Rights discourse originated in war and revolution rather than moral appeal
Evidence
In it Malcolm X does three things: First, he diagnoses a profound crisis of justice in race-based America and claims that it cannot be resolved by a purely domestic maneuver—that is, by the state’s formal extension of full citizenship to African Americans. Second, he defiantly asserts the humanity of African Americans quite independently of—in hostile opposition to—the American state and its political culture. Third, he proposes that justice consists in the legal conviction of America in an international court; justice is a matter of the law. This invocation of human rights by a black American citizen identifies America as the violator. The language of human rights invoked by him doesn’t make a moral appeal—at any rate, not to those who are declared to be the violators of rights—it declares a state of war and gives reasons why this war is necessary. It thus reaffirms the connection of rights discourse with war and revolution. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 691
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reading on human rights as a post-WWII construction (The Unmaking of the Arab World, other rights scholarship); also resonates with the library’s theme of Islam/Malcolm X adjacent to The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Human rights content results from political struggle, not nature or consensus
- SEED: An essay angle: ‘Civil rights asks the state to treat you right; human rights calls the state to the world court’ — the re-framing of rights language from appeal to declaration of war.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 691