CFP Themed Issue: Human Rights and Literature (Ed. Prof. Pramod Nayar)

Special Issue: Human Rights and Literature (Vol. 10, No. 4, September 2018)

To be edited by

Prof. Pramod K Nayar

Dept. of English, the University of Hyderabad, India

Human Rights and Literature has now acquired considerable standing as an ‘interdiscipline’, as one anthology characterizes it. With a keen political, both state and humanitarian-activist, interest in refugees, the displaced and the injured, not to mention a market for misery, the last decades of the twentieth  century has seen the rise of varied narratives – memoirs, testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and literature – by and around these categories of humans.

Critics have examined the narrative traditions of Human Rights, the idea of the ‘person’ in this discourse, literary genres most congenial to mapping the ‘human’ and the human’s rights. Distinguished literary-cultural scholars such as James Dawes, Joseph Slaughter,  Elizabeth Goldberg, Alexandra Schultheis, Domna Stanton, Elizabeth Anker, Lynn Hunt, among several others, have pioneered the study of the narrativization of the human, and therefore of Human Rights. With a quickening interest in ‘precarious lives’ in the work of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Bryan Turner, and others, conditions and narratives of precarity as documented in Literature have also come in for attention. Tangentially, the work of scholars like Hillary Chute on graphic novels have illuminated the role the medium and the genre plays in documenting suffering and the ‘personhood’ of victims.

This special issue seeks papers on the interface, Literature and Human Rights. Essays can examine a single text or group of texts/authors as these develop ideas about the person, her/his ‘social ontology’ and rights. We are interested in areas such as ecological crisis and Human Rights, biomedicine and Human Rights, canonical authors and their constructions of victims, the human and the subhuman, to mention a few possible realms for exploration.

Completed essays, within 5000 words, must reach the Guest Editor by 10 July 2018. Preliminary enquiries, preferably clearly focused ones, are welcome.

How to submit:

Please your submission to pramodknayar@gmail.com and editor@rupkatha.com following the Submission Guidelines at http://rupkatha.com/submissionguidelines.php. Please do not submit through the Submission Portal (http://rupkatha.com/review/index.php/rjis). This applies only to this issue.

Submission Deadline: July 10, 2018

Tentative Publication Month: September 2018