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.
Intersecting Diasporas examines literary expressions of allyship between Italian America and other diasporic communities in modern and contemporary US fiction. Rewriting the Anglo-American genre of ...the "Italian novel, " authors like James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Carolina De Robertis, and Chang-rae Lee have disrupted misconceptions of Italian and Italian American identity while confronting Italians' own complicity with white racism. Likewise, Italian American authors from John Fante to Tina De Rosa have written in solidarity with Black, Chicanx, Filipinx, Jewish, Romani, and Irish diasporic communities on US shores, unsettling stereotypes and dissecting Italian America's history of flawed allyship across diasporas. Suzanne Manizza Roszak traces these gestures of literary solidarity; considers how they relate to the writers' critiques of toxic masculinity, antiqueerness, and socioeconomic injustice; and proposes interdiasporic allyship as a practice of reconciliation and healing.
This book proposes a new definition of world literature: an archive of democratic mechanisms external to state power. Accordingly, World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance takes shape as an ...exploration of nonstate space - territories of self-government that contest the vertical command structures of the state. Joel Nickels argues that literature devoted to these processes of spatial occuption can help us imagine democratic alternatives to state space and to the regime of legalized dispossession that goes under the name of globalization. Conceptualized in these terms, world literature can be viewed not as the corollary of 90s-era cosmopolitanism, but as a document of strategies for the militant reorganization of social space. This ambitious book addresses the work of Patrick Chamoiseau, Ousmane Sembene, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Claude McKay, Arundhati Roy, T. S. Eliot and Melvin Tolson. It engages with theories of transnationality, diaspora and postcoloniality, as well as world literature.
New ideas for teaching contemporary social justice through Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. Describes innovative and portable teaching methods informed by recent scholarship in early modern ...literature, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. Offers strategies for effective teaching and advocacy amidst the growing cultural and economic complexities of higher education. Demonstrates the relevance of historical literary study to contemporary cultural conversations, especially those about social justice. Historicizes the malicious whitening" of Shakespeare and European culture, recognizing instead multiple, multicultural, accessible Shakespeares. Presents Shakespeare’s plays as a common corpus of great value to democratic conversations in widely divergent contexts. Gives educators language for promoting the virtue of humanistic inquiry and when higher education is on the defensive. This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices. They model ways of mobilizing justice with early modern texts and claim the intellectual benefits of integrating social justice into courses. The book reconceives the relationship between students and Renaissance literature in ways that enable them – and us – to move from classroom discussions to real-life applications."
World Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors explore the ...aesthetics of resistance through concepts including the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness. Addressing a broad range of examples, from the Maghrebian humanist Ibn Khaldūn to India’s Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic. It asks the urgent question: how critical practice might cultivate radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression?
Looking at the work of Latino/a authors who are U.S. citizens, including Junot Diaz, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, Marta Caminero-Santangelo examines how writers are increasingly expressing ...their solidarity with undocumented immigrants. She similarly foregrounds the narratives of the undocumented themselves to show how they are emerging in the public sphere.
In this multifaceted issue, the voices are myriad: they challenge common interpretations of "illegal" immigration, explore the inevitable traumas and ethical dilemmas, protest their own silencing in immigration debates, and even capitalize on the topic for the commercial market. This growing body of literature is critical to understanding not only the Latino/a immigrant experience, but also alternative visions of nation and belonging.
Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children's literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of ...their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at various past attempts at conveying moral messages to children and interrogate their underlying assumptions. What visions of childhood were conveyed by explicit attempts to cultivate specific virtues in children? What unstated cultural assumptions were expressed by growing resistance to didacticism? How should we prepare children to respond to racism in their books and in their society?
Part II takes up the ethical orientations of various classic and contemporary texts, including 'prosaic ethics' in the Hundred Acre Wood, moral discernment in Narnia, ethical recognition in the distant worlds traversed by L'Engle, and virtuous transgression in recent Anglo-American children's literature and in the emerging children's literature of 1960s Taiwan. Part III's essays engage in ethical criticism of arguably problematic messages about our relationship to nonhuman animals, about war, and about prejudice. The final section considers how we respond to children's literature with ethically focused essays exploring a range of ways in which child readers and adult authorities react to children's literature. Even as children's literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them.
Contemporary Latin American fiction establishes a unique connection between masquerade, frequently motivated by stigma or trauma, and social justice. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines ...philosophy, history, psychology, literature, and social justice theory, this study delineates the synergistic connection between these two themes. Weldt-Basson examines fourteen novels by twelve different Latin American authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Sergio Galindo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso, Mayra Santos- Febres, Isabel Allende, Carmen Boullosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Marcela Serrano, Sara Sefchovich, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ariel Dorfman. She elucidates the varieties of social justice operating in the plots of contemporary Latin American novels: distributive, postmodern/feminist, postcolonial, transitional, and historical justices. The author further examines how masquerade and disguise aid in articulating the theme of social justice, why this is important, and how it relates to Latin American history and the historical novel.
The novel as investigation Cannon, JoAnn
The novel as investigation,
c2006, 20060725, 2006, 2014, 2006-01-01
eBook
Detective fiction is a universally popular genre; stories about the investigation of a crime by a detective are published all over the world and in hundreds of languages. Detective fiction provides ...more than entertainment, however; it often has a great deal to say about crime and punishment, justice and injustice, testimony and judgment.The Novel as Investigationexamines a group of detective novels by three important Italian writers - Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, and Antonio Tabucchi - whose conviction about the ethical responsibility of the writer manifests itself in their investigative fiction.
Jo-Ann Cannon explores each writer's denunciation of societal ills in two complementary texts. These investigative novels shed light on pressing social ills, which are not particular to Italian society of the late twentieth century but are universal in scope: Sciascia focuses on abuses of power and the death penalty, Maraini on violence against women, Tabucchi on torture and police brutality. In addition, each of these texts self-reflexively explore the role of writing in society. Sciascia, Maraini, and Tabucchi all use their fiction to defend the power of the pen to address "il male del mondo."
The Novel as Investigationwill be of interest to a broad audience of readers, including those interested in Italian and comparative literature, Italian social history, and cultural studies.