Vernacular Rights Cultures

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

Sumi Madhok (Author)

9781009423939, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 March 2024

228 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.336 kg

'A marvellous account of subaltern and women's struggles in South Asia and their engagement with human rights … of great interest to scholars and students of decolonial and postcolonial theory, anthropology, South Asia and human rights.' Moritz Koenig, LSE Review of Books

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]