Crystal Parikh

“Come Almost Home”: Human Rights and the Return of Minor Subjects

This article seeks to reconceptualize the conventional distinction between the moral responsibilities of humanitarianism and the juridical claims of human rights by describing a more radical understanding of ethical responsibility, what Emmanuel Levinas describes as a “being for the Other.” This ethical perspective can revitalize a human rights politics that prepares us for the arrival of the subject of human rights (in contrast to the administered object of victimhood) and the articulation of her demand for the right to rights. Distinguishing notions of charitable humanitarianism from the ethical responsibility that a human rights politics might entail, the article outlines the difficult relations and necessary risks involved in granting personhood to desiring others. Moreover, it demonstrates that minor literatures can offer a crucial staging of the form and meaning of such responsibility and protection within a transnational frame of vulnerability, violence, and justice, by serving as countersite to national memory.

Asian American Literature within and beyond the Immigrant Narrative

For a very long time, Asians in America have been viewed as newcomers to the country and destined always to be outsiders. While the antiquity and greatness of their countries of origin were often touted, Asians themselves who crossed boundaries and set themselves up as immigrants to the United States were greeted with scorn. The following is an example of this attitude, published in 1904 in the widely read and much-respected Century Magazine : “These Orientals have a civilization older than ours, hostile to ours, exclusive, and repellent. They do not come here to throw their lot with us. They abhor assimilation, and they have no desire to be absorbed. They mean to remain alien; they insist upon being taken back when they are dead; and we do well to keep them out while they are alive.” 1 Under such conditions, it was diffi cult – but not impossible – for Asians in America to become writers who could fi nd a large readership. To do so required being aware of their uniqueness. It meant having to navigate a complex series of spoken and unspoken expectations about what they could write and how they could write it, with few if any models for how to accomplish this feat. This situation changed to some degree as activists began to organize as Asian Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s and started to make claims about a history of writing that had largely been obscured. Immigration laws also changed in the postwar era, fi rst incrementally and eventually in a large-scale way that opened the door to particular kinds of immigrants from Asia. The economic fortunes of several prominent Asian countries improved in the last decades of the twentieth century as well, putting enormous pressure on ingrained habits of racial perception. While the Asian as perpetual foreigner is a perception that continues to be widespread, its circulation is increasingly impeded by challenges to its underlying logic. The post-1965 immigrants and their children, working alongside more established communities of Asian Americans, have substantially contributed to an altered understanding of how Asians in America are raced. One way they have done so is by becoming creative writers, their numbers now signifi cant enough MIN HYOUNG SONG

Being Well: The Right to Health in Asian American Literature

Human rights scholars have described the “right to health” as a key component of what is known as the “second generation” of human rights. Conceived of as a “positive liberty,” because it requires active intervention on the part of states, the right to health has not been traditionally recognized within the United States as a “natural right.” By examining a short story cycle from Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, this essay examines the way in which Asian American literature formulates a human rights claim to health citizenship that rearticulates the terms of health and well-being in the United States.