The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique

by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (Editor), Guy Beauregard (Editor), Hsiu-chuan Lee (Editor)

Overview

Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated “subjects” of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia to recalibrate these human rights concerns from both sides of the Pacific.

The essays in this collection provide a sharper understanding of how Asian/Americans have been subjected to human rights violations, how they act as subjects of history and agents of change, and how they produce knowledge around such subjects. The editors of and contributors to The Subject(s) of Human Rights examine refugee narratives, human trafficking, and citizenship issues in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. These themes further refract issues of American war-making, settler colonialism, military occupation, collateral damage, and displacement that relocate the imagined geographies of Asian America from the periphery to the center of human rights critique.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439915738
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	12/06/2019
Series:	Asian American History & Cultu
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is a Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.
Guy Beauregard is a Professor at National Taiwan University. He is an Associate Member of Simon Fraser University's Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research.
Hsiu-chuan Lee is Professor in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Subject(s) of Human Rights; Recalibrating Asian/American Critique Guy Beauregard Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Hsiu-chuan Lee 1

Part I Recollecting Human Rights

1 Human Rights and South Korea: U.S. Imperialism, State Ideologies, and Camptown Prostitution Min-Jung Kim 21

2 After 1947: The Relative, the Refugee, and the Immigrant in the Chinese Canadian Family Narrative Christopher Lee 39

3 The Vancouver Asahi Connection: (Re-) engagement of the Families of Returnees/Deportees in Japanese Canadian History Masumi Izumi 56

4 A Journey to Freedom: Human Rights Discourse and Refugee Memory Vinh Nguyen 74

Part II Impossible Subjects: Race, Gender, and Labor

5 "Every Bombed Village Is My Hometown": James Baldwin's Engagement with the American War in Vietnam Yin Wang 95

6 Matronly Maids and Willful Women: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Plural Christopher B. Patterson 109

7 (De)humanizing Labor: Southeast Asian Migrant Narratives in Taiwan Grace Hui-chuan Wu 127

8 Factories, Farms, and Fisheries: Human Trafficking and Tethered Subjectivities from Asia to the Pacific Annie Isabel Fukushima 144

Part III Reading at the Limits: The Aftermaths, Afterlives, and Aesthetics of Human Rights

9 Reframing Cambodia's Killing Fields: The Commemorative Limitations of Atrocity Tourism Cathy J. Schlund-Vials 163

10 Reclaiming Home and "Righting" Citizenships in Postwar Sri Lanka: Internal Displacement, Memory, and Human Rights Dinidu Karunanayake 180

11 Toward an Aesthetics and Erotics of Nonsovereign Rights in Okinawa Mayumo Inoue 201

12 Figuring North Korean Lives: Reading at the Limits of Human Rights Christine Kim 217

Afterword: The Act of Listening Madeleine Thien 233

Contributors 241

Index 247