Sophia A. McClennen is Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature (affiliated with Spanish and Women's Studies) at Pennsylvania State University, USA and Director of The Center for Global Studies.

Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.

This book provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative new readings on a range of topics. The first of its kind, this volume moves beyond survey to offer innovative, insightful pieces that develop, critique, and test boundaries, expanding the idea of human rights literature to include texts that have often been excluded from the literary such as legal texts, performances, visual culture, and human rights reports. Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the area for the first time, or looking for new insights, directions, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Introduction: Aporia and Affirmative Critique: Mapping the Landscape of Literary Approaches to Human Rights Research, Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore  Part 1: Subjects  Introduction  1. A New Universal for Human Rights?: The Particular, the Generalizable, the Political, Domna C. Stanton  2. "Commonly Human": Embodied Self-Possession and Human Rights in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother, Elizabeth S. Anker  3. Who is Human? Disability, Literature, and Human Rights, Julie Avril Minich  4. Queer Rights? Greg A. Mullins  5. Gendering Human Rights and Their Violation: A Reading of Chris Cleave's Little Bee, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg  6. Contingent Vulnerabilities: Child Soldiers as Human Rights Subjects, Wendy S. Hesford  7. In Flight: The Refugee Experience and Human Rights Narrative, Eleni Coundouriotis  8. Immolation, Peter Hitchcock  9. Remembering Perpetrators: The Kunstlerroman and Second-Generation Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Sarah G. Waisvisz  Part 2: Forms  Introduction  10. Vanishing Points: When Narrative is Not Simply There, Joseph R. Slaughter  11. The Reemergence of the Slave Narrative Tradition and the Search for a New Frederick Douglass, Laura T. Murphy  12. Reading Human Rights Literatures through Oral Traditions, Katrina M. Powell  13. Beyond the Trauma Aesthetic: The Cultural Work of Human Rights Witness Poetries, Brenda Carr Vellino  14. Ending World War II - Visual Literacy Class in Human Rights, Ariella Azoulay  15. Inventing Human Dignity, Sharon Sliwinski  16. The Legible Face of Human Rights in Autobiographically Based Fiction, Meg Jensen  17. The World-Form of Human Rights Comics, Christine Hong  18. Sorry Business, Gillian Whitlock  19. From "Tutsi Crush" to "FWP": Satire, Sentiment, and Rights in African Texts and Contexts, Madelaine Hron  20. #NotABugSplat: Becoming Human on the Terrain of Visual Culture, Keith P. Feldman  21. Fragmented Forms and Shifting Contexts: How Can Social Media Work for Human Rights? David Palumbo-Liu  22. What about False Witnessing? The Limits of Authenticity and Verification, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson  Part 3: Contexts  Introduction  23. Nature and Society in Revolutionary Rights Debates, Susan Maslan  24. The "Rites of Discovery": Law and Narrative in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic World, Ralph Bauer  25. Natural Rights and Power in the Spanish Comedia after the Conquest, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen  26. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL): An Essay in Bibliography, Barbara Harlow  27. Localizing Human Rights: Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and the Lacuna in International Justice, Audrey J. Golden  28. Colonialism, Inherited Rights, and Social Movements of Self-Protection, Ban Wang  29. Transition and Transformation: Human Rights and Ubuntu in Antjie Krog's Writings after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mark Sanders  30. Violence, Indigeneities, and Human Rights, Arturo Arias  31. Human Rights and Cultural Representations of Mexico--US Border Migration, Claudia Sadowski-Smith  32. Journeying into Rwanda: Placing Philip Gourevitch's Account of Genocide within Literary, Postcolonial, and Human Rights Frameworks, Zoe Norridge  33. "Where is the World to Save Us from Torture?": The Poets of Guantánamo, Marc D. Falkoff  34. Human Rights and Minority Rights: Argentine and German Perspectives, Luz Angélica Kirschner   35. States of Cynicism: Literature and Human Rights in Israel/Palestine, Anna Bernard  36. Bringing Human Rights to Bear in American Literature, Crystal Parikh  37. Sites of Human Rights Theory, Hanna Musiol  Part 4: Impacts  Introduction  38. With Double-Binds to Spare - Assuming the Rhetorical Question of Human Rights Language as Such, Erik Doxtader  39. "Inverted Sympathy": Empathy and Mediation in Literary Transactions of Human Rights, Sarah Winter  40. Human Rights, Literature, and Empathy, James Dawes  41. The Right Time for Rhetoric: Normativity, Kairos, and Human Rights, Belinda Walzer  42. Values Without Qualities: Pathos and Mythos in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mark Goodale  43. Is the Age of Human Rights Over? Makau Mutua  44. Freedom of Expression and Cultural Production in the Age of Vanishing Privacy, Jonathan E. Abel  45. Poetry and the Limits of Human Rights, David Holloway  46. Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, Alexandra Schultheis Moore  47. The Graceful Walk, Chris Abani

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics. The first of its kind, this volume covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines between the social sciences and humanities. Sections cover:

• subjects, with pieces on subjectivity, humanity, identity, gender, universality, the particular, the body
• forms, visiting the different ways human rights stories are crafted and formed via the literary, the visual, the performative, and the oral
• contexts, tracing the development of the literature over time and in relation to specific regions and historical events
• impacts, considering the power and limits of human rights literature, rhetoric, and visual culture

Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the study of literature and human rights for the first time, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in new directions for future scholarship.

Contributors: Chris Abani, Jonathan E. Abel, Elizabeth S. Anker, Arturo Arias, Ariella Azoulay, Ralph Bauer, Anna Bernard, Brenda Carr Vellino, Eleni Coundouriotis, James Dawes, Erik Doxtader, Marc D. Falkoff, Keith P. Feldman, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Audrey J. Golden, Mark Goodale, Barbara Harlow, Wendy S. Hesford, Peter Hitchcock, David Holloway, Christine Hong, Madelaine Hron, Meg Jensen, Luz Angélica Kirschner, Susan Maslan, Julie Avril Minich, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Greg Mullins, Laura T. Murphy, Hanna Musiol, Makau Mutua, Zoe Norridge, David Palumbo-Liu, Crystal Parikh, Katrina M. Powell, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Mark Sanders, Karen-Magrethe Simonsen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Sharon Sliwinski, Sidonie Smith, Domna Stanton, Sarah G. Waisvisz, Belinda Walzer, Ban Wang, Julia Watson, Gillian Whitlock and Sarah Winter.