Lecture Reminder

Human Rights in the Neoliberal Imagination:
Mapping the “New Sovereignties”

a lecture by

JOHN NGUYET ERNI

Thursday, April 17th
Jordan Hall, Room A100,
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

ABSTRACT: "The end of sovereignty": this has been an ominous refrain in the chorus of global political and human rights analyses aimed at reformulating a post-Cold War configuration of world power. In cultural studies, the same pronouncement is more likely made through a mix of theoretical exuberance and ambivalence toward a post-nationalist and cosmopolitan imaginary. This presentation takes as a point of departure the rise of "new sovereignties" - a fractured Westphalianism - as a rubric for understanding the political imagination about the international community today. Speaking from a position of trying to bridge cultural studies with human rights legal discourse, I shall address these questions: To what dimensions of the "new sovereignties" can the human rights legal discourse as we know it today still exert influence, given the new configurations of globally disaggregated power? With "rights" today reemerging as a bifurcation, how can cultural studies reconcile a theory of "rights" as subaltern claim-making with that of "rights" as an all-encompassing tool in the neoliberal order of world justice? Through a preliminary mapping of the legal, institutional, and teleological forces that shape the new sovereignties, I attempt to illuminate why rights as international recognition politics for the subaltern is inadvertently complicit with the reproduction of rights constitutive of empire.

JOHN NGUYET ERNI, Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, researches on Chinese consumption of transnational culture, Asian pop, cultural tourism, sexualities in Asia, critical public health, and human rights politics. He has held a Rockefeller Humanities Research Fellowship at Columbia University’s School of Public Health in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights. In 2005, he completed a Master of Laws in Human Rights at the University of Hong Kong. His books include: Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS; Internationalizing Cultural Studies; and Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT PROFESSOR TED STRIPHAS: striphas@indiana.edu