Posts Tagged ‘Human Rights’

Goddess Laksmi and Cultural Traditions of Rice: Implications for the Status of Women

August 2, 2011

Bidyut Mohanty, Institute of Social Sciences (Delhi)

There is worldwide concern at the falling proportion of girls among youth populations in developing countries, especially in China and India which are otherwise making news as rising economies. Recent census figures in both countries present a still increasing gender gap and thus an alarming trend toward an expanding ‘female deficit’ over the decades. A deeper analysis of this phenomenon indicates that it is related in no small measure to the non-recognition of the economic value of women’s contribution to production processes and household work.

A glance into traditions of economy and culture can provide clues to solving this problem. The historical experiences of Asian societies, especially rice-growing regions, show that even in a prevailing patriarchal milieu, recognition of women’s participation in the agricultural process and household management has contributed to enhancing the status of women. This is illustrated by study of a social reform initiative in Eastern India which shaped popular consciousness in the sixteenth century through a literary creation rooted in the myth of goddess Laksmi, in which practices from the rural economy and the household helped convey a socially transformative message whose ritual observance continues on a mass scale until today and laid the foundation for a relatively more egalitarian and gender-just society.

The 16th-century regionalization of Indian culture accompanied the rise of great kingdoms and the unfolding of religious transformations. Regional languages challenged the dominance of Sanskrit by producing a rich variety of literature, while the great epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata were translated into local languages and adapted to local cultures. The Laksmi Purana (Laksmi Vratakatha) reflects this tendency. The purana genre is a popular Indian scripture, particularly in the tradition of Hinduism, that usually depicts the story of a goddess or god and sometimes imparts a radical message to the masses of common people. The Bhakti movement provides the example of social reformers like Balaram Das, who wrote the Laksmi Purana. This wave of the sixteenth century Bhakti movement in Odisha differed considerably from earlier phases insofar as it provided a social and philosophical orientation to the movement. Its two main sects challenged the existing patriarchal and caste hierarchy and the subordinate role of women by recruiting members from all castes, and advocating that the status of any individual be based on work, rather than birth.

The goddess Laksmi, known traditionally as the consort of Lord Vishnu, is regarded in Odisha as the consort of Lord Jagannath and resides with her husband within the boundaries of his temple at Puri while enjoying her own separate temple in his sacred precinct. The twelfth-century Jagannath temple is still considered the most important in Odisha since the god has always been recognized as the main deity of the royal family and the region itself.

In the sixteenth century different sects of the Bhakti movement worshipped Lord Jagannath, who was regarded as the incarnation of both Vishnu and Krishna. Thus the Jagannath temple became an important site for the reformers to impart their radical social messages. Balaram Das used the precinct of the temple to recite his purana among the women.

Laksmi is also known widely as Annapurna, provider of the bounty of rice. Examining the way Laksmi is conceptualized reveals her links to the cultural practices of rice cultivation. Women generally uphold cultural practices, and rice culture is no exception. The unique place of this grain in shaping the lifestyle of the people whose sustenance and livelihood depend on it is seen in the fact that only rice is associated with a goddess – Laksmi. In rice-cultivating regions in India, each stage of production is carried out on an auspicious day and rituals are performed. Odisha, a predominantly rice-producing state, knows various rituals marking stages of rice cultivation such as ploughing, transplantation, harvesting, and storage. Thus rice and Laksmi are interchangeable concepts in local imagination, and in the rural areas rituals have been performed from the sixteenth century until today. Women try to observe these rituals with devotion lest the displeasure of the goddess affect the harvest and bring starvation, concerns that ensure care and attention to the process of production. During the annual worship of Laksmi, women still recite the purana written by Das.

The purana story reads like this. Once Laksmi went out of the temple of Puri in disguise to observe devotees worshipping her on her designated day. She was disappointed to find only one untouchable woman worshipping. Being pleased with her, Laksmi went to her house and granted her a number of boons. On returning to the temple her husband Jagannath, provoked by his brother Balaram, rebuked her and demanded that she leave the temple since by visiting an untouchable household she had become an out-caste. Offended by the lack of appreciation of her visit to a devotee irrespective of caste, she cursed the brothers to be deprived of food until she fed them. She vowed to teach them a lesson by showing her own capabilities, and since she was in charge of the all the food grains of the mortal world as well as household affairs, she saw to it that the brothers went hungry. She resorted to this punishing act also realizing that otherwise men of the mortal world would not care for their women.

Deprived of food, the brothers roamed the land until they finally landed on the doorstep of the household where Laksmi was living. Laksmi fed them, declaring herself an untouchable. Realizing his fault, Jagannath promised her autonomy to move freely among her devotees without caste barriers, and allowed members of all castes to share offerings to him without stigmatization as out-caste. Jagannath receives offerings of cooked food to this day.

