Apartheid—The Global Itinerary

by Rotem Giladi --  In 2010, Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia argued for a very short history of human rights. Against the grain of celebratory accounts of the rise of human rights, Moyn dated their birth to the 1970s. To support his claim of extreme discontinuity, Moyn demonstrated why earlier episodes, concepts, or vocabularies were not and could not be about human rights. ‘The drama of human rights’, he asserted, was ‘that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere’. Chapter 3 of Moyn’s book was titled ‘Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement’ and asserted that ‘anticolonialist forces were more committed to collective ideals of emancipation—communism and nationalism—as the path into the future, not individual rights directly, or their enshrinement in international law’. Moyn added, as evidence, that ‘postwar anticolonialists … rarely invoked the phrase “human rights,” or appealed to the Universal Declaration of 1948 ’. Jan Eckel, in a 2010 Humanity review es...

  *** This blog was originally posted on the University of Dayton Human Rights Center’s blog   *** by Alexandra C. Budabin -- Last week, I attended a conference on “Celebrity and Protest in Africa and in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle” at the University of Copenhagen. The conference was an opportunity to share research conducted as part of the European Council Research project “Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation, 1948-1990” led by Louise Bethlehem of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The project aimed to “trace the global diffusion of apartheid-era expressive culture, whether textual, musical or visual, in a Cold War setting”. Panels showcased work on literary celebrities, music, and performance. Dr. Bethlehem delivered a keynote on “Stars in the Southern Hemisphere” that looked at the “global itinerary” of the exiled South African jazz singers Miriam Makeba Hugh Masekela as a means to challenge the neglect of Afric...