Acknowledgments; 1. An Introduction: Vernacular Rights Cultures in South Asia and Decolonizing Human Rights; 2. Human Rights, Political Agency, and Refusing the Politics of Origins; 3. Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia; 4. The Political Imaginaries of Haq: 'Citizenship' and 'Truth'; 5. Resisting Developmentalism and the Military: Haq as a Cosmological Idea and an Islamic Ideal; 6. Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics of Location: A Conclusion; Bibliography; Glossary; Index.
Tracks the critical conceptual vocabularies and the gendered subaltern politics of rights and human rights in South Asia.
Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Rethinking Agency: Gender, Developmentalism and Rights (2013), co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013) and The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).
'Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights
and Gendered Struggles for Justice should be essential reading for
all political and feminist theorists working on the concept of
human rights. In this profoundly original book, Madhok offers us a
way through and beyond choices between 'west' and 'non-west' in
human rights theory. She shows us that the choice between
universalism and particularism in rights theory is mistaken, and
that rights are always produced and put to work as part of
political struggles in a vernacular which is neither fixed nor
self-contained. She uses the tools of feminist historical ontology
and ethnography to demonstrate how epistemic agency and authority
in the conception of rights is constructed, reconstructed and
mobilised within the political imaginaries of haq by women living
multiple axes of oppression.' Kimberly Hutchings, author of Time
and World politics: Thinking the Present
'This remarkably original and sophisticated exploration of
vernacular rights cultures shifts the epistemic centre of global
human rights scholarship. Through the innovative methodological
device of feminist historical ontology, and her ethnographic study
of the idea of haq, Sumi Madhok offers an alternative conceptual
apparatus to register the epistemic presence of subaltern groups in
the Global South, and to understand how gendered subjects of rights
come into being in the vernacular. Madhok's book is a stellar
contribution to the decolonization of the political theory of human
rights as well as to the field of global intellectual history.'
Niraja Gopal Jayal, author of Citizenship and its Discontents: An
Indian History
'Madhok's book marks a powerful intervention in existing mainstream
as well as critical scholarship on human rights and gender justice.
It makes visible the ontological and epistemic violence inflicted
by dominant human rights on subaltern groups. By foregrounding
conceptual innovations from the standpoint of subaltern struggles
and within a vernacular rights culture, this book opens space for a
productive engagement with rights. In relating different stories
about human rights and modes of subject formation through a shift
in standpoint, Madhok offers a radical reorientation and
revisioning of human rights scholarship grounded in alternative
political imaginaries. Vernacular Rights Cultures is a work that
'most of the world' has been waiting for!' Ratna Kapur, author of
Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl
'How do you decolonize human rights? You begin by paying attention
to how people pursue rights in most of the world. Seemingly
obvious, what this book does is urge us not to see subaltern rights
struggles as merely talking back to the centre. If we examine the
deployment of rights by tenant farmers in Pakistan, Indigenous
peoples in India, desert dwellers in Rajasthan, we can find those
moments when an epistemic shift takes place and suddenly we see
peeping through the human rights frames we know so well an
alternate universe where food security is possible, forests are
preserved, and people demand not equality but a future. Through her
deeply attentive scholarship Madhok offers us the best gift of all:
critique with the possibility of transformation.' Sherene H.
Razack, author of Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries
into Indigenous Deaths in Custody
'A marvellous account of subaltern and women's struggles in South
Asia and their engagement with human rights … of great interest to
scholars and students of decolonial and postcolonial theory,
anthropology, South Asia and human rights.' Moritz Koenig, LSE
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