As mentioned in the story, women were in charge of managing the food grains at the household level. Women’s participation in the reality of agriculture work today remains obvious in rice-farming areas. Scholars from Boserup (1970) to Joan Menchor (1978) and Pranab Bardhan (1974) have all pointed out that women contribute significantly to almost every stage of rice cultivation. It has been observed that the girl child has a better chance to survive in rice-farming areas compared to areas where wheat cultivation dominates. Evidence also suggests that both the infant mortality ratio and the gender ratio (males per hundred females) are lower, thus less adverse to women, in the rice-producing regions as compared to wheat producing.

Thus it is that the Bhakti movement of the sixteenth century left traces visible to this day in rural Odisha. In the purana story not only does Laksmi assert her autonomy but, more importantly, she challenges dominant caste discriminations and raises the status of women’s labor. In the present global context some important lessons can be derived from this example. For although India and China have adopted policy measures to protect the girl child, year after year the proportion of female children continues to decline despite growing signs of social and economic prosperity. Such trends seem to indicate that cultural attitudes and perceptions may now be one of the greatest obstacles that policymakers and reformers confront. Although they should continue to advocate policies that increase job opportunities for women, they must also turn their attention to developing strategies that enhance the perceived value of women’s contributions to economy and society. Local mythologies may offer fertile ground for such activism, as the Laksmi Purana so eloquently suggests.

Bidyut Mohanty, Ph. D (Delhi) is Head of Women’s Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in New Delhi. She has been a Visiting Professor in the Global and International Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the coordinator of an ISS and UNDP project on capacity building of elected women leaders in local government in India, and as well as of a project sponsored by the National Commission on the protection of child rights.

Suggested Reading

Bardhan, Pranab (1974). ‘On Life and Death Question.’ Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, August.

Boserup, Ester (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development, London, Allen and Unwin.

Menchor, Joan (1978). Agriculture and Social Structure in Tamil Nadu: Past Origins, Present Transformation and Future Prospects.  New Delhi, Allied Publisher Ltd.

Mohanty, Bidyut (2008). “Status of Women in an agrarian Economy: Deconstruction of Oriya Laksmi vrata katha.”  In Shimkhada, Deepak and Phyllis Herman, The Constant and Changing Face of Goddesses: The Goddess Tradition of Asia. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Mohanty, Satya P (2008). “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as a Radical Pedagogy.” diacrities /Fall 2008

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Visual Culture and Pedagogy: Teaching Human Rights with Film and Images

November 11, 2009

Safia Swimelar, Elon University

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Fence

Contemporary globalization takes place visually – whether it be images and videos transmitted by cell phone and webcams, public video surveillance in buses or on street corners, a protestor or journalist’s capturing of political violence then seen by millions, or the plethora of international films that document diverse global experiences.  Images have a democratic quality to them: regardless of one’s language, level of literacy, or nationality, looking at a photo of Iraqi prisoners assembled naked into a pyramid with American soldiers grinning behind them or a video of Iranian student Neda killed by security forces in the streets of Tehran gives one evidence and perspective on state policy, human rights, and the universality of suffering.  As Murray Edelman chronicles nicely in his From Art to Politics, our perceptions of current political events stem from the images and stories that our memory recalls from art – films, books, paintings, but also the recreated events on TV.

Given the power of images to create meaning and expose and hide multiple realities, they can be important pedagogical tools for teaching global studies and human rights; although, there are both advantages and disadvantages to its use.  Film can be used to enrich the classroom in relation to substantive content and student engagement and also in terms of what perceptions and assumptions about global issues images construct for us.

Diverse and foreign films provide students with a powerful, visual global perspective.  While this may sound obvious, film’s comparative advantage of powerful images, compelling and concrete dramatic stories, and close-up shots of conflict (that are rarely directly observed or felt) means that students can be temporarily immersed into another cultural and political milieu. This can provide a jumping off point for the academic lesson, as I discuss below.  In my experience, students are eager to see how issues look from different cultural perspectives.  For example, many students naturally think of the American case when we talk of racism and discrimination.  Showing a film with detailed stories and images of discrimination and violence against European immigrants and Roma-Gypsies or indigenous peoples in Central America can provide a needed comparative and global perspective and take the conversation to another critical level.   It enables the idea of human rights to be universalized and individualized, thus bringing the global and local together.

Film can also inform, educate, and engage students about human rights.  Not only is film crucial for representing, identifying, and providing evidence for human rights challenges, it is useful to illustrate case studies of broader concepts and importantly as catalysts for engagement and academic study.  For example, when I teach human rights foreign policy and genocide, the feature film on the Rwandan genocide Sometimes in April (dir. Raoul Peck, 2006) is a potent visual text that spurs students to ask questions about how states and international organizations grapple with the legal, political, and moral dilemmas of mass violence and genocide in general and in Rwanda in particular.  It is especially powerful because through the personal story of a mixed Hutu/Tutsi family and a Hutu extremist brother on trial, we see the Rwandan genocide personalized and individualized.  At the same time human rights are universalized – we see that mass violence and the struggle for security are common and global phenomena. Lastly, almost all aspects of the Rwandan genocide that can spin-off into class examination are represented in the film: the causes of genocide, its preparation and process, identity politics, role of U.S. and the United Nations, international war crimes trials, reconciliation, and the local gacaca trials.

