1st Edition

Law and Cultural Studies A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights

By John Erni Copyright 2019
    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    New and unremitting violence linked to state, inter-state, and private actors has precipitated a renewal of social movements, many of which act in concert with human rights ethos and legal conceptions. Yet, cultural studies has so far had little engagement or institutional connection with these movements. How can cultural studies as a progressive discipline think with, and make space for, rights-inflected legal and humanitarian practices? This book considers the ways in which cultural humanism and the critical approach to rights, and more broadly between culture and law, can be brought together to open a new intellectual space to allow cultural studies to better engage with the current challenges presented by social and political struggles worldwide. It lays out the central theses essential for constructing a critical view of human rights, and then advances a distinctive critical model of analysis that incorporates insights of postcolonial legal theorists and jurists from the Global South and important cultural theorists from the North, while rethinking law, rights, and social movements as something constituted by multiple legal modernities. Through case studies covering questions relating to sovereignty, citizenship, refugee displacement, human rights defenders, and gender and sexual rights, Law and Cultural Studies develops a means by which the practice of cultural studies can be reinvigorated around the legal spaces, institutions, and movements tied to human rights struggles. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, critical legal studies, political theory, postcolonial studies, and human rights.

    Acknowledgements



    Prologue: Cultural Studies and Critical Human Rights: An Immanent Encounter



    1. Who Needs Human Rights? A Renewal



    2. 8 Theses on Human Rights: A Resource For Critical Engagement



    3. The Juris-Cultural: Cases and Perspectives



    Case 1. Human Rights in the Neoliberal Imagination: Mapping the "New Sovereignties"



    Case 2. Citizenship Management: On the Politics of Being "Included-Out"



    Case 3: Negotiating Refuge: Further Thoughts on the Politics of the "Included-Out"



    Case 4: Queering Laws, Transfiguring Marriage



    Case 5: A Perspective on the Field of Weiquan



    4. Legal Modernities



    Index

    Biography

    John Nguyet Erni is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics, Chair Professor in Humanities and Head of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of "Curing" AIDS, co-author of Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong: A Critical Multicultural Approach, editor of Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations and Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic, and co-editor of Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology and Asian Media Studies: Politics of Subjectivities. In 2017, he was elected President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.