Human Rights in the Americas

This interdisciplinary book explores human rights in the Americas from multiple perspectives and fields. Taking 1492 as a point of departure, the text explores Eurocentric historiographies of human rights and offer a more complete understanding of the genealogy of the human rights discourse and its many manifestations in the Americas.

Introduction: Human Rights in the Americas I Early Origins of Human Rights 1 "Human Rights in the Americas: A Stony Path" 2 "Constructing Rights and Empires in the Early Americas: The Parallel Reception Histories of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Cotton Mather" 3 "Maps of Violence, Maps of Resistance, or Where is Home in the Americas?" II Human Rights in Central America and the Caribbean 4 "The Human Rights Situation in Central America through the Lens of Literary Representation and Violence" 5 "Rebellion, Repression, Reform: U.S. Marines in the Dominican Republic" III Human Rights and Gender 6 "Black Women Writers in the Americas: The Struggle for Human Rights in the Context of Coloniality" 7 "Autobiography, Fiction, and Racial Hatred: Representation in Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then" 8 "The Rebirth of the Myth of the American Hero and Feminism" IV Human Rights: Mexican Indigenous Groups and Mexican Americans (Chicanx) 9 "Dancing Resistance, Controlling Singing and Right to Name Heritage: Mexican Indigenous Autonomy, P'urepecha, Practices, and United Nations" 10 "Carey McWilliams's Activism and the Democratic Human Rights Tradition" 11 "The Ontogenesis of Fear in Héctor Tobar's, The Barbarian Nurseries" V Human Rights: Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Latinas/os, and Latinas/os 12 "Brazilian Quilombos: Castaínho and Its Struggle for Human Rights" 13 "Capá Prieto and the Decolonial Afro-Latin(a/o) American Imagination" 14 "'We Got Latin Soul': Transbarrio Dialogues and Afro-Latin Identity Formation in New York's Puerto Rican Community during the Age of Black Power (1966-1972)" VI Human Rights, Animals Rights, and Posthuman Rights 15 "From Racism to Speciesism: The Question of the Freedom of the Other in the Works of J. M. Coetzee and Jure Detela" 16 "To Be or Not To Be Human: The Plasticity of Posthuman Rights"