Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature

Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature PDF Author: Yenna Wu
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739167421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature, while probing the intersections of suffering, politics, and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context. As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives, it demonstrates how literary insight enhances the study of human rights. Covering varied geographical and geopolitical regions, this collection encourages comparative analyses and cross-cultural understanding. Seeking to interrogate linguistic, structural, and cultural constructions of the political prison experience, it highlights the literary aspects without losing sight of the political and the theoretical. The contributors cross various disciplinary boundaries and adopt different interpretive perspectives in analyzing prison narratives, especially memoirs, from such diverse countries as China, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Romania, Russia, Uruguay, and the U.S. The volume emphasizes the literary works produced since the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since the political seismic shift in 1989. The authors treated range from the canonical to the less well-known: Nawal El Saadawi, Varlam Shalamov, Zhang Xianliang, Cong Weixi, Wumingshi, Carlos Liscano, Fatna El Bouih, Nabil Sulayman, Faraj Bayraqdar, Hasiba 'Abdalrahman, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nicolae Steinhardt, Irina Ratushinskaya, etc. Critical issues investigated include how the writers represent their sufferings, experiences, and emotions during incarceration; their strategies of survival; and how political prison literature can reveal hidden violations of human rights, while resisting official discourse and serving other functions in society. Examining the commonalities and differences in global experiences of imprisonment, the eight chapters engage with the aesthetics of self-making and resistance, individual and collective memory, denial and conversion, catharsis and redemption, and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma. Topics also include the politics of remembering and the politics of representation, such as the problematic relationship between narrative, language, and representations of torture. Similarly under discussion are prison aesthetics of happiness, the role of spectacle in the criminal justice system, and the intersection of prison, gender, and silences. At a juncture when more and more people all over the world actively defy repressive regimes and demand political reform, this book makes a timely contribution to the advocacy and discourse of universal human rights.

Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature

Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature PDF Author: Yenna Wu
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739167421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature, while probing the intersections of suffering, politics, and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context. As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives, it demonstrates how literary insight enhances the study of human rights. Covering varied geographical and geopolitical regions, this collection encourages comparative analyses and cross-cultural understanding. Seeking to interrogate linguistic, structural, and cultural constructions of the political prison experience, it highlights the literary aspects without losing sight of the political and the theoretical. The contributors cross various disciplinary boundaries and adopt different interpretive perspectives in analyzing prison narratives, especially memoirs, from such diverse countries as China, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Romania, Russia, Uruguay, and the U.S. The volume emphasizes the literary works produced since the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since the political seismic shift in 1989. The authors treated range from the canonical to the less well-known: Nawal El Saadawi, Varlam Shalamov, Zhang Xianliang, Cong Weixi, Wumingshi, Carlos Liscano, Fatna El Bouih, Nabil Sulayman, Faraj Bayraqdar, Hasiba 'Abdalrahman, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nicolae Steinhardt, Irina Ratushinskaya, etc. Critical issues investigated include how the writers represent their sufferings, experiences, and emotions during incarceration; their strategies of survival; and how political prison literature can reveal hidden violations of human rights, while resisting official discourse and serving other functions in society. Examining the commonalities and differences in global experiences of imprisonment, the eight chapters engage with the aesthetics of self-making and resistance, individual and collective memory, denial and conversion, catharsis and redemption, and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma. Topics also include the politics of remembering and the politics of representation, such as the problematic relationship between narrative, language, and representations of torture. Similarly under discussion are prison aesthetics of happiness, the role of spectacle in the criminal justice system, and the intersection of prison, gender, and silences. At a juncture when more and more people all over the world actively defy repressive regimes and demand political reform, this book makes a timely contribution to the advocacy and discourse of universal human rights.

Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature

Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature PDF Author: Yenna Wu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739186169
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature, while examining the intersections of suffering, politics, and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context. As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives, it makes a timely contribution to the advocacy and discourse of universal human rights by demonstrating how literary insight enhances the study of this field and encouraging comparative analyses and cross-cultural understanding.

Readings in Syrian Prison Literature

Readings in Syrian Prison Literature PDF Author: R. Shareah Taleghani
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815655207
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s—a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Asad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the “experimental shift” in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani’s groundbreaking work explores prison writing’s critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights PDF Author: Sophia A. McClennen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317696271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 997

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Book Description
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.

