ACLA: Literature After Rights
For over a decade now, the interdisciplinary study of human rights and literature has offered a generative lens for thinking about questions of citizenship, the nation-state, and narrative form. Scholars have studied the human rights novel (James Dawes), the co-constitution of human rights and the bildungsroman (Joseph Slaughter), literary and cinematic depictions of torture (Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg), and the rights-based political imaginations of American writers of color (Crystal Parikh), among other projects. These approaches have emphasized the discursivity of human rights: literature does not represent a static conception of human rights but rather helps shape understandings of what human rights are or could be.