The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

Description

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics. The first of its kind, this volume covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines between the social sciences and humanities. Sections cover: * subjects, with pieces on subjectivity, humanity, identity, gender, universality, the particular, the body; * forms, visiting the different ways human rights stories are crafted and formed via the literary, the visual, the performative, and the oral contexts, tracing the development of the literature over time and in relation to specific regions and historical events; * impacts, considering the power and limits of human rights literature, rhetoric, and visual culture. Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the study of literature and human rights for the first time, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in new directions for future scholarship. Contributors: Chris Abani, Jonathan E. Abel, Elizabeth S. Anker, Arturo Arias, Ariella Azoulay, Ralph Bauer, Anna Bernard, Brenda Carr Vellino, Eleni Coundouriotis, James Dawes, Erik Doxtader, Marc D. Falkoff, Keith P. Feldman, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Audrey J. Golden, Mark Goodale, Barbara Harlow, Wendy S. Hesford, Peter Hitchcock, David Holloway, Christine Hong, Madelaine Hron, Meg Jensen, Luz Angélica Kirschner, Susan Maslan, Julie Avril Minich, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Greg Mullins, Laura T. Murphy, Hanna Musiol, Makau Mutua, Zoe Norridge, David Palumbo-Liu, Crystal Parikh, Katrina M. Powell, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Mark Sanders, Karen-Magrethe Simonsen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Sharon Sliwinski, Sidonie Smith, Domna Stanton, Sarah G. Waisvisz, Belinda Walzer, Ban Wang, Julia Watson, Gillian Whitlock and Sarah Winter. Sophia A. McClennen is Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature (affiliated with Spanish and Women’s Studies) at Pennsylvania State University, USA and Director of The Center for Global Studies. Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. Introduction: Aporia and affirmative critique: mapping the landscape of literary approaches to human rights research / Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore -- A new universal for human rights?: the particular, the generalizable, the political / Domna C. Stanton -- "Commonly human": embodied self-possession and human rights in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother / Elizabeth S. Anker -- Who is human?: Disability, literature, and human rights / Julie Avril Minich -- Queer rights? / Greg A. Mullins -- Gendering human rights and their violation: a reading of Chris Cleve's Little Bee / Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg -- Contingent vulnerabilities: child soldiers as human rights subjects / Wendy S. Hesford -- In flight: the refugee experience and human rights narrative / Eleni Coundouriotis -- Immolation / Peter Hitchcock -- Remembering perpetrators: the Kunstlerroman and second-generation witnessing in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker / Sarah G. Waisvisz. Vanishing points: when narrative is not simply there / Joseph R. Slaughter -- The reemergence of the slave narrative tradition and the search for a new Frederick Douglass / Laura T. Murphy -- Reading human rights literatures through oral traditions / Katrina M. Powell -- Beyond the trauma aesthetic: the cultural work of human rights witness poetries / Brenda Carr Vellino -- Ending World War II: visual literacy class in human rights / Ariella Azoulay -- Inventing human dignity / Sharon Sliwinski -- The legible face of human rights in autobiographically based fiction / Meg Jensen -- The world-form of human rights comics / Christine Hong -- Sorry business / Gillian Whitlock -- From "Tutsi Crush" to "FWP": satire, sentiment, and rights in African texts and contexts / Madeline Hron -- #NotABugSplat: becoming human on the terrain of visual culture / Keith P. Feldman -- Fragmented forms and shifting contexts: how can social media work for human rights? / David Paulumbo-Liu -- What about false witnessing?: The limits of authenticity and verification/ Sidone Smith and Julia Watson. Nature and society in revolutionary rights debates / Susan Maslan -- The "Rights of Discovery": law and narrative in the sixteenth-century Atlantic world / Ralph Bauer -- Natural rights and power in the Spanish Comedia after the Conquest / Karen-Margrethe Simonsen -- Third world approaches to international law (TWAIL): an essay in bibliography / Barbara Harlow -- Localizing human rights: Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and the lacuna in international justice / Audrey J. Golden -- Colonialism, inherited rights, and social movements of self-protection / Ban Wang -- Transition and transformation: human rights and Ubuntu in Antjie Krog's writings after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission / Mark Sanders -- Violence, indigeneities and human rights / Arturo Arias -- Human rights and cultural representations of Mexico-US border migration / Claudia Sakowski-Smith -- Journeying into Rwanda: placing Philip Gourevitch's account of genocide within literary, postcolonial, and human rights framweworks / Zoe Norridge -- "Where is the world to save us from torture?": the poets of Gauntánamo / Marc D. Falkoff -- Human rights and minority rights: Argentine and German perspectives / Luz Angélica Kirschner -- States of cynicism: literature and human rights in Israel/Palestine / Anna Bernard -- Brining human rights to bear in American literature / Crystal Parikh -- Sites of human rights theory / Hanna Musiol. With double-binds to spare: assuming the rhetorical question of human rights language as such / Erik Doxtader -- "Inverted sympathy": empathy and mediation in literary transactions of human rights / Sarah Winter -- Human rights, literature, and empathy / James Dawes -- The right time for rhetoric: normativity, Kairos, and human rights, / Belinda Walzer -- Values without qualities: pathos and mythos in the universal declaration of human rights / Mark Goodale -- Is the age of human rights over? / Makau Mutua -- Freedom of expression and cultural production in the age of vanishing privacy / Jonathan E. Abel -- Poetry and the limits of human rights / David Holloway -- Film after atrocity: an interview with Joshua Oppenheimer / Alexandra Schultheis Moore -- The graceful walk / Chris Abani.