As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights returns with new urgency. This moment demands new ways of thinking about these problems. This seminar responds by turning to the many literary traditions from the Global South and postcolonial contexts in which writers have narrated human rights and personhood on their own cultural terms and grounds.

Across these traditions, normative rights are redefined, reconceived, expanded, translated, or repurposed as collective rather than individual entitlements, as claims to land, language, or subsistence, as rights of refusal or opacity, or as obligations across generations rather than guarantees held by a bounded legal subject. Alongside this, the figure of the human that grounds such rights is itself reimagined. Personhood is thought through frameworks that need not pass through a largely Western and liberal framework. This seminar asks how literary writing engages with and reimagines both human rights and personhood by approaching these texts from within their own cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts rather than measuring them against a Western standard.

We invite a wide range of discussion on human rights and personhood, including writing that may advance rights claims through collective projects such as nation-building and its aftermaths, statelessness, anticolonial and Indigenous struggles; through socialist, philosophical, and religious genealogies, including concepts like ubuntu, buen vivir, and dharma, which carry their own ideas of the human and of human rights, irreducible to liberal rights frameworks; or through an ecocritical lens that extends personhood and rights claims to nonhuman and more-than-human entities. We are especially interested in the range of literary and aesthetic forms this takes. Some writing may work through an aesthetics of irony, fragmentation, myth, excess, or magical realism that unsettles the sober, documentary tone of rights discourse, and registers rights claims obliquely, hyperbolically, or ambivalently rather than through direct testimony or affirmation. We welcome works that stake such claims to rights and personhood on its own terms, whether or not it has ever been read as “human rights literature.”

Our primary interest is in writing of recent decades that responds, in some capacity, to the present moment, though presenters are welcome to engage earlier work that illuminates these genealogies. Comparative and multilingual work is especially encouraged, as is attention to traditions underrepresented in the field.

For questions, you may contact Rojda Idil Arslan ([email protected]) and Nimisha Sinha ([email protected]).