Mark Philip Bradley's The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century welds together cultural analysis and international history to trace the emergence of a “global human rights imagination” (3). Though transnational in its scope, Bradley's interest lies less with the international human rights legal regime than with interrogating the frictions between local and global forces that impelled everyday American audiences to imagine the world around them. It is this affective potential of human rights discourse – the ability to rearticulate “the relationships between individuals, states, and the world community” – that animates the heart of the text (3).

Bradley's analysis thus lies at the intersection of human rights campaigns and the terrain of American cultural politics. He utilizes an innovative and seemingly disparate set of historical actors, including lawyers, filmmakers, musicians, students, writers, clergy, photographers, and grassroots activists, to reconstruct the ways in which human rights were made believable to American publics in the 1940s and 1970s. For example, Bradley documents how the overwhelming and atmospheric sense of immense social suffering in the 1940s was in part shaped by footage from Nazi concentration camps. Such “atrocity photographs” circulated throughout American newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters, becoming a visceral and “powerful form of mass witnessing” (79). It was this sense of horrific suffering, argues Bradley, that permeated the public mind as wartime human rights advocates convened in San Francisco to draft the United Nations Charter. Bradley argues that the production of such “elastic conditions of possibility” likewise shaped Native Americans’, Japanese Americans’, and African Americans’ legal campaigns against racial discrimination, which drew upon the era's emergent human rights vernacular (94).

However, it is Bradley's skillful analysis of visual and popular culture that is most compelling. This is particularly pronounced in his documentation of how the “guest language” of individual suffering, lived experience, and testimonial truth came to captivate the 1970s human rights imaginary. Here Bradley argues that the “testimonial turn” imported by Soviet dissidents and Latin American activists produced new ways of seeing that centered violations against the individual body and psyche. Testimonials increasingly disseminated across American art, film, and literature in the 1970s, reflecting a growing American fixation with torture and political terror. Bradley provides a stunning reading of the Chicago-born painter Leon Golub's series Mercenaries, Interrogation, and White Squad. Circulating throughout American art galleries and massive in their size, Golub's paintings engulfed viewers into quotidian scenes of torture and “made ethical demands” to witness the “interior conditions of violations of bodily integrity” as soldiers towered, smirked, and smiled over crouching torture victims (195). Bradley suggests that these proliferating bodies of cultural texts wedded a raw emotionality to human rights talk. The powerful resonances of this vernacular, he argues, fueled the growth of human rights industries in the 1970s; alongside advocacy organizations, American professions and funding agencies found themselves ever more interpolated into the practice of global human rights.

Although Bradley beautifully reconstructs the believability of human rights vernaculars, his discussion of the limitations of this “ubiquitous moral language” is, at times, underdeveloped (3). Readers will encounter moments where Bradley does not fully explicate what made some locales and concerns more poignant than others. Let us return, for instance, to his discussion of atrocity photographs and social suffering, which only briefly gestures to the ways in which racial violence against African Americans (and the cultural products documenting it) during the same period functioned as entertainment. Similarly, Bradley only cursorily mentions that the Arab–Israeli conflict and South African antiapartheid struggle remained beyond mass moral public outrage in the 1970s. Still, it is precisely because of these limitations that Bradley's appeal to “advance what might be considered a second generation of human rights history” succeeds (9). Such absences point to the necessity of continuing to ask who participates and how in the construction of a plurality of human rights imaginaries. It allows, in other words, for future scholars to explore how different “publics” engaged human rights through particular images or political events, as well as what geopolitical dynamics structured such localized human rights vernaculars. For this reason The World Reimagined is essential reading, especially for emerging scholars located at the intersection of race and ethnic studies, social movements, and human rights histories.