Public Books: The World of Asian American Studies
By
MIN HYOUNG SONG
Public Books
February 04, 2019
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.”