Being Well: Minor Subjects and the Right to Health

In 2006, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the purpose of which is “to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity.” However, the adoption of the CRPD made visible how, although persons with disabilities theoretically were to have enjoyed the same rights as other human beings, these individuals have historically been denied such rights and, indeed, were often considered barely human at all.

By way of a “human rights literacy,” this lecture considers how “minor literature” imagines and transforms the human persons to whom rights are accorded, as well as the normative principles that human rights codify. Drawn from the recently published monograph, Writing Human Rights, it argues in particular for a more capacious conception of the “right to health” than has been imagined in terms of the American “good life.”

Crystal Parikh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at New York University. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Dr. Parikh has published Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (2017) and An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (2009). She co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015) and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (forthcoming 2019). Dr. Parikh is also the Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.