HUMAN RIGHTS IN LITERATURE

Abstract

The field of human rights (HR) and literature has expanded in the last two decades fiction poetry, memories and graphic novels with HR themes has been examined and also cognate fields like popular culture and HR, humanitarianism and the history of HR itself. The literary, with its emphasis on the human ‘subject’, the formation of this subject, and the hurdles that confront its formation, is appropriate for the study of how humans are conceptualized as deserving, (or not) of rights, and the conditions in which the human loss his humanness victims, perpetrators and bystander are character in literary texts that critics study as model of subjectivity. The literary text asks us to imagine the nature of the human person, the universal state of human vulnerability, and the situation in which this vulnerability is prised open for exploitation. The entries here consist of those that engage literary text but also with frames, contested and the debated, that define the human, and without which a rights regime cannot be put in place or modified. Forms and aesthetics that are central to the documentation, witnessing and communicating the urgency of HR themes in various genres are also necessary a part of this bibliography. Various forms and genres in literature across ages geocultural formation, and nations- have addressed the theme of HR, explicitly or implicitly. The war navel, for instance, is more concerned with mass HR violations such as genocide, rape and continuing trauma. The child abuse novel is focused on individual HR plays by authors like Ariel Dorfman (e.g., his resistance trilogy) use the code to speak of unspeakable horror like torture. In the late 20th century, especially in the wake of art Spiegelman’s pioneering Maus, numerous have sought to document to atrocity and HR. testimonial text and fiction by victims have constituted a globally visible genre, again since the last half of the 20th century.