Abstract
It may be that, in keeping with global political aspirations, the twenty-first century will become the century of human rights.1 As many voices advocate as oppose such an aspiration, and the worlds of theatre and performance are no exception: the empowering qualities of theatre have been acknowledged by many, especially in relation to vulnerable communities.2 In the wake of the human rights legislation that emerged after World War II and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, theatre and performance artists have increasingly promoted specific human rights issues in their work and sought to establish special ties with various forms of human rights advocacy.3 The theatre artists who are connected with human rights are myriad, and some of the most celebrated include Augusto Boal (Brazil), renowned for his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ practices; Ariel Dorfman (Argentina); Athol Fugard and Yael Farber (South Africa); Václav Havel (Czech Republic); Harold Pinter (Great Britain); Nawal El Sadaawi (Egypt); Farzaneh Aghaeipour (Iran); Marcie Rendon and Cherrie Moraga (United States); Mangai (India); Nighat Rizvi, Madeeha Gauhar and Shahid Nadeem (Pakistan); and Juliano Mer Khamis, who was murdered in 2011 outside his theatre in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, on the West Bank.
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Notes
See, for example, Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1–49.
Paul Rae points to the ‘haziness’ that surrounds common perceptions of the relationship between theatre and human rights, to its capacity to generate opinions that are strong and impassioned yet often unreflective, and to disjunctions between the work of theatre institutions and practitioners and the actual safeguarding of human rights. Paul Rae, Theatre and Human Rights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–2, 34.
See Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2012).
The relation between literature and human rights has also been subject to close scrutiny; see, for example, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012);
Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007);
Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
See James Thompson, Digging Up Stories: Applied Theatre, Performance and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005);
James Thompson, Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003);
James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
James Thompson, Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour, eds., Performance in Place of War (London: Seagull, 2009);
Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, eds., Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996);
Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton, eds., Applied Theatre: International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice (Bristol: Intellect, 2009);
Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston, eds., The Applied Theatre Reader (London: Routledge, 2008).
D. Soyini Madison, Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224.
Hannah Arendt, ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the Ends of the Rights of Man,’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism, revised edn (New York: Schocken, 2004), 376–7.
On Arendt and human rights, see Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999);
Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos 2 & 3 (2004): 297–310;
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Against Human Rights,’ New Left Review 34 (2005): 115–31.
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 133.
Recent examples include James Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
Jonathan C. Friedman, Speaking the Unspeakable: Essays on Sexuality, Gender, and Holocaust Survivor Memory (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002);
Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions, revised edn (New York: Routledge, 2011);
Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014);
Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 12.
See William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 31, 46, 54;
Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 106. On apophasis, see
William Franke, What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, 2 vols (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
Adorno, ‘Messages in a Bottle,’ trans. Edmund Jephcott, New Left Review 200 (1993): 6. The original reads: ‘Was die Nazis den Juden antaten, war unsagbar: die Sprachen hatten kein Wort dafür […].’
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 288.
Vivian M. Patraka, ‘Spectacles of Suffering: Performing Presence, Absence, and Historical Memory at US Holocaust Museums,’ in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 89–90.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), trans. C. K. Ogden (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 188–9;
Jacques Derrida, May 1979, cited in Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens, ed. Elizabeth Weber (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 9;
Jacques Derrida, Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34;
Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 36.
A few years previously, the writer and concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol published essays reflecting on the literary modes appropriate for Holocaust testimonies. See Jean Cayrol, Oeuvre lazaréenne (Paris: Seuil, 2007).
Robert Antelme, The Human Race (first French edition 1947), trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1992), 288–9.
Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xiii–xv.
See Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
See Michael Ignatieff, American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), 6–7.
Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011).
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© 2015 Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin
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Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (2015). Introduction: Theatre and the Rise of Human Rights. In: Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (eds) Theatre and Human Rights after 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362308_1
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