The Social Work of
Narrative
Human Rights and the
Cultural Imaginary
Gareth Griffiths and Philip Mead (eds.)
New York: Columbia University Press: 2018, 414 pp.
ISBN: 9783838209586
This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational forms
have influenced and helped implement the project of human rights across the
world, and seeks to show how public discourses on law and politics grow out of
and are influenced by the imaginative representations of human rights. It draws
on a multi-disciplinary approach, using historical, literary, anthropological,
visual arts, and media studies methods and readings, and covers a wider range
of geographic areas than has previously been attempted. A series of
specifically-commissioned essays by leading scholars in the field and by
emerging young academics show how a multidisciplinary approach can illuminate
this central concern.
Acknowledgements
Gareth
Griffiths
Introduction:
Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
Part
1: Narrative and Human Rights in the Contemporary Moment
Joseph
R. Slaughter
Life,
Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say
Chantal
Zabus
Writing
Transgenderism and Human-Rights-with-a-Difference in
Post-Apartheid
South Africa
Mike
Hill
Human
Rights after the Human Being per se:
Narration
and Numbers in Net-centric War
Kieran
Dolin
“The
massacre of our voices”: Indigenous Rights and Narrative in
Contemporary
Australian Literature and Law
David
Trigger and Richard Martin
Ethnographic
Collections, Indigenous Narratives,
and
Post-Colonial Rights in Australia
Nicholas
Jose
Contrary
Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction
Asha
Varadharajan
How
to Kick Ass when Life’s a Bitch:
A
Human Rights Bulletin from India
Gillian
Whitlock
Bringing
Literature to Rights: Asylum Seekers as Subjects of English
Part
2: Imaginative Representation and Human Rights
Russell
West-Pavlov
The
Universal and the Local in Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s
Human
Rights Novel Nairobi Heat
Ned
Curthoys and Golnar Nabizadeh
The
Politics of Representation in Joe Sacco’s Palestine
Gareth
Griffiths
“Pictures
on the Wall, Music in the Air”:
Popular
Culture Forms, Human Rights Agitation and Fiction in Africa.
Helen
Gilbert
On
Show: Truth and Reconciliation in Canada
Ethan
Blue
Cognitive
Maps and Spatial Narratives: US Deportation Hearings
and
the Imaginative Cartographies of Forced Removal
Jane
Lydon
“Visual
history at its best!” Visual Narrative and UNESCO’s 1951
Human
Rights Exhibition
Sukhmani
Khorana
Balancing
the Quotidian and the Political: Beyond Empathy in
Australian
Multi-platform Refugee Narratives
Michael
R. Griffiths
Humanism’s
Pharmakon: Subalternity and Universality
Philip
Mead
Sovereignty
of the Mind
Philip
Mead
Afterword
Contributors
index
Gareth Griffithsis emeritus
professor of English and cultural studies at the University of Western
Australia and a professorial fellow at the University of Wollongong.
Philip Mead is chair of Australian
literature at the University of Western Australia
