Böcker av Boaventura de Sousa Santos

This publication documents Rivane Neuenschwander's first comprehensive solo exhibition in the German-speaking world. The artist, born in Brazil in 1967, traces fears and hopes in her multifaceted work, showing how they shape people and societies. Her work is characterized by a keen interest in cultural, psychological and sociological issues.The full breadth of her interests is re- flected in this publication. It includes a conversation with Christiane Meyer-Stoll that took place over the entire exhibition period, providing an in-depth insight into Neuenschwander's understanding of herself as an artist; an essay by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos deals with the Uncertainty Between Fear and Hope; the cut-up poems by writer Anna Ospelt - an outgrowth of the exhibition - testify to Neuenschwander's trust in the power of poetry, which permeates her entire oeuvre, as does the title knife does not cut fire, which is taken from a poem by the lyricist Herberto Helder.

We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights. Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.

Explores the struggles against moral and cultural imperialism and neoliberal globalization, and the alternatives that have emerged in countries throughout the developing world from Brazil and Colombia, to India, South Africa and Mozambique.