Narrative and Human Rights

This is a course on the literatures, laws, and languages of human rights. We consider problems in human rights storytelling by examining the figures of speech that the law constructs to protect people’s rights and by exploring the capacities and limits of specific narrative genres to represent and promote human rights. Topics and texts include: legal personhood, forensic anthropology, and testimony in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost; synecdoche and other figures of genocide in Hotel Rwanda; empathy, indifference, and humanitarianism in Henri Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino and Janette Turner Hospitals’ “Dear Amnesty”; epistolary limits of forgiveness in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother; torture and the drama of truth commissions in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; recreating and consuming trauma in The Act of Killing; the graphic nature of coming of age in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis; child soldiers and formations of (ir)responsibility in Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone; the end and ends of narrative in Mohamedou Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary.