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The Global South Atlantic (Paperback)
Kerry Bystrom, Joseph R. Slaughter; Contributions by Luis Felipe Alencastro, Jaime Hanneken, Jason Frydman, …
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R983
Discovery Miles 9 830
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Not only were more African slaves transported to South America than
to North, but overlapping imperialisms and shared resistance to
them have linked Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean for over
five centuries. Yet despite the rise in transatlantic, oceanic,
hemispheric, and regional studies, and even the growing interest in
South-South connections, the South Atlantic has not yet emerged as
a site that captures the attention it deserves. The Global South
Atlantic traces literary exchanges and interlaced networks of
communication and investment-financial, political, socio-cultural,
libidinal-across and around the southern ocean. Bringing together
scholars working in a range of languages, from Spanish to Arabic,
the book shows the range of ways people, governments, political
movements, social imaginaries, cultural artefacts, goods, and
markets cross the South Atlantic, or sometimes fail to cross. As a
region made up of multiple intersecting regions, and as a vision
made up of complementary and competing visions, the South Atlantic
can only be understood comparatively. Exploring the Atlantic as an
effect of structures of power and knowledge that issue from the
Global South as much as from Europe and North America, The Global
South Atlantic helps to rebalance global literary studies by making
visible a multi-textured South Atlantic system that is neither
singular nor stable.
In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal
interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter
demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature"
and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter
argues that international law shares with the modern novel a
particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman,
the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a
conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative
grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
early literary theorists both call "the free and full development
of the human personality." Revising our received understanding of
the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests
that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the
weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the
assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear
commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights
law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the
sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for
itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social
work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of
both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking
his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter
focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story
to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in
narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in
contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism,
neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational
consumer capitalism. Slaughter raises important practical and
ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human
rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more
than ever, are intertwined.
In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal
interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter
demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature"
and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter
argues that international law shares with the modern novel a
particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman,
the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a
conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative
grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
early literary theorists both call "the free and full development
of the human personality." Revising our received understanding of
the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests
that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the
weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the
assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear
commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights
law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the
sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for
itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social
work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of
both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking
his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter
focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story
to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in
narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in
contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism,
neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational
consumer capitalism. Slaughter raises important practical and
ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human
rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more
than ever, are intertwined.
This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational
forms have influenced and helped implement the project of human
rights across the world, and seeks to show how public discourses on
law and politics grow out of and are influenced by the imaginative
representations of human rights. It draws on a multi-disciplinary
approach, using historical, literary, anthropological, visual arts,
and media studies methods and readings, and covers a wider range of
geographic areas than has previously been attempted. A series of
specifically-commissioned essays by leading scholars in the field
and by emerging young academics show how a multidisciplinary
approach can illuminate this central concern.
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