Cultural Studies, Human Rights, and the Legal Imagination ─ Reframing Critical Justice

New and unremitting atrocities linked to state, inter-state, and private violence have precipitated new social movements that act in concert with international human rights law, yet cultural studies has so far had little engagement or institutional connection with these movements. How can cultural studies as a discipline make space for human rights as a global legal and humanitarian practice? This book considers the possibility of overcoming the apparent non-correspondence between critical cultural humanism and rights, and between culture and law. Exploring the intellectual and political blindspots within cultural studies and human rights practice, it creates a new intellectual space to allow cultural studies to meet the current challenges presented by social and political struggles worldwide. The book advances a distinctive critical model of analysis that incorporates insights of postcolonial legal theorists and jurists from the Global South and important cultural theorists from the North, whilst fusing a critical and unique combination of law, social movements, and modernity. Through case studies spanning the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia, and covering questions relating to genocide, pedagogy and gender and sexual rights, Cultural Studies, Human Rights, and the Legal Imagination develops a means by which the practice of cultural studies can be embedded within the legal space, institutions and social movements connected with human rights. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, critical legal studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies and human rights.

John Nguyet Erni is Professor and Head of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of Curing? AIDS, co-author of Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong: A Critical Multicultural Approach, editor of Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations and co-editor of Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology and Asian Media Studies: Politics of Subjectivities.