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612-822-4611
Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

Paperback

Literary CriticismSocial Movements

ISBN10: 150170558X
ISBN13: 9781501705588
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Jan 15 2017
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.62 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights.

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Social Movements