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Facilitators: Guillermo Irizarry (Modern and Classical Languages; Director, Puerto
Rican Latin@ Studies Institute); and Blanca G. Silvestrini (History).
Steering Committee: Richard Wilson (Anthropology; Director, Human Rights Institute);Jacqueline Loss (Modern and Classical Languages); Robin Greeley (Art History); Samuel Martínez (Anthropology); and Mark Overmyer Velázquez (History).
Presenters:
Jorge Duany (University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras),
Walter Mignolo (Duke University),
Sonia Álvarez (University of Massachusetts-Amherst),
Agustín Laó Montes (University of Massachusetts-Amherst),
Alicia Schmidt Camacho (Yale University),
Stephen Pitti (Yale University),
Licia Fiol Matta (City University of New York-Lehman College),
Kornel S. Chang (University of Connecticut)
Mark Overmyer Velázquez (University of Connecticut)
Jacqueline Loss (University of Connecticut)
Odette Casamayor Cisneros (University of Connecticut)
Discussants:
Diana Ríos (University of Connecticut)
Samuel Martínez (University of Connecticut)
Richard Wilson (University of Connecticut)
The Hospitable US concludes a yearlong, faculty seminar on the topic of hemispheric rights, agency, and border epistemologies. Scholars from various fields and institutional affiliations, mostly from the Humanities and Social Sciences, will collectively reflect upon paradigms that ground notions of citizenship, nationhood, and gender, and bolster correlative dialogues on civil and human rights emanating from these epistemological coordinates. Our participants will share and discuss original research and advance a theoretically informed, common language on these matters. Presenters will read summaries of full essays and share versions of their work with participants.
These are the concrete goals of our colloquium:
1. First half of the colloquium (May 16, 8:30am to 3:30):
- Participants will discuss a small number of individual, article-length
manuscripts in order to advance scholarly publications on these topics.
- The group will also offer advice on book-length projects stemming from essays.
2. A lunch, address and discussion will be devoted to a collective reflection on
hemispheric rights and border epistemologies, lead by Walter Mignolo, with Sonia
Alvarez and Agustín Laó as discussants.
3. In the afternoon session, the presenters will initiate a discussion on an edited
volume and potential for developing grant proposals on these topics.
4. In a morning session, on Saturday 17, we will meet to discuss the potential for
developing inter-institutional collaborations emanating from our colloquium.
Rationale: Membership, Migration, and Gender in Human Rights in the U.S.
As Americanists and human rights scholars involved in US-connected ethnic and area studies, we endeavor to bolster a new language on rights, agency, and identity amidst vast demographic and cultural transformation. We acknowledge that the relationship between individuals and their political communities has turned
ambiguous and perhaps untenable in our historical context. Scholars such as L.
Basch, S. Benhabib, E. Balibar, A. Negri, and M. Hardt inform our exploration on the crisis of territoriality, and B. Anderson, P. Virno, J. Nancy, I. Levinas, G.
Agamben propose new models for articulating notions of identity and community. A burgeoning field of scholarship brings these critical and theoretical approximations to bear in the Americas. This nascent field challenges the dichotomous epistemologies concerning language, race, ethnicity, and national origin, in its various social and gendered modulations.
In the early 2000s, a small group of scholars began exploring issues related to
human rights in the United States as diverse social groups began reclaiming the full legacy and meaning of international human rights in their movements. The first
national network on human rights in the US launched a 50 organizations conference at Howard University Law School in July 2002 and the American Civil Liberties Union held a major conference on the relationship between national and international legal human rights claims in October 2003. The Ford Foundation supported these efforts and spearheaded its own program with its pioneer volume, Close to Home. Case Studies of Human Rights Work in the United States. New scholarship is emerging linking thecivil rights and the international human rights movements. Using the language ofinternational human rights, Andersons' Eyes Off the Prize and Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid, opened the extraordinary richness of the field bylooking at race and self-determination struggles in the U.S. Other scholars are beginning to focus on migratory rights and the rights of belonging in the complex relationship of citizenship and exclusion (Gutiérrez, Santiago-Valles, Johnson, Kim, Wu, Rosaldo).
We will take into account the transmutations of demography, cultural politics, and
ethno-racial cartographies in the US, and the vast intimacy of this "host" political
community. Participants should address one of three major conceptual themes: (1)
the human right of membership; (2) migration and trans-border justice in the context of human rights in the US; and (3) the gender dimension, as diverse peoples claim what many view as their right to have rights.
A reflective interest in human rights guides our group, as well as a philosophically
inflected consideration of ethics. Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens,
Residents, and Citizens (2004) reminds us of Kant's Third Article of "Perpetual
Peace" (1795), which establishes that "The law of world citizenship shall be limited
to conditions of universal hospitality" (in Benhabib, 26). "Hospitality means the
right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of
another" (in 27). In Of Hospitality, Derrida suggests that true hospitality
requires "that we transgress all the laws (in the plural) of hospitality" and that
establish a "categorical imperative of hospitality" (81) whereby limitations are
abolished, even to the point of the host losing its authoritative sense of language,
identity, and ownership over its territory. Profoundly influenced by Levinasian
ethics, Derrida establishes individual and collective identity as anathema to
hospitality and decrees the primacy of the other over the self.
Various cultural critics and social scientists (Mignolo, Benhabib, et al) look at
the right of membership, the right to move, the right to not be stateless (to a
nationality) at the same time as they suggest that one is not confined to a fixed
nationality, as principled human rights that are not necessarily attached to
specific obligations. "Despite the cross border character of these rights, the
Universal Declaration upholds the sovereignty of individual states" creating a
series of internal contradictions that in practice debilitate the universal human
rights of moving populations.
The history of human rights in the United States complicates this scenario. Among
others: the governmental claims of sovereignty to step back from universal human
rights principles, the denial of human rights claims in American courts, the breach
between social justice and self-determination claims, the 'politics of rights'
itself induced by American exceptionalism, and the reluctance to incorporate in the
human rights analysis the persistence of structural racism.
Presenters and participants will address this subject matter in a multidisciplinary
context, in which history, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political
science, and philosophy will help us frame a theoretical context in which to analyze
concrete experiences.
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