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.

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.