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