Another example of how rich the transnational turn has been for contemporary scholarship in Asian American studies, Crystal Parikh’s Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color insists that we not dismiss human rights as a hopelessly flawed idea. This is because the idea names a crucial set of propositions: that “all human beings are … equal with respect to rights,” that “these rights are … not contingent on the whims of political authority,” and that “any government’s legitimacy depends upon its ability to secure these rights for its subjects.”

Read the full article.