Introduction: Reading Rights Discourse in a Transnational Economy

Abstract

This chapter provides an outline of the book’s materialist critique of human rights discourse in the post-9/11 era, clarifying parameters, offering a sketch of major ideas and arguments, and identifying challenges presented by the task. I mention the forms of rights discourse that the book will analyze—literary works, critical histories, international declarations, government statutes, NGO manifestos, and a documentary film—and note some of the injustices that rights discourse attempts to address: for example, injustices related to labor, gender, the citizen’s relationship to the state, and the movement of refugees. I highlight key problems with the discourse, including its limited definition of human rights, its reductive and regressive focus on the individual, its entanglement with systems of power, and its failure to point a way toward real transformation.