I’ve been thinking about human rights in art and literature. Two specific things come to mind. In my English class, we read Melville’s Billy Budd, a Christian allegory about impressed sailors. In my anthropology human rights class, we talked about “the Rights of Man,” 由 Thomas Paine and my mind drifted to the name of Billy’s original ship, the Rights-of-Man (abbreviated to “Rights.”) It was an obvious allusion to Thomas Paine. It was incredibly blatant symbolism that Billy was impressed onto a ship called the Indomitable. Impressment is just one of the times in history in which...
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