CFP: [Ethnic] Human Rights and/in Global Literary Production, ACLA (11/15/07, 4/24-4/27/08)

full name / name of organization: 
Alexandra Schultheis
contact email: 

Human Rights and/in Global Literary Production: Pedagogical and
Theoretical Perspectives

Elizabeth Goldberg & Alexandra Schultheis, co-chairs

Please submit proposals through the ACLA Conference website. Deadline
11/15/07.
http://www.acla.org/acla2008

As evidence by major conferences, scholarly production, and course
offerings, the interdisciplinary pairing of human rights and literature
has gained necessary momentum since 2001. This seminar explores global
literatures of human rights through both theory and pedagogic praxis. We
are particularly interested in the productive potential of movement
between human rights and literary discourses. If, in Upendra Baxi’s
words, “human rights…is a moral language (like those of ‘social
justice’, ‘equality’, and ‘redistribution’) that is simply exhausted,”
how might literary discourses reinvigorate it? And if “education in the
Humanities attempts to be an uncoercive rearrangement of desires”
(Spivak), what are we teaching (for) when we teach literature and/of
human rights?

Possible questions to consider may include: How do we define “human
rights” as an approach to global literary production? How do we
negotiate, theoretically or pedagogically, the relationship between the
literary subject and the subject who bears rights? How are human rights
and literary narratologies related? How do we incorporate critiques of
human rights and its link to Western imperialism into our approaches?
How are the material conditions of the production and circulation of
global literatures and rights related? What are the practical questions
we must address to make this disciplinary pairing work in scholarship and
in the classroom? Why and how is this theoretical and methodological
approach significant in our contemporary historical moment?

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Received on Mon Oct 29 2007 - 21:02:28 EST