Moreover, one of the ways of using film and photography in the classroom is to examine the assumptions we gain from those images.  For instance, students’ common stereotypes about conflict and poverty in Africa are reinforced through film and media images of starving African children, for example.  By contrast, Sometimes in April’s portrayal of a conventional middle-class Rwandan family does well somewhat not to fall back on these common assumptions.  This type of analysis can lead to an examination of how images can create or minimize the potential for international action, such as the importance of images of starving Bosnian concentration camp prisoners (that resembled Holocaust images) and spurred awareness and eventual NATO intervention.

Another example more dramatic and less political in its purpose, but that also illustrates the catalyzing power of film is Lilya-4-Ever (dir: Moodysson, 2002), a gripping, morose, cinematographically rich tale of child abuse and transnational trafficking that on its own does not tell us much about the broader causes, effects, and local/global efforts to ameliorate human trafficking.  It focuses intensely on Lilya’s post-Soviet life.  (Interesting, the U.S. State Department screened this film in connection with a discussion about policy on sex trafficking.)  In my experience, students gain an exceptional (yet tough-to-watch) visual representation of what a specific case of trafficking may look like today; it is also hard for students not to empathize with Lilya as she is abused and humiliated and thus be drawn into the issue and seek to learn deeper. While the use of emotion in film may be seen by some educators as a distraction, inappropriate, or too subjective, I believe that the dramatic nature of film can increase student’s interest and commitment to the subject; moreover, it can illustrate how the effects of abuse and hindrances to protection stem from psychological, personal, and socio-cultural issues, not only political and economic issues.  In learning, the categories “cognitive” and “emotional” are not distinct, but are aspects of one another.

In review, film can contribute to the goals of the human rights classroom by providing evidence and also by powerfully illustrating: (1) what abuse looks and feels like; (2) how individuals are affected by human rights struggles, including the short and long-term consequences of violations; (3) the different forms of human rights abuses and campaigns and how they are perceived cross-culturally; (4) the causes and processes, agents and actors; and (5) the explanations for action or inaction by outsiders.  Film is versatile as a form of art; it has the power to challenge conventional views, to call for social action and change, but also to reinforce entrenched assumptions.  All of these traits possess teaching moments.

This brings us to a brief overview of some of the disadvantages and concerns when using film in the global studies / human rights classroom. While emotion and personal drama can galvanize interest, there is also the potential for films with human rights content to be shallow, exploitative, and visually gratuitous in an attempt to use emotion manipulatively, thus we must be selective.  Secondly, art creates order out of disorder; it presents the ambiguous as coherent.  While this may be helpful to students, there is a risk of over-simplification, de-politicization, and de-contexualization of the problem.  Other potential disadvantages to the use of or over-reliance on film might be: (1) over time, the proliferation of negative images may become banal, unreal, and promote apathy, as Susan Sontag cautions; (2) the post-modern critique and the myth of the image: the belief that pictures can tell the whole story, while in fact they may conceal a great deal; (3) Shocking and violent images may overwhelm students.  Here, I suggest being both understanding to those students who have trouble with violent images, but also to be clear that being shocked, saddened, and uncomfortable may be part of the learning process, particularly on the subject of genocide.

In short, and despite the potential disadvantages noted above, I have found that using film and photographic images (for example, the Face of Human Rights book edited by Lars Müller) brings stories and images from the far corners of the world directly and vividly into the human rights and international studies classroom.  It can be a catalyst to engage students in critical thinking and deeper analysis .  Furthermore, while space limits further explanation, a study of images within global studies gets us to think about how our perceptions and assumptions about the world are affected by the inundation of images that surround us.

Brief List of Recommended Human Rights Films

  • Night and Fog
  • Sometimes in April
  • Ghosts of Rwanda
  • Grbavica: Land of My Dreams
  • Lilya-4-ever
  • The Lives of Others
  • Standard Operating Procedure
  • Taxi to the Dark Side
  • The Prisoner: how I planned to kill Tony Blair
  • Dead Man Walking
  • Battle of Algiers
  • Well-Founded Fear
  • Srebrenica: Triumph of Evil
  • Long Night’s Journey into Day
  • Bamako
  • Darwin’s Nightmare
  • Romero
Safia Swimelar, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of political science at Elon University in North Carolina where she teaches courses in human rights, international studies, and comparative politics. She is a Fulbright Scholar (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and recently published an article in the International Journal of Human Rights on human rights change and the Roma-Gypsies. She is currently working on a collaborative year-long project involving her students and courses examining the use of film, images and art in the teaching international studies and human rights.  She also studies human rights and politics in the contemporary Balkans.

