Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the ...novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. InFictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights.
Each of the novels Anker examines approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie'sMidnight's Childrenaddresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi'sWoman at Point Zerotakes up controversies over women's freedoms in Islamic society. InDisgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And inThe God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.
This is the first full-length book on the work of 'global Igbo'
writer Chris Abani. The volume dedicates a chapter to each of
Abani's fiction books, the two novellas Becoming Abigail
(2006) and Song ...for Night (2007), the three novels
GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007),
and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), which are read
against the grain of Abani's most important essays and poetical
production. By combining close readings and more theoretical
reflections, this volume provides a significant insight for both
scholars and students interested in the literature produced by the
emerging African voices in the twentieth-first century, in the
debate about human rights, and in general in how aesthetics is
deeply linked with ethics.
Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa. ...Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses various quests for justice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment.
During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds ...focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa.Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.
James Dawes defines a new, dynamic American literary genre, which takes as its theme a range of atrocities at home and abroad. This vibrant and modern genre incorporates key debates within the human ...rights movement in the U.S. and in turn influences the ideas and rhetoric of that discourse.
This book proposes feminist empathy as a model of interpretation in the works of contemporary Anglophone African women writers. The African woman's body is often portrayed as having been disabled by ...the patriarchal and sexist structures of society. Returning to their bodies as a point of reference, rather than the postcolonial ideology of empire, contemporaryAfrican women writers demand fairness and equality. By showing how this literature deploys imaginative shifts in perspective with women experiencing unfairness, injustice, or oppression because of their gender, Chielozona Eze argues that by considering feminist empathy, discussions open up about how this literature directly addresses the systems that put them in disadvantaged positions. This book, therefore, engages a new ethical and human rights awareness in African literary and cultural discourses, highlighting the openness to reality that is compatible with African multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and increasingly cosmopolitan communities.
The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking rights seriously has never been more urgent. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written as a ...contribution to this vital debate. Each moreover is written in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, reaching across the myriad constitutive disciplines of law, literature and the humanities in order to present an array of alternative perspectives on the nature and meaning of human rights in the modern world. The taking of human rights seriously, it will be suggested, depends just as much on taking seriously the idea of the human as it does the idea of rights.
The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and ...the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. Some of the essays were written especially for this volume; others are brought here together for the first time. The inquiry into extraterritoriality found in these essays is not confined to the established boundaries of political, conceptual, and representational territories or fields of knowledge; rather, it is an invitation to navigate the margins of the legal–juridical and the political, but also the edges of forms of representation and poetics. Within its accepted legal and political contexts, the concept of extraterritoriality has traditionally been applied to people and to spaces. In the first case, extraterritorial arrangements could either exclude or exempt an individual or a group of people from the territorial jurisdiction in which they were physically located; in the second, such arrangements could exempt or exclude a space from the territorial jurisdiction by which it was surrounded. The special status accorded to people and spaces had political, economic, and juridical implications, ranging from immunity and various privileges to extreme disadvantages. In both cases, a person or a space physically included within a certain territory was removed from the usual system of laws and subjected to another. In other words, the extraterritorial person or space was held at what could be described as a legal distance. (In this respect, the concept of extraterritoriality presupposes the existence of several competing or overlapping legal systems.) It is this notion of being held at a legal distance around which the concept of extraterritoriality may be understood as revolving. This volume is a part of Amir and Sela’s Exterritory Project, an ongoing art project that wishes to encourage both the theoretical and practical exploration of ideas concerning extraterritoriality in an interdisciplinary context. The project aims not only to draw on existing definitions of extraterritoriality but seeks also to charge it with new meanings, searching for ways in which the notion of extraterritoriality could produce a critique of discriminating power structures and re-articulate new practical, conceptual, and poetical possibilities.
Charles Pigault‐Lebrun's play Le blanc et le noir (1795) is one of only a handful of French revolutionary plays to stage the Saint‐Domingue slave rebellion, a rebellion today better known as the ...Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). I argue that Pigault‐Lebrun uses early melodramatic generic traits to develop a theatrical thought experiment revolving around three main themes: humanness, revolutionary legitimacy, and political order. Crucially, Pigault‐Lebrun does so by transporting French revolutionary figures and themes to the colonial setting, which means that his depiction of Caribbean revolt is seen through a distinctly Parisian lens. The first consequence of this framing is an omission of specifically Haitian concerns. The second is a particular infusion of colonial problems into metropolitan discussions. In analyzing this reciprocal transportation of figures and discourse, the article shows how the colonies not only affected the material lives of millions of Europeans but also influenced crucial questions of humanness, societal change, and political order.
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The field of Asian American studies grew out of mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles, anti-war protests, and third world liberation movements. As a result, human rights issues have always ...been part of Asian American studies, though they've been largely peripheral to the interdiscipline. This edited collection bring Asian American studies to the center of human rights critique by engaging with "the possibilities and the limits of the stories that have circulated and the knowledge that has been produced around the broad topic of 'human rights' understood primarily as a post-1945 discourse that has profoundly affected the movements of people and relations of power across the Pacific." The collection brings together scholars from North America and Asia in order to approach the issue of human rights from both sides of the Pacific.
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