Subtext
Jacobsen, Michael and Ole Bruun (edited by). Human rights and Asian values : contesting national identities and cultural representations in Asia
What I like about this book is that it discusses human rights in the broad aspect of Asian culture first. Then it goes on to consider in detail human rights in Vietnam in particular. It is one of the books that legally and culturally addresses the issues of human rights as a whole in the Asian culture.
Sidel, Mark. Book Review: New Directions in the Study of Vietnamese Law. Vietnam and the Rule of Law (Carlyle A. Thayer & David G. Marr eds.). Canberra: Australian National University, 1993. 189 pp.
In this review, Mark Sidel focuses on the “exchanges in constitutional law, legal theory, and law and society issues”. He focuses on these areas to see how they would improve the quality of legal study which would in turn give different perspectives on the legal reform of Vietnam.
Tai, Ta Van. Buddhism and Human Rights in Traditional Vietnam. Harvard Law School. Review of Vietnamese Studies 2004-2005
In this article, Tai presents most of the same ideas as he did in his book. The difference with this article is that he incorporated the influence that Buddhism had on the tradition of Vietnamese human rights. Even though he still relies a lot on the United Nations and its legal impact on the human rights, he really strives to make it clear where the Buddhist religion influenced Vietnamese tradition as well.
Young, Stephen B. & Nguyen Ngoc Huy. The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam. Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Council of Southeast Asia Studies
I found this source to be interesting because it out right addresses the issue of human rights in terms of China and Vietnam together. Like my main source, it uses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to refer to how human rights were established in Vietnam.
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/38819.pdf: Human rights concerns in Vietnam : hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, November 6, 2007
This document provides information about what is currently going in Vietnam regarding the issue of human rights. It also provides a number of statements that address the issue of how the law still authorizes arbitrary detention without trial amongst many other issues. I found this to be interesting because it discusses issues that were prevalent in the past and how they are still issues today.
2 comments:
In the subtext try to rely less on others' direct reviews of your source material. Instead try to incorporate more outside source that support certain examples inside your context and text. For instance, you refer to the western cultural and U.N. standards on human rights. Try to find some documents either commenting on the traditions of human rights in western society or in Asian culture, or you could try to find examples within the U.N. such as security council resolutions on human rights issues such as genocide, war crimes, or other issues in human rights. You could also take a different perspective and find sources on governement and non-government organizations for aiding people in need and dealing with human rights issues, including economic issues, which would provide greater depth to your points in the text that deal with the economic issues.
The subtexts that you have by Ta Van Tai are an interesting point, in that you provide the reader an extra point of view from the source author himself. In this way you provide a good follow up to your information. However, if you take this approach you need to provide more sources supporting what you already have within the text and context.
Overall there are some good sources that you provide to give the readers more information on your project, but you need to include more variety in your sources and include sources that back up what you have already said in your previous two sections.
Nice subtext, and I too really like the idea of using other works by the same author so you get a feel for his views, but be careful to not get off subject as the subtext is again pertaining to your theme rather than just your text. I would say you could probably find something online that directly compares at least some aspects of Vietnamese and other cultures views on human rights, which would add to your subtext as well as be an interesting thing to see in general. It seems I'm always repeating db, but it would be a good idea to focus less on reviews of the book and more on Vietnamese human rights in general. I think instead if you want to stay on the book and topic, perhaps try to find something that takes an opposing view to anything that seems questionable in the text, or that fills in any gray areas missing details. What you have here is excellent and is plenty for relating your book to the topic, but try to throw in some other things which allow people who read your first two sections to see some other or more in depth views on the theme in general.
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