Sylvanna M. Falcón

Mestiza Double Consciousness: The Voices of Afro-Peruvian Women on Gendered Racism

In this article, the author proposes a confluence of W. E. B. Du Boiss “double consciousness” (1903/1982) and Gloria Anzaldúas “mestiza consciousness” (1989) to analyze the experiences of three Afro-Peruvian women. The merging of double and mestiza consciousness is necessary to holistically understand how gendered racism shapes their lives and why they have a desire to forge transnational solidarity with other women in the African Diaspora of the Americas. By gendering double consciousness and expanding mestiza consciousness beyond the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, we can better understand how womens agency plays a role in what the author refers to as mestiza double consciousness.

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights: AN INTRODUCTION

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, feminists are at a critical juncture to re-envision and re-engage in a politics of human rights that underscores the creative displays of grassroots resistance by women globally and affirms transnational feminist solidarity. In highlighting feminisms and human rights that are antiracist and social justice oriented, this issue highlights new research that reveals the transformative potential of a feminist human rights praxis that embraces collective justice. In this introduction, we discuss dominant critiques of human rights frameworks and explore critical human rights activism ‘from below’ in order to establish the context for this special issue on new directions in feminism and human rights.

Invoking Human Rights and Transnational Activism in Racial Justice Struggles at Home: US Antiracist Activists and the UN Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination

In February 2008, over 120 members of US civil society representing a range of domestic non-governmental organizations attended a United Nations hearing regarding the US governments compliance with the International Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination. In this article, I analyze a distinct form of transnational activism that requires US racial justice activists to identify human rights standards and principles upon which to build their assertions of racial injustice, necessitating a fluency in the language of human rights and the ability to negotiate and lobby with members of a UN committee.

The Particularism of Human Rights for Latin American Women of African Descent

Starting in the late 1990s, communities of African descent in Latin America engaged in a wide-ranging, regional political mobilization for the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Of specific interest in this article is how Black feminists in Latin America asserted an important new engagement with human rights through discursive and political mobilizations of vulnerability and precarity. For Black women activists, preparing for the world conference provided an opportunity to contribute to a discernable platform for African descendants in Latin America that was beginning to form. The primary purpose of this article is to understand what happens when the precarious have an opportunity to advance alternative conceptualizations about the meaning of human rights. Their antiracist feminist engagements underscore both the social meaning of precarity for Latin American women of African descent as well as the particularism of human rights.

Constellations of Human Rights

This article explores the production of human rights discourse by examining the organization and social actors involved in its construction. The author proposes a triad constellation configuration for situating the varied engagements of human rights by different constituencies at the United Nations level: dominant understandings, counterpublic approaches, and social praxis. Dominant understandings are affiliated with the Western-legal apparatus, counterpublic approaches embrace antiracist and feminist epistemologies, and social praxis is about the mediation between the first two constellations. This article argues that the social praxis constellation is where the discourse of human rights can be inventive and dynamic because an envisioning of human rights moves beyond the rubric of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights.