Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature

Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg is an associate professor of English at Babson College, where she teaches courses in international literatures and human rights. She is author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative and Human Rights (2007) as well as articles in books and in journals such as Callaloo, South Atlantic Review, and Peace Review.Alexandra Schultheis Moore is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family (2004) as well as essays in edited collections and journals including Contemporary Literature, South Asian Review, Peace Review, and Genders.

• Contents Foreword, Joseph R. Slaughter Acknowledgments Introduction Human Rights and Literature: The Development of an Interdiscipline, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore I. Histories, Imaginaries, and Paradoxes of Literature and Human Rights 1: "Literature," the "Rights of Man," and Narratives of Atrocity: Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony, Julie Stone Peters 2: Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law, Joseph R. Slaughter 3: Top Down, Bottom Up, Horizontally: Resignifying the Universal in Human Rights Discourse, Domna C. Stanton 4: Literature, the Social Imaginary and Human Rights, Meili Steele 5: Intimations of What Was to Come: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and the Indivisibility of Human Rights, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg 6: Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and Human Rights, Greg Mullins II. Questions of Narration, Representation, and Evidence 7: Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art, Carolyn Forché 8: Narrating Human Rights and the Limits of Magical Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Elizabeth S. Anker 9: Complicities of Transnational Witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Wendy Kozol 10: Dark Chamber, Colonial Scene: Post-9/11 Torture and Representation, Stephanie Athey III. Rethinking the 'Subject’ of Human Rights 11: Human Rights as Violence and Enigma: Can Literature Really Be of Any Help with the Politics of Human Rights?, Nick Mansfield 12: Imagining Women as Human, Hephzibah Roskelly 13: "Disaster Capitalism" and Human Rights: Indra Embodiment and Subalternity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Alexandra Schultheis Moore 14: Do Human Rights Need a Self? Buddhist Literature and the Samsaric Subject, Gregory Price Grieve IV. Epilogue Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore

"The range of voices represented in the book is remarkable…Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature promises to be an important contribution not only because it effectively described the burgeoning subfield of literature and human rights, but also because its theoretical interventions help to consolidate and advance that subfield." –James Dawes, Macalester College, Comparative Literature