Human Rights on the Move (On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities) - Tapa dura

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Wendy S. Hesford is Professor, Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Faculty Director of the Global Arts + Humanities Theme at The Ohio State University. Her books include Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, and many others.

Momar K. Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University. An artist, educator, and researcher, Ndiaye makes work that directly addresses the existential conditions of Africans in a world of globalization. His activism-driven pieces include “Toxu: Between Dreams and Realities,” “Me and My Space,” and “Genesis,” among many others that have been shown at major festivals in Europe, Africa, and America.

Amy Shuman is Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy, coeditor of Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, and author and editor of several other books.

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Drawing on a multitude of sources, including personal testimonies and art-activist projects, contributors observe how discourses of suffering and empathy play a role in both the creation of human rights policies and the critique of practices. Ndiaye, Linyekula, and Espinosa and Pineda illustrate how human rights imaginaries are tied to the politics of memory, to local communities, and to peoples and communities on the move. Several contributors also explore the links between the politics of memory and decolonization, border abolition, and migration and mobility, asking whether decolonization can coexist with and challenge certain notions of human rights. Although contributors amplify the power of cultural productions to contest abuses of power and perpetuation of human rights violations, they do not inflate the political efficacy of these productions in the movement toward social justice but rather account for their provisional and strategic articulations of resistance.

By integrating political discussions on human rights with aesthetic discourses, this volume considers how vulnerable populations and victimized communities imagine pedagogies and interdependencies for social action. If, for example, the production of human rights subjectivity is not in response to “wounded attachments,” then how is it conceptualized? Research on local voices, including artistic voices, gives greater insight into the often-competing agendas in which human rights subjectivities are deployed and exploited and how subjectivities and solidarities are produced and mobilized for social action within particular contexts. Marginalized standpoints can counteract hierarchies of oppression, focus on political voice and local practices and pedagogies, trouble redemption and liberation frameworks, and decenter the state by amplifying “liberation at the margins.” In grappling with inscriptions of human rights into global capitalism and its nationalist and militarist correlates, contributors account for the contingencies that shape human rights entanglement with institutional structures and individual lives, and imagine justice, liberation, and freedom (variously defined) moving through these situational entanglements.

The pandemic called attention to some of the same incommensurabilities that are endemic to efforts to address human rights violations. While the pandemic crossed political boundaries, efforts to provide care were stymied by politics, claims to national sovereignty, and objections to State mandates. At the same time, the pandemic fostered multiple discourses, local, artistic, cultural, and political, including narratives of resilience. This volume proposes the idea of human rights on the move as one way to recognize that the divide between state sovereignty and accountability for persecution is not the only obstacle to justice. That divide locates the problem in fixed, intractable policies. Instead, responses to human rights violations encompass multiple dynamic voices that attend not only to the emergencies of genocide and other forms of violence but also to the ongoing, everyday institutional frameworks that sustain power and constrain people and ideas. In answer to those who would say that the global human rights perspective is stuck and ineffective, we point to the dynamic, vibrant, and often local efforts of those who counter and resist persecution. Human Rights on the Move suggests that policies alone, as important as they are, are insufficient to respond to human rights violations. In addition, to understand how we might confront persecution in its many forms, we need to pay closer attention to the varied forms of interdependence and relationality, ways that people create public spaces and navigate across the many constraints designed to control them and keep them in place.