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Rethinking Gender and Human Rights in the Global Political Economy

September 9, 2009

Deborah M. Weissman

Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter

Globalization has required a change in our way of considering and teaching human rights, gender and justice. Gender equality had hardly begun at the national level when transnational developments called attention to the need to think about the condition of women on a global scale. The relationship between human rights and women’s equality has indeed assumed a place of prominence in the debates on globalization and international law, including universal human norms to guide the conduct of public life as well as private realms.[1]

Women’s organizations and human rights groups have frequently relied upon legal approaches and rights-based claims. Violence against women is now considered a proper subject for international human rights law.  Indeed, the issue of human rights for women has moved to center stage of the United Nations in terms of programmatic, administrative, and methodological approaches to international relations.  So too has the International Criminal Court included both substantive protections, procedural safeguards, and administrative structures that are gender-sensitive and designed to fully incorporate the needs of victims of and witnesses to gender-based crimes.

But it is more complicated, for this process is itself often a microcosm of the larger debate about globalization, specifically the degree to which old paradigms of colonialism are being recreated in the guise of global integration.  The call for women’s equality, a summons to which all people of good will cannot but be sympathetic, must, nevertheless be received warily, to be examined for hidden agendas and ulterior motives.  Transnational feminist human rights advocacy cannot yet be unhinged from nation, where one nation, the United States, so dominates global dynamics.  Caution is warranted if the pursuit of objectives that envision women’s human rights is not as an end unto itself but a means by which to enhance U.S. global interests.  To this end, this essay proposes the need for including a critical perspective in classroom debates and academic endeavors about the gendered imperative of human rights.

Certainly, advocacy efforts to develop gendered international legal standards, most often framed as human rights protections function positively in a number of ways.  As a rhetorical matter, the appeal to globalized legal standards, particularly in the area of human rights, serves as a harbinger of change and messenger of modernity and progress.  In these circumstances, rules regarding the treatment of women have, at the very least, symbolic value.  But they may likely provide benefits beyond mere signaling for instrumental purposes.  For example, in countries that ratify human rights treaties such as the Convention to End Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), albeit without intentions to comply, CEDAW may still serve as a signpost of the government’s obligations about which women’s rights activists can make claims and raise issues both in domestic and international fora (Hathaway 2003).

Furthermore, by reframing the issue of women’s inequality as a global issue, it may be easier for activists to raise concerns that might otherwise be relegated to the background, or perhaps even abandoned, if such issues were to be articulated as a problem arising within the modern territorial state.  For example, during times of political turmoil that threaten the stability of state regimes, when governments experience pressure, particularly in the form of external hostility, women may be reluctant to mount criticisms that target state practices.  However, when these issues are expressed as global concerns, the tension between the need to critique internal state practices and the need to defend against external threats may be lessened.

While there is little doubt that women have benefitted by using the international human rights framework to seek and obtain equality and justice, it is also true that the efforts to harness such norms on behalf of women’s equality often acts in tandem with a different set of concerns and may serve as intellectual currency to advance U.S. political interests, defined in terms of power, and its ideological purpose of global economic liberalization.

The United States has invoked the circumstances of women as a pretext for humanitarian intervention, often with devastating consequences.  During the period of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, advocates of U.S. expansionism justified military intervention in the Pacific and the Caribbean by appealing to the need to save, uplift, and civilize the women of the region (Hoganson 1998; Renda 2001; Merry 2000).  Intervention and occupation, it was claimed, would be the means by which to deliver the goods of human rights, particularly in the form of the rule of law.  Despite the inflammatory rhetoric used to describe the condition of women in order to promote intervention in the Caribbean and Pacific, these new legal measures were not designed to improve the circumstances for women.  Cuban women found themselves restricted in family arrangements and ownership and control of property (Stoner 1991; Ibarra 1998).  Once under U.S. influence, the doctrine of coverture was introduced in Hawai’i, effectively eliminating once powerful and active women from political participation (Merry 1998).  For many women, humanitarian intervention was experienced as rape and sexual harassment.

Concern for human rights continues today to function as a master narrative of U.S. imperial tendencies.  As historian Emily Rosenberg notes, at the end of the twentieth century, public commentators and scholars promoted America’s Empire as capable of delivering a host of public goods including freedom and democracy and the uplift of women (Rosenberg 2006).  The same missionary discourse that originated with saving women in the nineteenth century continues to play out in stereotyping and ongoing concerns about veils, polygamy, and women’s seclusion despite Arab feminist resistance to such formulaic depictions (Saunders 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002).  The current use of the condition of women in Afghanistan as an illustration of the need for intervention is thus, not without historical antecedents, presented in its current form as a product of a historical trend.

Moreover, human rights have been largely defined as individual political rights.  Rights pertaining to economic and social justice have been relegated to lesser considerations.  Others have described human rights initiatives targeted at women’s equality as a form of instrumental feminism that supports women’s rights as a means to enhance the development of market economies (Bessis 2004, Orford 2000).  Women are the new component of the globalized work force moving across international borders.  Gender inequality in the form of obstacles that prevent their free movement by which they enter the low-paid workforce are inimical to the interests of transnational corporations that rely on cheap female labor.

