Counternarratives as Political Contestation: Life Narratives of Three Female Drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948

• In Event: 63.023 - Exploring Boundaries and Counternarratives of Women and Globalized Education

Abstract

Earlier research on the drafting process leading up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 has generally focused on the contributions and life stories of the Western and male delegates who participated in the drafting process. In the light of the marginalization of some female non-western contributions to the UDHR the paper argues for the need to illustrate and highlight counter-narratives to the dominant narrative on who were active in drafting the UDHR.
The concept of ‘counter-narratives’ is drawn from sociological (Andrews & Bamberg, 2004) and educational research (Peters & Lankshear, 1996) and makes explicit the hegemony that silence some voices in history. Re-reading the UDHR through different stories than the already known, dominant western story of the origin of human rights adds value to human rights studies today, for instance, the arguments for human rights in 1948 by the women delegates from India, Pakistan and Dominican Republic based on their different religious and cultural values have something important to say about both the legal and pedagogical aims of the document. The female delegates highlighted in the paper are Hansa Mehta (1897-1995), an Indian delegate and legislator who was an activist in the movement towards India’s independence and delegate to the United Nations Drafting Committee; Shaista Ikramullah (1915-2000), Pakistani author who set up the Muslim Women Students Federation in Pakistan and delegate to the United Nations Third Committee of Social and Economic Affairs; and Minerva Bernardino (1907-1998), a feminist politician and leader of women’s movements from the Dominican Republic and delegate to the United Nations Third Committee and the United Nations General Assembly.
I claim that there are important, albeit neglected, philosophical conclusions to gain from closely examining the roles of the women delegates in these different bodies, since their contributions and argumentations were distinctive and often quite different from those of their male participants. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s (2000), what unites human beings is the sharing of stories, of narratives that relate in different ways to our personal life narrative. Through a counter-discursive reading of the archival material from the UN Archives, the concept of counter-narratives is enacted as political contestation to a universal dominant narrative of who has ‘the right to have rights’ to quote Hanna Arendt (1973). This re-reading also opens up educational possibilities of shared and unique narratives of learners in global education.

References
Arendt, Hannah. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando: Hartcourt Inc.
Andrews, Molly and Bamberg, Michael. (2004). Considering Counter Narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense. Amsterdam: J Benjamins.
Cavarero, Adriana. (2000). Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London: Routledge
Peters, Michael and Lankshear, Colin. Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. New York: Routledge

Author

• Rebecca Adami, Stockholm University