The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature

260 Pages·2019·1.961 MB·English

by  Crystal Parikh

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The Cambridge Companion to
Human Rights and Literature
Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good
life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human
rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also
recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning,
and scope of human rights. T he Cambridge Companion to Human Rights
and Literature introduces this new and exciting fi eld of study in the human-
ities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts,
genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally access-
ible to beginners in the fi eld and more advanced researchers, this C ompanion
emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights
and the humanities.
Crystal Parikh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at New
York University. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Professor Parikh
has published W riting Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of
Color (2017), which was the recipient of the Association for Asian American
Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural
Studies: Literature. She is also the author of A n Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of
Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (2009), which was awarded
the Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and
Chicana and Chicano Literary Studies, and co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, the
Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). Professor Parikh
is the Director of the Asian/Pacifi c/American Institute at New York University.
A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book .
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THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO
H U M A N R I G H T S
A N D L I T E R A T U R E
EDITED BY
CRYSTAL PARIKH
New York University
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DOI:  10.1017/9781108698511
© Cambridge University Press 2019
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2019
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library .
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Parikh, Crystal, editor.
Title: The Cambridge companion to human rights and literature / edited by Crystal Parikh.
Other titles: Human rights and literature
Description: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. |
Series: Cambridge companions to literature |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2019000686 | I SBN 9781108481328 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108722209 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Human rights in literature. | Law in literature. |
State, The, in literature. | Social justice in literature. | Humanitarianism in literature.
Classifi cation: LCC P N 56. H 79 C 36 2019 | DDC 809/.933581–dc23
LC record available at h ttps://lccn.loc.gov/2019000686
ISBN 978- 1- 108- 48132- 8 Hardback
ISBN 978- 1- 108-7 2220- 9 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-p arty internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
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… If we go on, we might stop
in the street in the very place
where someone disappeared
and the words Come with us! we might
hear them. If that happened, we would
lead our lives with our hands
tied together …
–Carolyn Forché, “San Onofre, California”
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CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors p age ix
Chronology of Major Works and Events, 1215–2 018 xiii
SARONIK BOSU AND HEBA JAHAMA
Introduction 1
CRYSTAL PARIKH
Part I Genealogies and Contexts
1 Recounting History, Locating Precursors for Human Rights 1 3
SARAH WINTER
2 Humanitarianism’s Way in the World: On Missionary and
Emergency Imaginaries 2 7
KERRY BYSTROM AND ELENI COUNDOURIOTIS
3 Literature, Human Rights, and the Cold War 4 2
ANDREW HAMMOND
4 Human Rights in the Vernacular: Translating and Inventing
Rights Outside the State 5 8
DAVID PALUMBO-L IU
Part II Fashioning Methods
5 Law and Literature, the Procedural and the Performative 75
AUDREY J. GOLDEN
6 Human Rights Modes and Media 88
LIEVE GIES
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Contents
7 Remembering the Forgetting: Human Rights Literature and
Memory Work 1 00
CATHY J. SCHLUND-V IALS
8 Queering Human Rights: The Transgender Child 114
WENDY S. HESFORD AND RACHEL A. LEWIS
Part III G eneric Representations
9 Narrating the Human Person 1 29
SUNNY XIANG
10 The Dramas of Human Rights: Documentary Theater and Performance 1 41
BRENDA g. WERTH
11 Poetic Justice and the Idea of Poetic Redress 154
RAJEEV S. PATKE
12 Truth- Telling: Reportage and Creative Nonfi ction 1 67
JAMES DAWES
13 Visualizing the World: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Human Rights 178
CHARLOTTA SALMI
Part IV W riting Human Rights
14 Perpetrators, Victims, and Benefi ciaries: The Subjects of Human Rights 1 93
ELIZABETH SWANSON
15 Routing Emotions, Forming Humans: Affect, Aesthetics, Rhetoric 206
GREG A. MULLINS
16 Beyond Sovereignty: Reimagining Vulnerability and Security 217
ALEXANDRA S. MOORE
Select Bibliography 233
SARONIK BOSU AND HEBA JAHAMA
Index 2 39
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Saronik Bosu is a doctoral student in the Department of English, New York
University. He received his BA degree from the University of Calcutta, and his MA
and MPhil degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Kerry Bystrom is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College at Bard
College Berlin, a Liberal Arts University. Her publications include  Democracy
at Home in South Africa  (2016), T he Global South Atlantic (co-e dited with
Joseph R. Slaughter, 2018), and the special issue of Journal of Human Rights ,
“Humanitarianism and Responsibility” (co- edited with Glenn Mitoma, 2013).
Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English and Comparative Literary and
Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarship focuses on the
engagement of literature with history in the postcolonial novel and human rights
narratives. She is the author of C laiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography
and the Novel (1999) and The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the
Postcolony (2014), which offers a literary history of the war novel in sub-S aharan
Africa in the context of humanitarianism. In other work, she has addressed how
literary texts complicate philosophical defi nitions of human dignity, and explored
the testimony of rape victims, the fi gure of the child soldier, the narrative contours
of histories of the human rights movement, and refugee narratives.
James Dawes teaches literature and human rights at Macalester College. He is
the author of The Novel of Human Rights (2018), E vil Men (2013), T hat the
World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (2007), and T he Language of
War (2002).
Lieve Gies is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication
at the University of Leicester. Her main research interests are in the area of media
representations of the law. She is author of Law and the Media: The Future of an
Uneasy Relationship (2008) and M ediating Human Rights: Media, Culture and
Human Rights Law (2014).
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