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,” by 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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