Foreword: Representing Culture, Translating Human Rights
2006; Routledge; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0163-7479
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
ResumoOn November 3-4, 2005, the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice and the Texas International Journal jointly hosted a conference at The University of Texas School of entitled Representing Culture, Translating Human Rights.1 This multidisciplinary and international symposium continued the Rapoport Center's exploration of the mutual constitution of the local and the global by considering how international human law and discourse migrate, and how, in the process, issues of culture emerge. Speakers considered invocations of both and culture in the North as well as the South, in the West as well as the East. Through panel discussions on translation, sovereignty and asylum, as well as book-end keynote addresses considering differing conceptions of the roles and reception of international law in the United Kingdom and the United States, on one hand, and contemporary challenges to global security on the other, speakers considered questions about what is meant by human and culture, and how those meanings change as human law and advocacy travel. Those who spoke at the conference are the contributors to this published symposium. Beyond having published on the areas discussed in the symposium,2 many of the participants have long been in conversation with each other. Such conversations have taken place on a variety of multidisciplinary, national, and global terrains-from meetings of the postcolonial reading group that Antony Anghie, Srinivas Aravamudan, Ranjana Khanna and I all participated in a decade ago at the University of Utah to a conference this past summer in Melbourne on the of human rights that I attended with Gregor Noll and Florian Hoffman. Many of us, including most of those already mentioned as well as Philippe Sands and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, have also participated together in a number of David Kennedy's conferences on New Approaches to International Law and even the fin of such approaches over the years. In addition, the relationship between culture and human has been an ongoing topic of discussion at the Rapoport Center, where Shannon Speed, Gerald Torres and now Derek Jinks are among the primary participants. Finally, several of the contributors have been engaged in discussions with Gaurav Desai and Charles Piot on human and postcolonialisms, while others have collaborated with Surakiart Sathirathai on topics ranging from United Nations reform to the role of microenterprises in the developing world. That interpersonal narrative was meant to do more than fit everyone in the symposium into the foreword, although it did that. I could fill it in with juicy details, and it might offer some of the intrigue of a David Lodge novel. With a lot more detail and consideration, it might even suggest an account of how schools of are formed and challenged, how thought is transmitted across generations and changes and develops (and in some ways stays the same) over time, and how different formations of people suggest different questions at different times.3 That many of us have long been in conversation with each other in fact provided the opportunity for us to push the contours of the conversation a bit. Indeed, the symposium was partly designed to prompt those of us who often see ourselves as more or less on the same page to see where our differences might lie. And I think it was successful in that aim. As discussion got underway, we began to identify some of the ways in which we often operate with different conceptions of culture and human rights, as well as of their relationship to each other. We began to see how we are both products and producers of different cultures-in ways that we might not normally recognize-and how our understandings of our own and other cultures affected our approaches to the topics we discussed. The symposium thus provided as much a laboratory as a forum for considering the questions of how international human law and discourse migrate, and how, in the process, issues of culture emerge. …
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