal 37 (2000): 403–21. 11. Andrew Levin, “Civil Society and Democratization in Haiti,” Emory International Law Review 9 (1995): 389–457; Anthony Taibi, “Racial Justice in the Age of the Global Economy: Community Empowerment and Global Strategy,” Duke Law Journal 44 (1995): 928–84; Ugo Mattei, and Jeffrey Lena, “U.S. Jurisdiction Over Conflicts Arising Outside of the United States: Some Hegemonic Implications,” Hastings International & Comparative Law Review 24 (2001): 381–400. 12. See Jeffrey Brown, “Beyond Nationalism and Toward a Dynamic Theory of Pan-African Unity,” Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy 8 (2006): 60–78. 13. See Johanna Bond, “International Intersectionality: A Theoretical and Pragmatic Exploration of Women's International Human Rights Violations,” Emory Law Journal 52 (2003): 71–85; Sami Zeidan, “The Limits of Queer Theory in LGBT Litigation and the International Human Rights Discourse,” Willamette Journal of International Law & Dispute Resolution 14 (2006): 73–96. 14. See Richard Glick, “Lip Service to the Laws of War: Humanitarian Law and United Nations Armed Forces,” Michigan Journal of International Law 17 (1995): 53–107; Felicia Swindells, “UN Sanctions in Haiti: A Contradiction Under Articles 41 and 55 of the UN Charter,” Fordham International Law Journal 20 (1997): 1880–960. 15. See Hilary Charlesworth, “Not Waving but Drowning: Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights in the United Nations,” The Harvard Human Rights Journal 18 (2005): 1–17; Karen Engle, “‘Calling in the Troops’: The Uneasy Relationship Among Women's Rights, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Intervention,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 20 (2007): 189–226. 16. See Karin Mickelson, “Rhetoric and Rage: Third World Voices in International Legal Discourse,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 16 (1998): 353–419; Benjamin Richardson, “Environmental Law in Postcolonial Societies: Straddling the Local–Global Institutional Spectrum,” Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy 11 (2000); 1–82. 17. See http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/gender/ 18. I told this story in John N. Erni, “Who Needs Human Rights: Cultural Studies and Public Institutions,” in Instituting Cultural Studies, ed. Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming). 19. In 2005, the author completed a Master of Laws studies specializing in Human Rights at the University of Hong Kong. 20. Andrew Ross, “Components of Cultural Justice,” in The Fate of Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 203–28. 21. Toby Miller, “What it is and what it isn't: Cultural Studies Meets Graduate-student Labor.” Yale Journal of Law and Humanitics 13 (2001): 69–94. 22. Allen Feldman, “On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 203–26. 23. Henry Giroux, Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics after Abu Ghraib (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Abeiter Ring Publishing, 2005). 24. See, e.g., Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Rosemary Coombe, “Legal Claims to Culture in and Against the Market: Neoliberalism and the Global Proliferation of Meaningful Difference," Law, Culture and the Humanities 1 (2005): 32–55; Rosemary Coombe, "The Expanding Purview of Cultural Properties and their Politics," Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 5 (2009): 393–412.