This chapter gives an overview of the current debates regarding the way human rights has been defined and historicized. It argues that understanding these debates is crucial for an understanding of the ways in which human lights matter to literary study. Referencing the works of Johannes Morsink, Paul Gordon Lauren, Lynn Hunt, and Samuel Moyn, the author moves the through the varied points of origin and genealogies of human rights as we understand them today. The chapter shows that this present concept is by no means unambiguous, and argues that literature and its analysis provides us with one of the best ways to investigate the historical and political tensions that exist at its very foundations.

Most legal and juridical proceedings depend upon fixed positions with regards to human rights claims, especially where violations of rights are concerned, those of victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and sometimes, although to a lesser extent, beneficiaries. However, the social and political realities in which rights are embedded usually prove much murkier. For example, those who carry out atrocities one minute, might find themselves the object of state violence the next; witnesses who receive reparations or are able to sell their stories might seem like less innocent beneficiaries of the events of which they’ve given accounts, and a much broader notion of culpability calls into question the function or efficaciousness of identifying individual perpetrators. This chapter argues that literature is especially well-suited for evincing and elaborating such ambiguities and contradictions that inhere in the history and politics of human rights.

Traditional investigative journalism maintains a commitment to neutral objectivity, but the genre of creative nonfiction, in which writers are deeply immersed in complex and rapidly shifting social and political conditions, has proven to be one of the most durable genres of human rights literature. On the one hand, reportage often enjoys the documentary authority of the first person observer. However, the intensely personal relationship of the writer to his or her subject also entails vexed questions of how they represent the experiences of human rights subjects (whether victims or survivors), the usually uneven structural relations of power between the writer and subject, and the ethical good or harms enacted by the representations themselves. This chapter turns to reportage and other first-person documentary prose, including Human Rights Watch press releases, Addario’s The Forever War, and Angelina Jolie’s Notes from my Travels to examine both the appeals and difficulties the genre poses for representing human rights victims and struggles.

This chapter provides a survey of poetic reactions to human rights violations in the contemporary world. Theodor Adorno declared in 1949, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” a sentiment symptomatic of the shock that made literature seem inadequate in dealing with the scale of human injustice revealed by the Holocaust. However, the human capacity for wrongdoing remains endemic to our times. Wherever human rights violations have proved irresistible, poets have sought redress through the symbolic action of poetry, giving proof of how we might invert the sentiments of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In the teeth of modern barbarism, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, poetry continues to remind humanity of what will keep us humane and human.

The practical inefficacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was largely due to the development of the Cold War following its adoption in 1948. The author in this chapter studies the generative environment of the UDHR, with the particular geopolitical and cultural dissonances of the post world war world, and follows through to its immediate aftermath. It especially looks at the literary advocacy of human rights that had come up in this period, where the right to write without persecution began to stand for a larger body of diverse rights. Traversing a wide range of literary engagement with human rights in the Global South and North – in testimonio, autobiography, political fiction, radical drama, community theater, war poetry, magical realism, and diasporic literature – the author shows how Cold War literature documents both the ideals and the failures of human rights as thought and action.

This chapter looks at the proliferation and pluralization of the subject of human rights, in terms of identity and difference, in the twentieth century, with its inclusion of previously elided constituencies – women, LGBTQ individuals, persons with disabilities, migrants, and so on. The authors test the limits of this plurality by studying its imbrication with heteronormative notions of reproductive futurism, transnormativity, ableism, and neoliberal agency. The texts in consideration are three documentary films – Growing up Coy, Born in the Wrong Body: My Transgender Kidand Kids on the Edge: the Gender Clinic. This chapter seeks to understand the potentialities and limitations of transformative identity-based legal categories, and the children whose personal lives are derecognized within the systems of these categories, and also to ‘queer’ or ‘crip’ established human rights discourses which have their roots in heterosexist notions of ownership of one's body.

This chapter considers how specific aesthetic styles and rhetorical frames correspond to and alter the affective dimensions, primarily shame and empathy, of human rights discourse and politics. From the sentimental pathos by which NGOs often publicize humanitarian campaigns, deep anger and melancholy that saturate testimonies from human rights victims and survivors, and the gallows humor by which prisoners often manage to survive their embattled positions, negotiating human rights has been as much a matter of the heart and of feeling, as it is of the head. Human rights advocates and liberal humanitarianism have long relied on a certain set of stock emotions to convey the urgency of their endeavors, which literary forms can shore up but also disrupt in unpredictable ways.

