M. Stone

This article argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by claiming certain inheritances from eighteenth-century American and French rights declarations, simultaneously disavowed others, reshaping the genre of the rights declaration in ways amenable to forms of imperial and racial domination. I begin by considering the rights declaration as genre, arguing that later participants can both inherit and disavow aspects of what came before. Then, drawing on original archival research, I consider the drafting of the UDHR, using as an entry point the reception of the NAACP’s Appeal to the World petition, edited by W.E.B. DuBois. I reconstruct conversations within the drafting committee about the right to petition, self-determination, and the right to rebellion, and the separation of the Declaration from the rights covenants, to illustrate the allegiances between US racial politics and French imperial politics, and their legacies for our contemporary conceptions of human rights.

The core of this special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education emerged from the Broken Narratives and the Lived Body conference held in 2016. The ‘Broken Narrative’ essays included in this issue open up a critical space for understanding and theorising illness narratives that defy a conventional cognitive ordering of the self as a bounded spatial and temporal entity. Here, we discuss how narratives might be ‘broken’ by discourse, trauma, ‘ill’ lived bodies and experiences that exceed linguistic representation. We trouble distinctions between coherent and incoherent narratives, attending to what gaps, silences and ‘nonsenses’ can convey about embodied illness experiences. Ultimately, we suggest that ‘breaks’ are in fact a continuation of embodied narration. This is shown in the ‘Art and Trauma’ forum of essays, which reveal how narrative silences can ‘infect’ other embodied subjects and be transformed, achieving musical or visual representation that allow us to apprehend the ‘constitutive outside’ of narratives of illness or trauma.

This collection of essays takes as its starting point Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy, a seminal work on Kant's thinking about law, which also treats many of the contemporary issues of legal and political philosophy. The essays offer readings and elucidations of Ripstein's thought, dispute some of his claims and extend some of his themes within broader philosophical contexts, thus developing the significance of Ripstein's ideas for contemporary legal and political philosophy. All of the essays are contributions to normative philosophy in a broadly Kantian spirit. Prominent themes include rights in the body, the relation between morality and law, the nature of coercion and its role in legal obligation, the role of indeterminacy in law, the nature and justification of political society and the theory of the state. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience, including legal scholars, Kant scholars, and philosophers with an interest in Kant or in legal and political philosophy.