Vernacular Rights Cultures

Tracks the critical conceptual vocabularies and the gendered subaltern politics of rights and human rights in South Asia.

Sumi Madhok (Author)

9781108832625, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 February 2022

224 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2 cm, 0.42 kg

'How do you decolonize human rights? You begin by paying attention to how people pursue rights in most of the world. Seemingly obvious, what this book does is urge us not to see subaltern rights struggles as merely talking back to the centre. If we examine the deployment of rights by tenant farmers in Pakistan, Indigenous peoples in India, desert dwellers in Rajasthan, we can find those moments when an epistemic shift takes place and suddenly we see peeping through the human rights frames we know so well an alternate universe where food security is possible, forests are preserved, and people demand not equality but a future. Through her deeply attentive scholarship Madhok offers us the best gift of all: critique with the possibility of transformation.' Sherene H. Razack, author of Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody

Vernacular Rights Cultures offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of world-making that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights, in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilisations in 'most of the world'. Vernacular Rights Cultures demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights.

Acknowledgments
1. An Introduction: Vernacular Rights Cultures in South Asia and Decolonizing Human Rights
2. Human Rights, Political Agency, and Refusing the Politics of Origins
3. Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia
4. The Political Imaginaries of Haq: 'Citizenship' and 'Truth'
5. Resisting Developmentalism and the Military: Haq as a Cosmological Idea and an Islamic Ideal
6. Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics of Location: A Conclusion
Bibliography
Glossary
Index.

Subject Areas: Political activism [JPW], Human rights [JPVH], Central government [JPQ], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ]