Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Vis... - 9781138860278

Taylor & Francis

This book responds to the failures of human rights\u2014the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions\u2014through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore draws on theories of vulnerability, precarity, and dispossession to argue for the necessity of recognizing the embodied and material contexts of human rights subjects. At the same time, she demonstrates how these theories run the risk of reproducing the structural imbalances that lie at the core of critiques of human rights. Pairing conventional human rights genres\u2014legal instruments, human rights reports, reportage, and humanitarian campaigns\u2014with literary and visual culture, Moore develops a transnational feminist reading praxis of five sites of rights and their violation over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers in Nigerian literature; human rights rep.