Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts and Contestation
- Chapter 1 Genres of Slavery and Human Rights
- Chapter 2 Humanitarian Attachments: Contemporary Anti-slavery and Anti-trafficking Discourses
- Part II Forms and Figures
- Part III Legacies and Afterlives
- Part IV Metaphors and Migrations
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 1 - Genres of Slavery and Human Rights
from Part I - Contexts and Contestation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts and Contestation
- Chapter 1 Genres of Slavery and Human Rights
- Chapter 2 Humanitarian Attachments: Contemporary Anti-slavery and Anti-trafficking Discourses
- Part II Forms and Figures
- Part III Legacies and Afterlives
- Part IV Metaphors and Migrations
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
Building on the work of Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) scholars, this essay considers the limitations of international law (and the human rights legal framework more specifically) in addressing slavery, and the ways in which contemporary global fiction puts pressure on normative legal and literary conceptions of slavery and freedom. The essay begins with an examination of how slavery and the slave narrative take shape in the context of international law that is rooted in colonial encounters and predicated on the differential recognition of humanity. That analysis leads to investigation of how normative twentieth century human rights law delimits the concepts of slavery and freedom. In its final section, the essay how several contemporary global fictions challenge the familiar, generic logic of the slave narrative and, with it, human rights imaginaries of freedom.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery , pp. 13 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022