Theoretical Perspectives On Human Rights And Literature

Download or read book Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature written by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can literary theory reveal about discourses and practices of human rights, and how can human rights frameworks help to make sense of literature? How have human rights concerns shaped the literary marketplace, and how can literature impact human rights concerns? Essays in this volume theorize how both literature and reading literarily can shape understanding of human rights in productive ways. Contributors to Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature provide a shared history of modern literature and rights; theorize how trauma, ethics, subjectivity, and witnessing shape representations of human rights violations and claims in literary texts across a range of genres (including poetry, the novel, graphic narrative, short story, testimonial, and religious fables); and consider a range of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights and their representations. The authors reflect on the imperial and colonial histories of human rights as well as the cynical mobilization of human rights discourses in the name of war, violence, and repression; at the same time, they take seriously Gayatri Spivak’s exhortation that human rights is something that we "cannot not want," exploring the central function of storytelling at the heart of all human rights claims, discourses, and policies.

Download or read book Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature written by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can literary theory reveal about discourses and practices of human rights, and how can human rights frameworks help to make sense of literature? How have human rights concerns shaped the literary marketplace, and how can literature impact human rights concerns? Essays in this volume theorize how both literature and reading literarily can shape understanding of human rights in productive ways. Contributors to Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature provide a shared history of modern literature and rights; theorize how trauma, ethics, subjectivity, and witnessing shape representations of human rights violations and claims in literary texts across a range of genres (including poetry, the novel, graphic narrative, short story, testimonial, and religious fables); and consider a range of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights and their representations. The authors reflect on the imperial and colonial histories of human rights as well as the cynical mobilization of human rights discourses in the name of war, violence, and repression; at the same time, they take seriously Gayatri Spivak’s exhortation that human rights is something that we "cannot not want," exploring the central function of storytelling at the heart of all human rights claims, discourses, and policies.

Download or read book Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies written by Alexandra Schultheis Moore and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the discourse of human rights has expanded to include not just civil and political rights but economic, social, cultural, and, most recently, collective rights. Given their broad scope, human rights issues are useful touchstones in the humanities classroom and benefit from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural pedagogy in which objects of study are situated in historical, legal, philosophical, literary, and rhetorical contexts. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies is a sourcebook of inventive approaches and best practices for teachers looking to make human rights the focus of their undergraduate and graduate courses. Contributors first explore what it means to be human and conceptual issues such as law and the state. Next, they approach human rights and related social-justice issues from the perspectives of particular geographic regions and historical eras, through the lens of genre, and in relation to specific rights violations--for example, storytelling and testimonio in Latin America or poetry created in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Essays then describe efforts to cultivate students' capacity for ethical reading practices and to deepen their understanding of the stakes and artistic dimensions of human rights representations, drawing on active learning and experimental class contexts. The final section, on resources, directs readers to further readings in history, criticism, theory, and literary and visual studies and provides a chronology of human rights legal documents.

Download or read book Examining Critical Perspectives on Human Rights written by Rob Dickinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection evaluates the crisis of confidence in human rights which underpins understandings of just decision making and liberal democracy.

Download or read book Activating Human Rights and Peace written by GOH Bee Chen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights and peace issues and concerns have come about at a critical time. The world has recently witnessed a plethora of turning points that speak of the hopes and vulnerabilities which are inherent in being human and demonstrate that change in the service of human rights and peace is possible. At the same time, however, other events indicate that wherever there is life, there is vulnerability in a world characterized by instability and endemic human suffering. On top of all this, the collapse of the global financial system and the serious, rapid destruction of the environment have brought the world to a precarious state of vulnerability. Activating human rights and peace is, therefore, a project that is always in progress, and is never finally achieved. This enlightening collection of well thought through cases is aimed at academics and students of human rights, political science, law and justice, peace and conflict studies and sociology.

Download or read book Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture written by Alexandra Schultheis Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, reportage, and humanitarian campaigns—with literary and visual culture, Moore develops a transnational feminist reading praxis of five sites of rights and their violation over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers in Nigerian literature; human rights reporting and novels that address state-sponsored ethnocide in Zimbabwe; the international humanitarian campaigns and disaster capitalism in fiction of Bhopal, India; the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Sahel, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma as represented in various media campaigns and in photo/graphic narratives; and, finally, the human rights campaigns, fiction, and film that have brought Indonesia’s history of anti-leftist violence into contemporary public debate. These case studies underscore how human rights norms are always subject to conditions of imaginative representation, and how literature and visual culture participate in that cultural imaginary. Expanding feminist theories of embodied and imposed vulnerability, Moore demonstrates the importance of situating human rights violations not only in the context of neo-liberal development policies but also in relation to the growth of security networks that serve the nation-state often at the expense of the security of specific subjects and populations. In place of conventional victims and agents, the intersection of vulnerability and human rights opens up readings of human rights claims and suffering that are, at once, embodied and shareable, yet which run the risk of cooptation by security rhetoric.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights written by Sophia A. McClennen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.