Prison Writing and the Literary World

Prison Writing and the Literary World PDF Author: Michelle Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000215938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise, it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison and the literary world.

Law and Cultural Studies

Law and Cultural Studies PDF Author: John Erni
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317156218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
New and unremitting violence linked to state, inter-state, and private actors has precipitated a renewal of social movements, many of which act in concert with human rights ethos and legal conceptions. Yet, cultural studies has so far had little engagement or institutional connection with these movements. How can cultural studies as a progressive discipline think with, and make space for, rights-inflected legal and humanitarian practices? This book considers the ways in which cultural humanism and the critical approach to rights, and more broadly between culture and law, can be brought together to open a new intellectual space to allow cultural studies to better engage with the current challenges presented by social and political struggles worldwide. It lays out the central theses essential for constructing a critical view of human rights, and then advances a distinctive critical model of analysis that incorporates insights of postcolonial legal theorists and jurists from the Global South and important cultural theorists from the North, while rethinking law, rights, and social movements as something constituted by multiple legal modernities. Through case studies covering questions relating to sovereignty, citizenship, refugee displacement, human rights defenders, and gender and sexual rights, Law and Cultural Studies develops a means by which the practice of cultural studies can be reinvigorated around the legal spaces, institutions, and movements tied to human rights struggles. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, critical legal studies, political theory, postcolonial studies, and human rights.

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368–1644)

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368–1644) PDF Author: Ying Zhang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004432299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Approaching the prison as a creative environment and imprisoned officials as creative subjects in Ming China (1368-1644), Ying Zhang introduces important themes at the intersection of premodern Chinese religion, poetry, and visual and material culture. The Ming is known for its extraordinary cultural and economic accomplishments in the increasingly globalized early modern world. For scholars of Chinese religion and art, this era crystallizes the essential and enduring characteristics in these two spheres. Drawing on scholarship on Chinese philosophy, religion, aesthetics, poetry, music, and visual and material culture, Zhang illustrates how the prisoners understood their environment as creative and engaged it creatively. She then offers a literature survey on the characteristics of premodern Chinese religion and art that helps situate the questions of “creative environment” and “creative subject” within multiple fields of scholarship.

History of Communism in Europe: Vol. 4 / 2013

History of Communism in Europe: Vol. 4 / 2013 PDF Author: Dalia Báthory
Publisher: Zeta Books
ISBN: 6068266699
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description


Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China

Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China PDF Author: Elisa Nesossi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317106059
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The volume presents an extensive investigation into the process of reforms of detention powers in today’s China and offers an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding the reformist attempts. The chapters in this collection demonstrate that legislative and institutional reforms in this area result from political opportunities - openings and tensions at the central institutional levels of political authority - and contingent social and political factors. The book examines legal and institutional reforms to institutions of detention and imprisonment that have occurred since the 1990s, with a particular focus on the 21st century. Its content follows three particular lines of enquiry concerning the issue of deprivation of liberty in contemporary China. The first deals with the academic and theoretical debates on the subject of imprisonment and detention. The related chapters explain the difficulties encountered in this area of research and understandings of the discourses of reform through labour in Western and Chinese scholarship. The second deals with the specific issues of criminal and administrative forms of deprivation of liberty, examining in particular the institutional and legislative dimensions, considering the relationship between reforms and criminal justice policy agendas. The third assesses the meaning of institutional reforms in the context of the changing state-society relationship in contemporary China.

The Golden Chariot

The Golden Chariot PDF Author: Salwa Bakr
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 1617971936
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
From her cell in a women's prison, Aziza decides to create a golden chariot to take her to heaven, where her wishes and dreams can be fulfilled. As she muses on who to take with her, she tells the life stories of her fellow prisoners and decides in her heart which ones deserve a free ride to paradise. Aziza's cruelly frank comments about her friends and their various crimes including murder, theft, and drug-dealing weave these tales together into a contemporary Arabian Nights. Salwa Bakr takes a wry and cynical look at how women from widely differing backgrounds, some innocent and some guilty, come together in a single prison ward. Salwa Bakr's writing depicts life at the grassroots of Egypt's culture, admiring its resilience in the face of poverty and inequality. With a strong distrust of imported kitsch, western consumerism is contrasted with the indigenous culture. In The Golden Chariot, Salwa Bakr opens a magical door, through which we are able to see the injustices of a society in transition. Beyond these stories of crime, we glimpse the yearning and longing for a better life, and the problems of not being able to realize these dreams by honest means.