This chapter studies the work of memory in the domain of non-reconciled human rights, with respect to the cultural representations of the authoritarian Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The work of memory, the author suggests, takes place outside the ambit of international human rights actors such as states and non-governmental organizations, and also that of conventional legal and juridical methods that are used to redress violations. To illustrate this point, she charts the history of the so called “Pol Pot time,” especially by means of a close reading of Rithy Panh’s 2011 memoir, The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields. Bringing these postulations to the present moment, the chapter closes with a discussion of the United Nations/Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

This chapter considers the particular significance of theater as a genre that works at the intersection of imagination, spectacularity, and embodiment for the representation of human rights, as well as drama as a critical lens for understanding the “performance” of human rights in other public venues. Live drama can carry with it the aspects of temporal urgency, public activity, and personal embodiment on which human rights have also been centered, and documentary theater in particular holds significance in human rights discourse due to its relationship to archive, evidence, and the real. Examining three forms of documentary theater (the tribunal, the auto-biographical, and the site-specific), the chapter argues that this genre has become an essential mode for framing human rights both in its advocatory potential and in its posing of questions about the relationship of theater and documentary to truth and legitimacy.

This chapter explores the role that various media play in the developmnent of human rights discourses. It pays particular attention to the dependency of humanitarian initiative on media exposure, and the construction of specific cases of human rights abuses as sufficiently deserving of relief, or otherwise. The author argues that the role that the media play goes beyond mere carriers of information and ideology. They are fundamental in creating the imagery of suffering, and its generative association with care and relief. Within limited news cycles, they also have to deal with “compassion fatigue”; and the chapter closes with a description of how human rights advocates negotiate with these issues as they seek to bring attention to violations.

Most legal and juridical proceedings depend upon fixed positions with regards to human rights claims, especially where violations of rights are concerned, those of victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and sometimes, although to a lesser extent, beneficiaries. However, the social and political realities in which rights are embedded usually prove much murkier. For example, those who carry out atrocities one minute, might find themselves the object of state violence the next; witnesses who receive reparations or are able to sell their stories might seem like less innocent beneficiaries of the events of which they’ve given accounts, and a much broader notion of culpability calls into question the function or efficaciousness of identifying individual perpetrators. This chapter argues that literature is especially well-suited for evincing and elaborating such ambiguities and contradictions that inhere in the history and politics of human rights.

This chapter looks at two nexuses: law-and-literature and human-rights-and-literature. In her analysis of Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Testimony: the United States (1885-1915): Recitative (1978), the author brings the law-and-literature paradigm to bear on literary expression of human rights. She finds in the text overlapping ideations of the procedural and the performative, in its juridical and literary dimensions. On the one hand, the text serves to show the limitations of the law and its technologies such as the trial, which literary performance can help compensate for. On the other hand, Reznikoff's poem also proves the necessity for these technologies as organizing principles, especially in methods like citation and precedent, in order to battle the ever present risk of erasure.

This introduction provides an introduction to the entire volume, including an overview of the field of human rights and literature, the aims and objectives of the Companion, and its organizational structure.

This chapter looks at two nexuses: law-and-literature and human-rights-and-literature. In her analysis of Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Testimony: the United States (1885-1915): Recitative (1978), the author brings the law-and-literature paradigm to bear on literary expression of human rights. She finds in the text overlapping ideations of the procedural and the performative, in its juridical and literary dimensions. On the one hand, the text serves to show the limitations of the law and its technologies such as the trial, which literary performance can help compensate for. On the other hand, Reznikoff's poem also proves the necessity for these technologies as organizing principles, especially in methods like citation and precedent, in order to battle the ever present risk of erasure.

This chapter considers how the rising interest in human rights, humanitarianism, and the humanities has coincided with the arrival of the graphic novel as an object of serious attention in literary studies. To notable effect, comics and graphic novels have in turn taken human rights crises as a central thematic concern: works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Magdy El Shafee’s Metro, and the comics of Joe Sacco have all brought international attention to the violence of war, occupation, and political corruption. Paying particular attention to the conjunction of visual, narrative, and textual representations that takes place in the genre, this chapter considers the way in which the graphic novel has taken up both documentary and advocacy functions in regards to human rights.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.