Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism and the End of the Third World
Professor Joseph R. Slaughter
Moderated by Professor Brinkley M. Messick
October 6, 2016 · 12-1PM
Columbia University, Fayerweather Hall, Room 411
The Committee on Global Thought (CGT) Lunchtime Seminars are a forum for Columbia University faculty and visiting scholars to discuss current research characterizing and assessing issues of global importance. Open to Columbia affiliates only. No registration is required. Light lunch will be available.
About the discussion
Over the past decade, a new historiography of human rights has identified the 1970s as the crucial period when human rights discourse gained traction globally. Most of the historians working in this mode adopt a North Atlantic perspective on the history and concept of human rights; they relegate stories and struggles outside the U.S. and Europe to minor, inconsequential, or irrelevant uses of the languages of human rights. The story of the Westâs reduction of human rights to a limited set of individual civil and political protections against state abuses in the 70s cannot be told without recognizing the dramatic foreclosure of other more radical visions of human rights that still obtained in the Third and Fourth Worlds: national self-determination, economic redistribution, and social and cultural security. If the 1970s was the decade of human rights, it was also the decade of hijackings, many of which were undertaken in the name of those broader struggles. As Joseph Slaughter argues, however, none of those airline hijackings were quite as effective as the neo-liberal hijacking of human rights.
About the speaker
Joseph R. Slaughter is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). Heâs especially interested in the social work of literatureâthe myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.
His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 RenĂ© Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. His essay, âEnabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,â was honored as one of the two best articles published in PMLA in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.
His essays and articles include : âWorld Literature as Propertyâ in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics; âHowever Incompletely, Humanâ in The Meanings of Human Rights: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Law; ââItâs good to be primitiveâ: African Allusion and the Modernist Fetish of Authenticityâ in Modernism and Copyright; âThe Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?â in Critical Quarterly; âVanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply Thereâ in The Journal of Human Rights; ââA Mouth with Which to Tell the Storyâ: Silence, Violence, and Speech in the Narrative of Things Fall Apartâ in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; âMaster Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenyaâ in Research in African Literatures; âIntroducing Human Rights and Literary Form; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,â co-authored with Sophia A. McClennen, in Comparative Literature Studies; âA Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Lawâ in Human Rights Quarterly; âHumanitarian Readingâ in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative. Slaughter is a founding co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.
He is co-editing a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a coherent region. He is currently working on two monographs, âPathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanitiesâ and “New Word Orders: Intellectual Property and World Literature,” which considers the role of plagiarism, piracy, and intellectual property regimes in the globalization of the novel, as well the work the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual creations.
Read more about the CGT Lunchtime Seminars.
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- CGT Chair Carol Gluck participating in the seminar.
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- Professor Joseph R. Slaughter and the moderator Professor Brinkley Messick.
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- Audience members take notes during the seminar.
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- CGT member Professor Larkin in attendance at the seminar.
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- Professor Joseph R. Slaughter engages in discussion with the audience.
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- Professor Joseph R. Slaughter presents during the seminar.
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- Akeel Bilgrami asks a question of Prof. Slaughter among audience members.
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- Martha Poon among the audience at the seminar.
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- CGT member Akeel Bilgrami and CGT Chair Carol Gluck speak during the event.
