Culture, Nationhood, and the Human Rights Ideal

This Symposium on nation and culture illustrates these LatCrit goals and advances them. The two main works and the commentaries on them are rich explorations and representations of the voices and concerns of LatCrit theory. This Foreword engages all the works by focusing on the concept of voice and silence. Part I locates the works in the axis of silence and power. Part II explores how critical theory and international human rights norms can be used to develop a progressive methodology to analyze and detect the exclusion or silencing of myriad voices. This Part develops a LatCritical Human Rights paradigm that, by internationalizing voice, serves as a useful tool to explore power-based silencing. Finally, in Part III, the authors illustrate how the proposed paradigm can focus the issues of culture and nation in a way that allows us to promote a non-essentialist, anti-subordination, inclusive personhood ideal.