Tag
Human Rights
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The Uninhabitable Front
“Israeli military aircraft flew low over the Lebanese villages of Ras Naqoura and Aita al-Shaab, spraying agricultural fields with a fine mist… Within days, the green of fields, orchards, and olive groves turned brown. Farmers who had worked the same soil for generations watched their trees die.”
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Necessary Documents, Undocumented Americans
It doesn’t matter if they are innocent parents or 9/11 heroes: undocumented Americans have been villainized and brutalized by the United States.
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Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
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Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican …
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Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to the lived present of the author who reconstructs them. Done well, memoirs people the past, putting their reader in touch with affects, intentions, and relations…
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Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a …
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“Who Inherits?”: A Conversation between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby
Over the decades of her transatlantic career, distinguished Yale University professor emerita of American and African American studies Hazel V. Carby has considered how one negotiates ancestral ties to two islands intimately entangled by empire, Britain and Jamaica. Her new book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, is her answer to that question. As…
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Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the …
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Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician …
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The Inequality of “Human Rights”
What if the global struggle for human rights has accidentally helped make the world more unequal? What if, in seeking human rights, Samuel Moyn asks, we’ve …
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The Right to Have Rights
Since the election of Donald Trump, sales of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism have soared. Driving the new attention to this three-volume work of political theory published in 1951 is …
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Chaucer and Humanitarian Activism
Refugee Tales, a recent adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is more than a retelling of one of our “great books” of English literature …
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Refugee Stories for Young Readers
Today, more than half of the world’s refugees are children under the age of 18. That’s nearly 50 million young people, making this the worst child refugee …
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The High Power of the Lower Courts
In 2010 the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its legions of gun-rights supporters were on the verge of a constitutional revolution. …
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Is the Law Our Ally? Lessons from World War II
With Europe still reeling from the effects of World War II, the Allied forces set to work prosecuting a monumental trial …
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The Art of Protest
I marched with thousands on the streets of New York, asserting that “Trump is Not Our President” and “Love Trumps Hate.” So far we are free to assemble on Union Square in New York, to march up Fifth Avenue, to shout our anger, our fear, and our resolve. The street and soil are still ours to share. As I…
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We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign …
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Rape Culture Syllabus
I just start kissing them. Just kiss—I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. —Donald Trump The video was released on Friday, October 7. At the presidential debate two days later, when CNN…
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The Afterlife of Agent Orange
“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can be just as brutal. For now the victors would get to rule over more than just territory: they would get…
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Who Cares about American Power?
As the insane 2016 US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, we are with new urgency forced to question the role of American power in the world. In this charged moment, Noam Chomsky’s new book Who Rules the World? could not offer more essential reading; and the negative response to its publication could not be…
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Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest
On August 5, 2015, a team contracted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate a leak at the Gold King mine in Silverton, Colorado, accidentally breached the mine, sending three million gallons of toxic wastewater in a foul yellow surge down the Animas River. The two nearest downstream communities are Silverton, a small…
