Andreas Huyssen's keynote address : Natural rights, civil rights, and the politics of memory = Derechos naturales, derechos civiles y la política de la memoria.
Video documentation of Andreas Huyssen's keynote address, 'Natural Rights, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Memory, ' presented as a part of the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held in August of 2009 in Bogotá, Colombia, under the title 'Staging Citizenship: Cultural Rights in the Americas.' This 10-day event brought together activism, scholarship, and art around the themes of legacies, memories, struggles, and frontiers of citizenship. With an introduction by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, Andreas Huyssen's keynote proposes that human rights and memory discourses must be robustly linked with each other to add a necessary dimension of futurity to memory and of history to human rights politics. This keynote asks to what extent 'rights of nature' need to be considered to nurture the sustainability of human rights as social rights. Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is founding director of Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). His books include After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), and Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003). He is the editor, most recently, of Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (2008). Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics