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.

Trailers and previews of our course texts

Here are some sneak peaks from/about the texts we'll be reading and viewing in class this fall.

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.
From the publisher: How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals far and wide. Hunt also shows the continued relevance of human rights in today's world.



Here's a lecture that Hunt recently gave, summarizing the main argument made in Inventing Human Rights:



Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre, The Photographer.
From the publisher: In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war with the Soviet Union. This graphic novel/photo-journal is a record of one reporter's arduous and dangerous journey through Afghanistan accompanying the Doctors Without Borders. Didier Lefèvre’s photography, paired with the art of Emmanuel Guibert, tells the powerful story of a mission undertaken by men and women dedicated to mending the wounds of war.

Clipped from: www.firstsecondbooks.com (share this clip)

Here's a short piece about how The Photographer was made: