Beyond Sovereignty: New Cultural Imaginaries of Human Rights

This introductory essay examines the role of sovereignty (both state and individual) in structuring normative human rights as well as major critiques of sovereignty in contemporary scholarship. The authors take up Theophilus Marboah’s diptych of sea traffick—an eighteenth-century slave ship diagram juxtaposed against Massimo Sestini’s aerial photograph of a boat of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean—to consider the need for alternative conceptions of human rights that might address deep historical and structural forms of belonging and unbelonging; the rise of xenophobia, neoliberal governance, and securitization that result in the purposeful precaritization of marginalized populations; ecological damage that threatens us all, yet whose burdens are distributed unequally; and the possibility of decolonial and posthuman approaches to rights discourses. The essay considers how different forms, materials, perspectives, and aesthetics might contribute to the cultural production of new human rights imaginaries.