Category: 27.1 Human Rights and Literature

Quiet Prose and Bare Life: Why We Should Eschew the Sensational in Human Rights Language Several scholars observe that sensational depictions of human rights violations enter international circuits of activist discussion and action. However, sensational narratives eclipse the everyday deprivations that accumulate to become a multigenerational legacy of want, stunted potential, and psychological emasculation. This… Continue reading 27.1 | Rajini Srikanth

Incorporating the Impossible: Female Suicide Terrorism in Before We Say Goodbye The novel Before We Say Goodbye (2004) is endorsed by Amnesty International for contributing to a better understanding of human rights values. It tells the news item story of a Palestinian girl blowing up herself and an Israeli girl in a supermarket. Through exclusion,… Continue reading 27.1 | Loes van der Voort

“Not to Arouse Your Pity”: Situated Engagement and Human Rights in Dangarembga’s “The Letter” This essay reads Tsitsi Dangarembga’s short story, “The Letter,” for the ways in which its play with epistolary form challenges normative human rights discourse and literary expectations. I develop the concept of situated engagement examine how the text at once locates… Continue reading 27.1 | Alexandra Schultheis Moore

A Double-Negation: Allegory and the Re-inscription of Human Rights This essay explores the intersection of literary form and appeals for human rights. It focuses on how the form of allegory, or what Walter Benjamin calls the “expression of convention,” highlights the authority of those genres that work to confirm or deny human rights. To this… Continue reading 27.2 | Daniel Listoe

Bodily Vulnerability, the Human Rights of Immigrants, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010) follows the final months in the life of its protagonist Uxbal as he dies from prostate cancer. Uxbal is a middleman who brokers the labor of unauthorized immigrants, yet as he confronts his mortality he also contends with… Continue reading 27.1 | Elizabeth S. Anker