Which Way Home assignment

 For next class, please read Inventing Human Rights, chapter 5: “‘The Soft Power of Humanity:’ Why Human Rights Failed Only to Succeed in the Long Run,” then watch Rebecca Cammisa’s Which Way Home (on DU Course Media), and then write a response to the following:

Lynn Hunt contends that the rise of the nation-state served both to advance and to frustrate the spread of human rights. On the one hand, many of the new national constitutions enshrined in law the individual rights of their citizens. On the other hand, those rights were understood to belong not to all human beings universally but to the particular groups regarded as “true” members of the nation in question, thus giving rise to all manner of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion, and gender. A contemporary instance of this conflict between particular, nation-based rights and universal, human rights can be found in the controversies surrounding immigration. So, in a 300–500-word essay, please use Hunt’s argument to analyze the plight of the Central American child migrants depicted in Which Way Home. How does their plight reflect the conflict between national rights and human rights?

Please email your response to Catherine and John by the start of class on Tuesday.