Human Rights Inc or Dragons at Your Door

Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law

Author: Joseph Slaughter

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature" and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call "the free and full development of the human personality."Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread ofmultinational consumer capitalism.Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     vii
Preamble: The Legibility of Human Rights     1
Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law     45
Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship     86
Normalizing Narrative Forms of Human Rights: The (Dys)Function of the Public Sphere     140
Compulsory Development: Narrative Self-Sponsorship and the Right to Self-Determination     205
Clefs a Roman: Reading, Writing, and International Humanitarianism     270
Codicil: Intimations of a Human Rights International: "The Rights of Man; or What Are We [Reading] For?"     317
Notes     329
Bibliography     389
Index     419

New interesting book: Comptabilité internationale

Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition

Author: Ming Zeng

The new competitive challenge from Chinese businesses is like nothing seen by Western companies since the Japanese arrived twenty years ago with their cars and consumer electronics. To fend off these fierce competitors, managers must forget yesterday's image of Chinese companies as producers of cheap, low-quality imitations flooding world markets. In fact, by strategically implementing what the authors call cost innovation, Chinese firms are advancing into high-end products and industries and competing for such high-value activities as engineering, design, and even R&D.

The first book to examine this new competitive force, Dragons at Your Door exposes the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of these fast-rising Chinese competitors, surfaces the underlying logic that enables Chinese firms to attack high-end industries, and provides critical new insight into these very different competitors.

The New York Times

These companies are hiring people from anywhere in the world...[they]have different strategies, reflecting their strengths . . .

Financial Executive

Among the books assessing the impact of the Chinese surge into global markets [book] deserves a high ranking.

Strategy & Business

. . . a timely book . . .

Publishers Weekly

According to business professors Zeng (of Cheung Kong Graduate School in China) and Williamson (of INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), the slogan of the China International Marine Containers Group, "Learn, Improve, Disrupt," could just as easily apply, with global consequences, to any Chinese corporation busy using those principles to reinvent manufacturing. The authors reveal that low labor costs are only one advantage enjoyed by Chinese companies, and that the "three faces" of cost innovation (offering high technology at low cost, a near-impossible range of choice and "specialty products" at volume prices) have allowed them to make impressive inroads into markets long assumed impenetrable. This is sobering reading for Western audiences; while the authors avoid the alarms that sound throughout many current business books on China, their dry, factual approach may prove even more unnerving. Though it may paint a disturbing portrait of a competitor formidable even in its infancy, this volume brings to light anecdotes and analysis that are bound to inspire anyone serious about global business or politics today. (June 12)

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