Human Rights and Narrated Lives

The Ethics of Recognition
2004. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-1-4039-6494-6
Verlag: Palgrave MacMillan Us

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 217 mm, Gewicht: 458 g

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schaffer, K.

Smith, S.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements Introduction Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights The Venues of Storytelling Truth, Reconciliation and the Traumatic Past of South Africa Who Speaks for the Stolen Generation/s?: Indigenous Human Rights in Australia Belated Narrating: 'Grandmothers' Telling Stories of Forced Sexual Servitude during World War II Life Sentences: Narrated Lives and Prisoner Rights in the United States Post-Tiananmen Narratives and the New China Conclusion Bibliography of Works Cited

Über Autor(innen)

KAY SCHAFFER is a recently retired Professor with a Personal Chair in Gender Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

SIDONIE SMITH is the Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English
and Women's Studies and Chair of the English Department at the University of
Michigan, USA.