Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead

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.

"Gareth Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong. He has published in the fields of post-colonial literatures, secular/sacral relations in the modern world, missions in colonial space, African literatures in English and theatre studies. His many books include: A Double Exile, African and West Indian Literatures in English (1978), African Literatures in English-East and West (2000), he has co-authored The Empire Writes Back (1989) and co-edited The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998), Mixed Messages: Materality, Textuality (2005), Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies (2003) and co-authored Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750-1940 (2015).

Professor Philip Mead is Chair of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, and Visiting Professor of Australian Studies, Harvard University (2015-16). Philip Mead’s research is at the intersections of national and transnational literary studies, cultural history and theory, poetics, literary education, and digital humanities. He has published in the fields of literary history, Indigenous Studies, social memory, literary education, and postcolonial poetics. His books include Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry (2010), An Introduction to the Literature of Tasmania (2016), and Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (with Gordon McMullan) (2016).

This finger-on-the-pulse collection dramatically expands debates on human rights, law, and literature. Recognizing the paradox of human rights as universal but exclusionary, these elegant essays cover an impressive range of media genres, showing how narrative form shapes claims-for-rights, not the other way around. Addressing pressing issues like new technologies of war, indigenous struggles, the refugee crisis, and much more, this interdisciplinary volume needs to be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in human rights.



Isabel Hofmeyr

Global Distinguished Professor, NYU

Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand