The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence

Notes

Notes
Introduction 1. Proskauer to Du Bois, October 1944, The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 23. 2. Du Bois to Proskauer, November 1944, ibid., 24–25. 3. David L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 503. As Lewis remarks, the “influential” Commission to Study the Organization of Peace included such notable persons as Roger Baldwin, John Foster Dulles, Merle Curti, Max Lerner, Owen Lattimore, Virginia Gildersleve, Philip Jessup, and Claude Pepper (503). 4. Ibid., 509. 5. William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People (New York: International Publishers, 1970). Since his initial formulation of the “problem of the color-line,” Du Bois consistently cast the issue of racism in an international frame. As he wrote in 1903: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 10. 6. Samir Amin recently advanced this concept of an internationalism of peoples in his important book The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty-First Century, trans. James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008). His genealogy of this antiimperialist internationalism runs from the First International of 1864, called the International Workingmen’s Association and “designed precisely to overcome the emergent separation [of working peoples] into national groupings” (11), to an emerging “Fifth International,” which he says “should not be an assembly exclusively of political parties, but should gather all peoples’ movements of resistance and struggle and guarantee both their voluntary participation in the construction of joint strategies and the independence of their own decision making” (79). 117 118 Notes to Introduction 7. See, e.g., Marshall Berman, “Modernism and Human Rights near the Millennium,” Dissent (Summer 1995), and Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 8. See, e.g., David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), and Marjorie Agosín, A Map of Hope: Women’s Writing on Human Rights–An International Literary Anthology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 9. See, e.g., Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 10. To give but one example of the stark difference of opinion from within the metropolitan left consider the following two statements. The first from Arjun Appadurai: “While global capital and the system of nation-states negotiate the terms of the emergent world-order, a worldwide order of institutions has emerged that bears witness to what we may call ‘grassroots globalization’ or ‘globalization from below.’ The most easily recognizable of these institutions are NGOs (nongovernmental organizations ) concerned with mobilizing highly specific local, national, and regional groups on matters of equity, access, justice and redistribution. These organizations have complex relations with the state, with the official public sphere, with international civil society initiatives, and with local communities. Sometimes they are uncomfortably complicit with the policies of the nation-state and sometimes they are violently opposed to these policies. Sometimes they have grown wealthy and powerful enough to constitute major political forces in their own right and sometimes they are weak in everything except their transparency and local legitimacy. NGOs have their roots in the progressive movements of the last two centuries in the areas of labor, suffrage, and civil rights. They sometimes have historical links to socialist internationalism of an earlier era. . . . Although the sociology of these emergent social forms — part movements, part networks, part organizations — has yet to be developed, there is considerable progressive consensus that these forms are the crucibles and institutional instruments of most serious efforts to globalize from below.” Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 15. In contradistinction to Appadurai’s formulation of “populism from below,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri cast international human rights activism as a form of high moral imperialism in the service of Empire: “The Empire’s powers of intervention might be best understood as beginning not directly with its weapons of lethal force but rather with its moral instruments. What we are calling moral intervention is practiced today by a variety of bodies . . . but the most important...