The current focus on human rights related to violence against women assumes, paradigmatically, the duty of the state to enforce standards and indeed, the obligation to punish offenders.  In a review of one study of one hundred eighty-five CEDAW reports, the most frequently noted human rights reform pertaining to gender equality was the enhancement of criminal penalties (Goldscheid, 2006).  Many of these reforms were modeled after legal developments in the United States, although such criminal intervention models may poorly serve women for a number of reasons.  State interference in the private realms of family or within local communities where gender-based human rights violations may occur is problematic in many settings, particularly where the state often poses as great a threat to human rights as do individual or local violators.  Criminal justice remedies may have little transference value in cultures where punishment for purposes of deterrence or retribution is not the norm.  Moreover, invoking state enforcement mechanisms in circumstances where economic and social justice issues are background considerations not only reduces the opportunity to eliminate human suffering, but may encourage the arbitrary exercise of power.

The benefits of the human rights discourse on behalf of global equality for women cannot be denied.  However, it is not a straightforward endeavor.  Put differently, to what extent must we question with our students and in our research whether the historical misuse of human rights create the very problems that the interveners claim they are seeking to interrupt?

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, 104 Am. Anthropologist 783 (2002)

Bessis, Sophie, International Organizations and Gender: New Paradigms and Old Habits, 29 Signs 633 (2004)

Goldscheid, Julie, Domestic and Sexual Violence as Sex Discrimination: Comparing American and International Approaches, 28 T. Jefferson L. Rev. 355(2006)

Hathaway, Oona, Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference? 111 Yale L. J. 1935 (2003)

Hoganson, Kristin L., Fighting for American Manhood (1998)

Ibarra, Jorge, Prologue to Revolution (1998)

Merry Sally Engle, Law, Culture and Cultural Appropriation, 10 Yale J. L. and Human. 575(1998)

Merry Sally Engle, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000)

Orford, Anne, The Subject of Globalization: Economics, Identity and Human Rights, 94 Am. Soc’y Int’l L. Proc. 146(2000)

Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti (2001)

Rosenberg, Emily S. Bursting America’s Imperial Bubble, 53 Chronicle of Higher Education 63 (Nov 13, 2006)

Saunders, Kriemhild, Introduction in Feminist Post-Development Thought, (Kriemhild Saunders, ed. 2002)

Stoner, K. Lynn, From the House to the Streets (1991)

[1] This entry is abstracted from Deborah M. Weissman, Gender and Human Rights: Between Morals and Politics in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship (Linda C. McClain & Joanna L. Grossman, eds. 2009).

Deborah Weissman is the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Globalization, the Global Trope, and Poor Black Communities: The Recent American Experience

May 15, 2009

David Wilson
Department of Geography
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

harlem_10

Today, in the shadows of shiny gentrified blocks and gleaming downtown skyscrapers, many poor African American neighborhoods in America continue to suffer. Globalization continues to afflict these already punished terrains in ways that are now well chronicled. Most conspicuously, globalization engulfs these terrains and eradicates decent paying jobs and lowers pay rates. Hyper-frenetic, globally coordinated businesses and corporations, increasingly dominating urban economies, potently order and re-order locations of jobs, investment, and physical infrastructure (notably plant and store locations). In a process described by David Harvey (2000, 2005), capital’s continuous search for profitability takes the form of a restless and relentless re-making of the spaces of production. In its wake, these communities experience intensified poverty, underemployment, and unemployment.

But the impact of globalization on these communities has another dimension. Less recognized is that globalization, as a kind of cultivated imagining that is aggressively spoken, is widely put in the service of neoliberal urban politics (via diverse kinds of communicating) that deepens the production of these disadvantaged communities. Here, what globalization is thought to be by people is seized and wielded like a cudgel to punish and discipline planning measures, social welfare programs, and urban policy. Planning, political expediency, and opportunistic pronouncements of a new ominous reality meld into one potent political force. In the process, the public often comes to casually accept an “entrepreneurializing” of cities that afflicts these racialized communities. Let me provide specifics about this profoundly influential but only dimly recognized process (see also Wilson, 2007).

These poor African American communities today continue to suffer with a strengthened functional logic assigned to them: to warehouse “contaminants” in the new competitive, global reality. These communities across Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and the like have, for decades, warehoused the racial poor as the real-estate sectors in these cities have used planning and policy to keep key housing markets healthy and profitable. But in the latest twist on this, ghetto maintenance has increasingly involved wielding the recent fear and obsession within a supposed new era: globalization. This elaborate rhetoric, now served up heavily in newspapers, planning documents, and politician oratory, has been a key trigger to mobilize and put into play crucial ghetto-afflicting forces (targeting of government resources to cultivate a robust entrepreneurial city, retrenching the local welfare state, rhetorically attacking these populations and spaces). This rhetoric, which I term “the global trope,” typically extends neoliberal principles and designs into common thought and city planning measures (particularly the notion of the private-market as best determinant of social and land-use outcomes). The global trope, in this frame, is served up as a frank and blunt package of truths about city realities and needs that can no longer be suppressed. In assertion, its pleas correspond to core truths; deft interpreters read and respond to clear truths as a policy prescriptive, progressive human intervention onto a turbulent and fragile city.

