The Routledge companion to literature and human rights
Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (eds.)Routledge, London: New York, 2016, 528 pp.
ISBN: 9780415736411
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.
Contents
Introduction: Aporia and Affirmative Critique: Mapping the Landscape of Literary Approaches to Human Rights Research, Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Part 1: Subjects
Introduction
1. A New Universal for Human Rights?: The Particular, the Generalizable, the Political, Domna C. Stanton
2. "Commonly Human": Embodied Self-Possession and Human Rights in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, Elizabeth S. Anker
3. Who is Human? Disability, Literature, and Human Rights, Julie Avril Minich
4. Queer Rights? Greg A. Mullins
5. Gendering Human Rights and Their Violation: A Reading of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg
6. Contingent Vulnerabilities: Child Soldiers as Human Rights Subjects, Wendy S. Hesford 7. In Flight: The Refugee Experience and Human Rights Narrative, Eleni Coundouriotis
8. Immolation, Peter Hitchcock
9. Remembering Perpetrators: The Kunstlerroman and Second-Generation Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, Sarah G. Waisvisz
Part 2: Forms
Introduction
10. Vanishing Points: When Narrative is Not Simply There, Joseph R. Slaughter
11. The Reemergence of the Slave Narrative Tradition and the Search for a New Frederick Douglass, Laura T. Murphy 12. Reading Human Rights Literatures through Oral Traditions, Katrina M. Powell
13. Beyond the Trauma Aesthetic: The Cultural Work of Human Rights Witness Poetries, Brenda Carr Vellino
14. Ending World War II - Visual Literacy Class in Human Rights, Ariella Azoulay
15. Inventing Human Dignity, Sharon Sliwinski
16. The Legible Face of Human Rights in Autobiographically Based Fiction, Meg Jensen
17. The World-Form of Human Rights Comics, Christine Hong
18. Sorry Business, Gillian Whitlock 19. From "Tutsi Crush" to "FWP": Satire, Sentiment, and Rights in African Texts and Contexts, Madelaine Hron
20. NotABugSplat: Becoming Human on the Terrain of Visual Culture, Keith P. Feldman 21. Fragmented Forms and Shifting Contexts: How Can Social Media Work for Human Rights? David Palumbo-Liu
22. What about False Witnessing? The Limits of Authenticity and Verification, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
Part 3: Contexts
Introduction
23. Nature and Society in Revolutionary Rights Debates, Susan Maslan
24. The "Rites of Discovery": Law and Narrative in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic World, Ralph Bauer
25. Natural Rights and Power in the Spanish Comediaafter the Conquest, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
26. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL): An Essay in Bibliography, Barbara Harlow
27. Localizing Human Rights: Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and the Lacuna in International Justice, Audrey J. Golden
28. Colonialism, Inherited Rights, and Social Movements of Self-Protection, Ban Wang
29. Transition and Transformation: Human Rights and Ubuntu in Antjie Krog’s Writings after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mark Sanders
30. Violence, Indigeneities, and Human Rights, Arturo Arias
31. Human Rights and Cultural Representations of Mexico--US Border Migration, Claudia Sadowski-Smith
32. Journeying into Rwanda: Placing Philip Gourevitch’s Account of Genocide within Literary, Postcolonial, and Human Rights Frameworks, Zoe Norridge
33. "Where is the World to Save Us from Torture?": The Poets of Guantánamo, Marc D. Falkoff
34. Human Rights and Minority Rights: Argentine and German Perspectives, Luz Angélica Kirschne
35. States of Cynicism: Literature and Human Rights in Israel/Palestine, Anna Bernard
36. Bringing Human Rights to Bear in American Literature, Crystal Parikh
37. Sites of Human Rights Theory, Hanna Musiol
Part 4: Impacts
Introduction
38. With Double-Binds to Spare - Assuming the Rhetorical Question of Human Rights Language as Such, Erik Doxtader
39. "Inverted Sympathy": Empathy and Mediation in Literary Transactions of Human Rights, Sarah Winter40. Human Rights, Literature, and Empathy, James Dawes
41. The Right Time for Rhetoric: Normativity, Kairos, and Human Rights, Belinda Walzer 42. Values Without Qualities: Pathosand Mythos in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mark Goodale
43. Is the Age of Human Rights Over? Makau Mutua
44. Freedom of Expression and Cultural Production in the Age of Vanishing Privacy, Jonathan E. Abel
45. Poetry and the Limits of Human Rights, David Holloway
46. Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, Alexandra Schultheis Moore
47. The Graceful Walk, Chris Abani
Sophia A. McClennenis 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 Mooreis Associate Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.