You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Set at the intersection of Human Rights, social justice and Literature, this cutting edge book examines a range of literary texts, fiction, plays and poetry, and through them considers representations of Human Rights and their violations. Examining violated bodies and subjects, the settings and environments in which these are embedded and the witnessing of atrocities, it considers how the ‘subject’ (or ‘person’ of Human Rights) emerges within fiction or poetry. Structured so as to move outward from the individual body to the world, the study progresses from the preconditions or settings for Human Rights violations through to atrocity, from witnessing to the making of a specific kind of public around traumatic recall. It addresses representations of destroyed corporeality and subjectivity, the violations and dissolution of the subject and the construction of trauma-memory citizenship to the making of communities of mourning. Through a broad study of texts from different genres, this text reveals how Literature both documents the basic human aspirations of happiness, security and hope, but also the limitations and the violations of these aspirations.
In Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives, Ademola Adesola examines the dominant factors that writers privilege in their portrayals of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In his textual-interpretive analyses of selected novels in the African child soldier genre, Adesola contends that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. The author argues that such reductive decontextualization of war realities serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centered on a moral and humanit...
"This volume analyzes the figure and representation of disability in postcolonial literature, unpacking how depictions of disability both reflected and directly impacted the growth of disability human rights in the latter half of the twentieth century"--
Rights War tracks how the human rights framework is weaponized against the oppressed, and it makes the case for the central place of literature in understanding this seizure of narrative control. While literary humanitarianism depoliticizes suffering and positions the reader as a savior to traumatized Others, Rights War shows how contemporary fiction by women of color and queer writers across the African diaspora engage innovative narrative paradigms to address structural inequities. It analyzes strategies set out in this literature for disarming savior victimism, which it identifies as a pernicious cultural phenomenon in which the powerful proclaim themselves saviors to and victims of those they marginalize. As the disassociation of national rights from international human rights and the disconnection of civil and political rights from social and economic rights provoke a contest of victimhood, this book offers a renewed argument for the indivisibility of rights and the social justice function of literature.
This book responds to the failures of human rights--the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions--through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore draws on theories of vulnerability, precarity, and dispossession to argue for the necessity of recognizing the embodied and material contexts of human rights subjects. At the same time, she demonstrates how these theories run the risk of reproducing the structural imbalances that lie at the core of critiques of human rights. Pairing conventional human rights genres--legal instruments, human rights reports, repo...
After 9/11, the United States became a nation that sanctioned torture. Detainees across the globe were waterboarded, deprived of sleep, beaten by guards, blasted with deafening music and forced into obscene acts. Their torture presents a profound problem for literature: torturous pain and its traumatic aftermath have long been held to destroy language, shatter experience, and refuse representation. Challenging accepted thinking, Gestures of Testimony asks how literature might bear witness to the tortures of a war waged against fear itself. Bringing the vibrant field of affect theory to bear on theories of torture and power, Richardson adopts an interdisciplinary approach to show how testimon...
Winner of the 2020 Eudora Welty Prize Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or witnessing—trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women and adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature. Eden Wales articulates a theory of reading (or dual-witnessing) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. She places these original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to spea...
None
Mobility has become one of the most exciting factors shaping our transnational and transcultural world today. However, the variety of approaches and stimulating debates it has engendered in geopolitics and sociology make it challenging for literary and cultural critics to establish solid approaches and own vocabularies. Through a variety of case studies written by international contributors, this volume addresses emerging topics by using the tools of border studies, postcolonial discourse, and globalization theory. The multiple perspectives provided here emphasize the interaction between migrants and hosts as material, discursive, and historical. The chapters in this volume view identities a...
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...