The rhetoric of the global trope has thus been a perceptual apparatus with profound material effects. It has served up a digestible reality that, following Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1994), guides construction of programs and policies by making certain actions thinkable and rational and others not. Imposed webs of meanings, like symbolic cages, build bars around senses of reality that place gazes within discrete and confining visions. One reality is ultimately advanced while alternatives are purged. Here is Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) implicit dialogue with other points of view, the simultaneity of asserting one vision and annihilating others. This strategic affirmation and rebuke, forwarding what exists and what does not, continues to make this rhetorical formation a fundamental instrument of power. As this apparatus has resisted and beaten back competitive visions of city and societal realities, even as it is contested and struggled against, it grows stronger in many U.S. cities.

At this rhetoric’s core, a supposed new hyper-competitive reality (“globalization”) makes these cities easily discardable as places of investment, production, and business. These once robust economic landscapes, in the rhetoric, have recently become porous and leaky landscapes which could economically hemorrhage. In this new era of competitive globalization, cities are portrayed as beset by a kind of accumulation disorder and uncertainty that now haunts them. The city, as a place of becoming, is a threatened but historically resilient locale that once again must act ingenuously to survive. The offered signs of this new ominousness – municipal fiscal depletion, an aging physical infrastructure, the “reality” of decayed residential, commercial, and production spaces dotting the city – are deployed as disciplining indicators of what the future can bring. Through this rhetoric, a proposed shock treatment of re-regulation and privatization is grounded and rationalized.

In a second part of the rhetoric, city survival supposedly depends upon following two imperatives: strengthening the city as a taut entrepreneurial space and meticulously containing poor black communities and their populations. In the first imperative, the assertion is forceful: Now cities must push to build attractive consumptive complexes, upper-income aesthetic residential spaces, efficient labor pools, and healthy business climates. This post-1990 rhetoric has been at the heart of what Kevin Cox (1993) earlier identified as the supplanting of a “politics of redistribution” by a “politics of resource attraction.” Entertainment, culture, sports, and leisure now become civic business. To fail to commodify these, borrowing from Milwaukee Mayor J. Norquist (1998), is to miss the reality of the new stepped-up inter-city competition. An intensified fragmenting and balkanizing of city space by class and race is not merely normalized, it becomes celebrated as utilitarian and in the service of city survivability.

In the second imperative, the assertion is sometimes explicit but often implicit: that poor black neighborhoods and populations need to be systematically isolated and managed as tainted and civic-damaging outcasts. These are cast as not merely culturally problematic but things to be feared, reviled, and cordoned off. At work is William Wimsatt’s (1998) notion of the mobilized fear economy, a general trepidation that now expands to more deeply include black ghettos. As Wimsatt notes, since 1980 we have increasingly had government by fear, foreign policy by fear, and landscapes of fear, all of which are expediently peddled by all scales of media. Now, we also have a heightened fear of the sinister black-ghetto in these cities that is manifested in a discursive fright about crime, black men, black youth, streets, and ghettos. A spiral of fear, peddled through rich images, now sells black bodies and spaces as potential violators of the collectivity’s socio-moral and economic integrity.

The global trope is in this sense two-pronged. It offers the complementary “truths” of what circumstances these cities now face and also what they must do to survive. These two supportive formations seamlessly connect to form a coherent and resilient rhetoric which is aggressively spoken in all U.S. cities. This whole, borrowing from Wendy Hollway (1984), offers purportedly progressive positions for subjects to adopt that legitimates potentially contentious actions (e.g. requiring poor people to work at sub-minimum wages, cutting food stamps to the needy, using public funds to subsidize gentrification). Yet use of such discourse by growth elites is anything but surprising. These formations, following Norman Fairclaugh (1992), are the modern alternative to flagrant violence and oppression. The now established rule in complex societies, to Fairclaugh, is to make and manage rather than to nakedly repress. To Fairclaugh, politics today is increasingly practiced in the domain of producing knowledge, i.e, defining what is normal, non-normal, ethical, and rational.

The end result, I suggest, has been the production of a more impoverished African American poor community as the now stepped-up zone of human discard in “the global era.” These communities, simply put, have become one-dimensional apparatuses for the naked isolating and warehousing of the black poor which help drive downtown transformation and gentrification. In the process, dominant, widely chronicled changes in these ghettos (deepened deprivation, more health fatalities, more poverty) reflect this newest rhetorical-planning process put into play in our cities. The facilitating rhetoric, the global trope, proves functional by communicating the need to re-entrepreneurialize city form and life. At the moment, even with the ascendancy of Obama and with possibilities for progressive change, this rhetoric and its afflicting continue unabated.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhael (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas.

Cox, Kevin (1993) “The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical Review,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11: 433–448.

Fairclaugh, Norman (1992) Discourse and Social Change. New York: Polity

Harvey, David, 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California.

Harvey, David, 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford.

Hollway, Wendy (1984) “Gender difference and the production of subjectivity.” In J. Henriques, W. Hollway et al. Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity. New York: Metheun.

Norquist, John (1998) The Wealth of Cities. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Wilson, David. 2007. Cities and Race: America’s New Black Ghetto. London: Routledge.

