Once you have read this week’s reading, please complete this eResponse by writing concise but thorough answers to all of the following questions.
You must include page numbers in each question–your score will depend on it. I do not require any specific citation format. Just include (author last name, page number) at the end of the relevant sentences. Please note that you must cite when you draw any ideas from the text, whether or not you explicitly quote it. And you must draw your ideas from the text because that is the assignment.
Please be sure that if and when you use a direct quotation from the reading, you also explain what that quotation means in your own words.
- Mutua argues that the grandiosity of the human rights movement is underpinned by the savages-victims-saviors (SVS) metaphor. What does the SVS construction say? How is it used?
- What is the tension between local and universal that Mutua discusses, and what does he say tends to happen between the local and universal in the context of colonialism and its legacies?
- What is Mutua’s critique of “the metaphor of the victim” in human rights discourse?
