Vernacular Rights Cultures

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Rethinking Agency: Gender, Developmentalism and Rights (2013), co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013) and The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).

• Acknowledgments; 1. An Introduction: Vernacular Rights Cultures in South Asia and Decolonizing Human Rights; 2. Human Rights, Political Agency, and Refusing the Politics of Origins; 3. Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia; 4. The Political Imaginaries of Haq: 'Citizenship' and 'Truth'; 5. Resisting Developmentalism and the Military: Haq as a Cosmological Idea and an Islamic Ideal; 6. Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics of Location: A Conclusion; Bibliography; Glossary; Index.

'Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice should be essential reading for all political and feminist theorists working on the concept of human rights. In this profoundly original book, Madhok offers us a way through and beyond choices between 'west' and 'non-west' in human rights theory. She shows us that the choice between universalism and particularism in rights theory is mistaken, and that rights are always produced and put to work as part of political struggles in a vernacular which is neither fixed nor self-contained. She uses the tools of feminist historical ontology and ethnography to demonstrate how epistemic agency and authority in the conception of rights is constructed, reconstructed and mobilised within the political imaginaries of haq by women living multiple axes of oppression.' Kimberly Hutchings, author of Time and World politics: Thinking the Present