Mark Philip Bradley. The World Reimagined

Blending cultural analysis with diplomatic and international history, Mark Philip Bradley makes a signal contribution to an increasingly crowded field of scholarship analyzing human rights in recent U.S. history. The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century is a brilliantly interdisciplinary study of the role of non-state actors engaged in human rights advocacy in the 1940s and the 1970s. Human rights “amateurs,” Bradley argues, “collectively brought into being a distinctly twentieth-century global human rights imagination,” making human rights “believable to a wide variety of American publics” (6). Taking a transnational perspective that tracks the transmission of overseas human rights developments into the U.S. context, Bradley aims to “provincialize” America (9)—both avoiding exceptionalist narratives of American political development and illuminating the importance of foreign states and peoples in the making of the twentieth-century global human rights order. In part I, Bradley offers a fresh and compelling analysis of the expansive human rights talk that emerged in the 1940s and was enshrined in the international bills of rights drafted during the wartime era. Beginning with an innovative discussion of 1930s reportage, Bradley argues that by capturing social suffering at home, documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange provided “visual flashpoints to understand a growing American concern with and consciousness of what in wartime came to be called human rights” (24–25). During the war, ideas about rights became increasingly embedded in a transnational frame as searching discussions over the scope of international legal guarantees of rights and their protections were influenced by Canadian, European, and Latin American jurists, as well as wartime refugees in America, whose numbers included many lawyers and scholars. In the immediate postwar era, Bradley argues that secular and religious rights advocates played a defining role in mobilizing popular opinion in support of embedding human rights in the United Nations (UN) Charter. Correspondingly, the widespread publication of Holocaust atrocity photographs, “presented as images of unprecedented suffering without specific contextualization” (77), lent new urgency to the case for human rights.

Art · Context (archaeology) · Fundamental rights · Human rights · International human rights law · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Right to property · Scholarship · Sociology · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies