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.
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