Human Rights and Narrated Lives | The Ethics of Recognition

Schaffer, Kay, and Smith, Sidonie

ISBN 10: 1403964955 / ISBN 13: 9781403964953

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York & Houndmills, UK, 2006

About this Item

5-1/2" x 8-1/2", xii + 303pp. Perfect bound book in matte laminated printed card stock cover. Minimal shelf wear to cover. Binding is square and tight. Pages are clean and bright and unmarked. This is an unread copy in as-new condition.

Seller Inventory # 003512

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Human Rights and Narrated Lives | The Ethics of Recognition
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, New York & Houndmills, UK
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1403964955
• ISBN 13: 9781403964953
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Politics & Political Economy
  • Cultural Studies - Sociology
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.

About the Author

KAY SCHAFFER is a recently retired Professor with a Personal Chair in Gender Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

SIDONIE SMITH is the Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English
and Women's Studies and Chair of the English Department at the University of
Michigan, USA.