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Commentary on Cooper.

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a 'feminist debt'. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/ enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces—and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations.

This ambitious and remarkable book provides us with a new, creative, and critical site for feminist scholarship and leads the way in producing historically and contextually specific empirical datasets and analysis of the deeply complex area of global women's rights. As is often the case with important work, the book engenders a supplementary set of hard questions to be asked both of itself and of the wider literature. In particular, the book enables us to raise two sets of further questions: first, about the links between law, policy making, women's rights, and social transformation, and second, to raise methodological and conceptual questions in the wake of empirically operationalizing intersectionality on a global scale.

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: In order to conceptually capture and represent acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue for a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation, if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.

In a new book, LSE’s Sumi Madhok proposes a new theoretical framework for agency thinking by examining the ethical, discursive and practical engagements of a group of women development workers in north-west India with developmentalism and individual rights.

In this article, I track the deployment of rights in the vernacular across different subaltern citizen mobilizations in Southern Asia. In order to conceptually capture the ethical dynamism, ideational energy and intellectual innovativeness of this language of rights, I argue that we need yet more complex and different kinds of thinking. I propose the framework of vernacular rights cultures to theories and empirically document the rights politics in ‘most of the world’. A critical aspect of vernacular rights cultures, as a framework of analysis, is its attention to the languages—both literal and conceptual—of rights/human rights and also to the political imaginaries that these languages embody and make available. An important way of documenting and analyzing rights languages and 2 political imaginaries is to examine the justificatory premises that underpin the political struggles around claim making. In this article, I draw attention to three different justificatory premises that underpin the deployment of rights within contemporary subaltern rights struggles rights in India and Pakistan. By attending to the justificatory premises that animate and activate rights in the region, I am insisting not only on a scrupulous politics of location but also a refusal of orginary discourses that dominate human rights politics thinking and politics.

In this paper, I argue for a refusal of the ‘politics of origins’ framework that dominates human rights talk and towards one that privileges a ‘politics of meanings’. Drawing on my ethnographic work on the rights encounter with developmentalism and rights in rural Rajasthan, I present a few elements of this shift towards a ‘politics of meanings’ and introduce a new conceptual framework, one of vernacular rights cultures, which I suggest will help us to conceptually capture the dynamic politics of rights and entitlements in the Southern Asia. As a conceptual intervention, thinking in terms of ‘ politics of meanings’ and indeed in terms of ‘vernacular rights cultures’, I argue, will help us move beyond the tired arguments of eurocentrism, cultural relativism or celebratory universalism that can no longer adequately capture the dynamism of the citizenship claims that are increasingly voiced and struggled for. The experiences of making rights claims and entitlements that I document are like all experiences and phenomena gendered, and provide insights into a fascinating set of paradoxes, disappointments and despair: the attachment of rights to privileged gendered bodies while being desired and claimed, contested and fought for by the marginalized, the precarious and the powerless.

We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.

In this paper we draw attention to the difficulty of accessing reproductive rights in the absence of effective state and legal guarantees for gender equity and citizenship, and argue that if reproductive rights are to be meaningful interventions on the ground, they must be reframed in terms of reproductive justice. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rajasthan, Northwest India, we track two dynamic legal aid interventions on reproductive health rights in India, concerned with domestic violence and maternal mortality respectively, that have sought to fill this existing gap between ineffective state policies and the rhetoric on reproductive rights. Through an analysis of these interventions, we propose that requirements of reproductive justice cannot be met through discrete or private, albeit creative legal initiatives, pursued by individuals or civil society organisations but must involve comprehensive policies as well as strategies and alliances between state, non-state, transnational organisations and progressive political groups.

In this interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Sumi Madhok speaks about her latest book, Vernacular Rights Cultures which subverts prevailing frameworks around human rights by exploring how subaltern groups mobilise for justice through particular political imaginaries, conceptual vocabularies and gendered political struggles.

This article focuses on rights politics in most of the world and on knowledge production ‘after rights’. It assembles a few key elements of anti-imperial epistemic justice which it argues is a necessary lens for producing knowledges on rights politics in most of the world ‘after rights’. Its key argument is that knowledge production on rights politics ‘after rights’ is one that is invested in challenging existing coloniality, structural injustice, exploitation, oppression and methodological nationalism. It is also one that is invested in producing conceptual descriptions of rights politics in most of the world.

Vernacular rights cultures tells a different story of human rights. The book moves away from the dominant narrative of universal human rights, based on western history and epistemology, pointing readers towards ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Sumi Madhok complicates the unidirectional account instead, narrating a subaltern story of rights that is foregrounded in ‘struggles and contestations over rights’ in the south Asian context. This attentiveness to the ‘vernacular’ refers to the ways marginalized groups articulate rights claims, and to the political imaginaries and subjectivities that their articulations engender. In the first three chapters, Madhok critically engages with the multiple literatures on human rights and presents her conceptual framework. The author takes on board the robust and growing critique of the racialized basis underpinning the prevailing human rights law and discourse. Then, Madhok goes further and presents an alternative genealogy, embedded in the local notions of haq. According to the author, the word haq translates to ‘right’, but ‘in the course of its travels, it has gathered complex meanings and iterations that inform political imaginaries, subjectivities and political cultures of rights and rights claim-making’ (p. 1). This transregional term appears in multiple languages across the subcontinent, and the book conveys its historical roots and contemporary usage not only in south Asia, but also in the Middle East and North Africa. The fact that haq is transregional allows the author to traverse borders and trace power struggles over rights across states and institutions in India and Pakistan. This is particularly important in a postcolonial context of contestation over state borders and associated citizenship rights.