"This timely collection of essays articulates a new generation of human rights thought. Here, human rights are seen not as inalienable property, but as claims, stakes, and occasionally as trumps which people play out locally and globally, nationally and transnationally. These rights emerge, not from declarations, but from a culture of conflict over human dignity and self-preservation."—Michael Geyer, professor of history and member of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago

"[T]he essays make for compelling reading, raising as they do questions of human urgency, collective commitment, and political prospects, but drawing on informed narratives of individual encounters and combined resources. Taken together, they provide a riveting analysis of the fates of human rights at the onset of a new century."—Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin

Among the signal developments of the last third of the twentieth century has been the emergence of a new politics of human rights. The transnational circulation of norms, networks, and representations has advanced human rights claims in ways that have reshaped global practices. Just as much as the transnational flow of capital, the new human rights politics are part of the phenomenon that has come to be termed globalization. Shifting the focus from the sovereignty of the nation to the rights of individuals, regardless of nationality, the interplay between the local and the global in these new human rights claims is fundamentally redrawing the boundaries between the rights of individuals, states, and the international community.

Truth Claims brings together some of the best new work from a variety of disciplinary and geographic perspectives in order to examine the making of human rights claims and the cultural politics of their representations. All of the essays explore the potentialities of an expansive humanistic framework. Here, the authors move beyond the terms ¾ and the limitations¾ of the universalism/relativism debate that has so defined existing human rights literature.

Mark Philip Bradley is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam. Patrice Petro is the director of the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a professor of film studies, which she teaches in an interdisciplinary program sponsored by the English department. She is the author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (Rutgers University Press).