Appealing subjects: Reading across the international division of humanity [electronic resource]
說明
186 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-12, Section: A, page: 4535
Adviser: Rosaura Sanchez
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006
In this dissertation I treat the discourse of human rights as a privileged site of symbolic contact in the era of late capitalism. As the rights of citizenship are adjusted in relation to globalized capital, human rights become an increasingly important category of regulation. It is through this discursive modality that the proper subject of violence is obliged to emerge. My focus on the idea of violence directs us to a critical locus where a North/South neocolonial dynamic is materially reproduced and symbolically sustained under contemporary conditions of globalization. In this mode, human rights is understood as a primarily representational form which articulates the political through a cultural episteme. The limiting effects of this epistemological frame work to erase the other scene of politics that is anti/post-colonial struggle. My analysis relies upon various anti-colonial theories as the basis for both a critique of human rights discourse and for an understanding of the politics of 'subaltern' representation. In particular I examine a series of contemporary geopolitical encounters in which the quasi-legal instruments of human rights serve as an ineffective vehicle for the actualization of freedom for the peripheral majority of the world's population
My title "Appealing Subjects" refers to the production of a juridical boundary which, on the one hand distributes the subject of violence along an ethical axis of qualified and disqualified victims and, on the other hand, organizes the field of resistance along a political axis of those practices that fall inside or outside the law. This asymmetrical structure reproduces an international division of humanity which renders largely invisible and illegible all forms of struggle that do not adhere to the demands of an appellative structure of redress. In my reading of anti-colonial theory, subalternity marks the place of a disjuncture where the subaltern always already exists as (a subject of) violence necessarily outside the Law of both the historical and the juridical