Wimsatt, William (1998) “The Fear Economy,” Adbusters Magazine, #21, Spring 10–12.

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Responsibilities for Protecting Human Rights

February 15, 2008

Mark Gibney
Belk Distinguished Professor
University of North Carolina-Asheville
Email: mgibney@unca.edu

Human rights are universal, meaning that each person possesses certain human rights by the mere fact of this person’s humanity. What does not matter – or at least what should not matter – is where a person lives, how much money a person has (or does not have), whether that person’s country has (or has not) became a party to any particular international human rights treaties, and so on.

Who has the responsibility for meeting these “universal” rights? The (universal) response of states has been that each country is responsible for protecting human rights within its own borders – but that no state has human rights obligations that extend outside of its own territorial jurisdiction. But what if a country is not able or is not willing to protect the human rights of its citizens? Or what if human rights are being violated, in large part due to the actions of outside states? It is here that the silence of the international community has been deafening.

Thus, notwithstanding near-universal declarations of the “universality” of human rights, the responsibility for protecting human rights has been based almost exclusively on territorial considerations. What has this territorial approach to human rights given us? Unfortunately, not nearly enough. Looking at violations of economic rights alone, we live in a world where an average of 50,000 people die every single day due to preventable causes. Yet, notwithstanding this incredible level of human rights atrocities, the territorial approach to human rights has essentially gone unchallenged. However, this has started to change and it has come from the most unlikely of sources: the “war on terror.”

To state matters bluntly, the reason why “enemy combatants” are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and not in some location in this country is that American government officials are of the mind that U.S. obligations under international law do not extend outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. Under this (territorial) approach to human rights, the U.S. government is not bound by the Torture Convention and the Covenant on International Civil and Political Rights (both of which the U.S. is a party to) when it is operating outside the territorial borders of the United States. This same kind of rationale is behind the policy of “extraordinary rendition.” The idea is that the U.S. has not done anything wrong or unlawful when individuals outside the United States are being kidnapped and sent to some third country for “interrogation” purposes – albeit at the behest of, and under the direction and control of, American authorities. Again, the argument is that American obligations under international law are only applicable to actions within the United States.

Fortunately, most people have been able to see behind this façade. That is, they have recognized that territorial considerations should not be used in this manner to demarcate where a country’s human rights obligations begin – but, more importantly, where they end. Most people seem to believe that torture is illegal whether it takes place in Fort Benning, Georgia, or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In that way, the “war on terror” has helped us see that territorial considerations oftentimes make little sense in the context of protecting human rights.

This is not to suggest that “territory” does not matter at all or that states have the same human rights obligations outside their borders as they do domestically. Neither of these propositions happens to be true. Rather, each state has the primary responsibility for protecting human rights within its own domestic borders. However, what we have completely failed to recognize are the secondary responsibilities that the rest of the international community has when the territorial state has not been willing or able to offer human rights protection. And what also has to be said is that this is not simply a moral obligation – wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if we provided some assistance to starving children in some other land – rather, it is a legal obligation. This is most clearly seen in the language of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, one of the so-called International Bill of Rights, whereby each state party to the Covenant has (legally) obligated itself to protect the economic rights of “everyone” by means of “international assistance and cooperation.”

What does “international assistance and cooperation” mean? What it means is that when children in a particular country are being denied an education (to choose one example), this not only constitutes a violation of human rights by the territorial state – but this also constitutes a human rights violation on the part of the rest of the international community, which has pledged to protect those rights.

The point is that human rights are universal, but so are the duties and responsibilities to meet those rights. This is what the framers of the International Bill of Rights, and all of the other international human rights treaties, sought to achieve. This is the only way that the notion of human rights makes any sense. If human rights protection were something that individual states could (and would) do individually, there would be no need for any international conventions. Stripped to their barest essentials, what each one of these treaties represents is nothing less than this: that everyone has an ethical as well as a legal obligation to protect the human rights of all other people. Sadly enough, our inability to recognize the extent of our own human rights obligations has constituted the greatest human rights failure of all.

Mark Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. His latest book is International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles.

global-e volume 1 number 3 February 2008

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The Nail House: Global Media, Local Politics

May 15, 2007

Michael Curtin
Director, Global Studies Program
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: mcurtin@wisc.edu

I’ve traveled to Asia many times over the past decade, and if everything works flawlessly, the trip takes about 24 hours door-to-door from my home in Madison to a hotel room on the other side of the world. Then it usually takes another 72 hours before my body begins to adjust to the rhythms of Asia. In the semi-hallucinogenic haze of jet lag, one becomes acutely aware that the titanic global struggle between corporate America and radical Islam figures little in the daily calculations of Chinese citizens who worry more about the dramatic changes taking place in their own backyards. Yet this doesn’t mean they’re globally disconnected. In fact, the opposite is true.

