Human Rights, Empire, and Postcolonial Politics

Undergraduate / Graduate

This class focuses on the history and theory of human rights by considering it as a quintessentially postcolonial political form. Dialoguing with histories of imperialism, we consider how the genealogies of colonial rule intersect and interact with trajectories of political modernity after the formal end of empire. Empirically, the class focuses on the histories and presents of India and South Africa, as exemplary cases of countries that underwent processes of constitutional decolonization. Thus, rights have a foundational place in both polities. What does that mean? How does that create openings for the imaginations and instantiations of socially transformative policies? How does it lead to the endurance of traces and aspects of colonial government? What are the promises and limits of rights as we consider them in such historical and political contexts? In the process, how does our thinking and conceptualization of rights, imperialism and postcolonial political modernity, and the relationship between them, itself come to be at stake?