Most recently, their concerns were crystallized in television images of the stubborn nail house, a lonely brick structure sticking out of a vast pit dug around it by shopping mall developers in downtown Chongqing. Refusing to make way without a fight, Wu Ping vigorously waved a Chinese flag from the rooftop of his home, while his wife, Yang, regaled television reporters with vigorous criticism of the moneyed and politically-connected interests that threatened their home. The particulars of the case are perhaps less significant than the fact that the Wu family staged a self-conscious media war, receiving widespread TV coverage and more than 10 million Internet page views before government officials clamped the lid on it. An opinion poll conducted by one of China’s most popular websites, QQ.com, showed support for the Wus running four-to-one.

Depending on whom one listens to, China is either teetering on the brink of greatness or catastrophic demise. It is at once the most powerful economy in Asia and perhaps the most fragile, with some experts estimating that more than a hundred million of its citizens have taken to the road in search of work, while hundreds of thousands more have stayed at home to organize demonstrations for economic equity and social justice. Sit-ins, marches, and militant clashes with authorities are now regular occurrences, as government officials scramble to respond to the rising tide of protests.

Such a world is a long way from the end of history that Francis Fukuyama and others anticipated only a decade ago. At the time, it was suggested that the most momentous decisions after the Cold War would revolve around a set of rather mundane choices: Coke or Pepsi? Sony or Panasonic? MTV or ESPN? Media metaphors flowed easily then. Satellite TV and the dawning of the Worldwide Web seemed to augur a collapsing of boundaries and the ultimate triumph of consumer capitalism, leading to an era of global peace and prosperity. US leaders during the 1980s and 1990s contended that that trade liberalization, new technologies, and Western expertise (the Washington Consensus) would unleash the productive power of lesser-developed nations, a classic reassertion of the development paradigm that had fallen into disfavor during the 1970s. They likewise resurrected the end of ideology as the end of history, which played as a companion theme to the weightless economy and the global communication grid.

Of course the worm turns and now, in the new millennium, cultural and economic difference again seem as intractable as jet lag. Societies have grown wealthier, but disparities have grown greater. Global communication technologies have furthermore engendered disjunctive aspirations and imaginations on the part of media users. That is, rather than fostering spontaneous development, television exposure seems to be exacerbating tensions between global imagery and local experience. This media lag engenders much discomfort among the poor, but it also makes it possible for the Wus of Chongqing to lay claim to global standards of personal rights and governmental transparency, neither of which were available to them through local institutions. Television has created a space for Wus to imagine and perform their protest for appreciative audiences near and far, and to bring pressure to bear on powerful interests who aren’t accustomed to such scrutiny. Like global finance, world trade, and political liberalization, television is a powerful change agent in Asia.

The medium spread through the region at a remarkable pace during the 1990s, adding close to two billion new viewers. In China alone TV access has risen from virtually zero to some 90% of the population over the past twenty years. A medium that was originally intended to foster economic development and national unity has become a source of significant anxiety among leaders in Beijing, sparking debates over rising expectations and growing social activism. A similar trajectory of rapid adoption has taken place in India and the Middle East where policy makers also fret that the rapid diffusion of television exerts intense pressure to deliver the fruits of economic and social development quickly. Just as jet lag challenges one’s physical and mental capacities, so too is media diffusion challenging the institutional capacities of Asian societies. In this state of disjuncture, disparities of wealth seem to take on vivid significance in the lives of viewers. Rather than fostering aspirations for modernization and development (a desire to catch up), television makes uneven development fantastically apparent to TVs newest audiences.

Put another way, if one looks carefully at a map of the world’s proven oil reserves, it is glaringly obvious that resources in the Middle East eclipse the combined reserves of the rest of the world. Likewise, if one examines the geographic distribution of the world’s manufacturing workforce as a function of labor cost, one quickly is alerted to the significance of places like Guangdong province or Andra Pradesh. Now compare these global maps of resource distribution to maps of resource consumption, energy use, and per capita income. The disparities are stunning but nevertheless commonly pass without critical comment in the mainstream media. Yet even though television rarely acknowledges these disparities at an explicit level, it prismatically refracts them through the disjunctive delivery of fantasy images of consumption to the shantytowns and cramped quarters of the world’s working poor. Moreover, television’s fixation on female consumerism offers up relentless images of feminine agency that are commonly embraced by young women who leave behind the drudgery of familial servitude for a chance to migrate to the workshops of transnational capital. Social tensions therefore multiply beyond class issues to controversies over gender relations and family values, as well. Therefore, like jet lag, media lag intensifies one’s sensitivity to now and then, here and there, us and them.

It’s noteworthy therefore that the end of ideology coincided with the emergence of development communications during the 1950s and that the end of history accompanied the dawning of a global communication grid during the 1990s. Yet we have neither transcended ideology nor history. Instead, the globalization of electronic media and the resulting phenomenon of media lag is actually fostering ideological and historical awareness despite (or perhaps because of) television’s fixation on abundance and consumerism. It is therefore worth paying attention to the operations of both ideology and history as we reflect upon the recent increase in TV viewing around the world. For the social transformations that accompany new communication technologies often take time to register. In Asia, those transformations are perhaps just beginning.

global-e volume 1 number 1 may 2007

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