[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Politics of Representation: Human Rights, Witnessing, and Transnational Readership

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

	*CFP: Politics of Representation: Human Rights, Witnessing, and
Transnational Readership(11/1/06; ACLA, 4/19/07-4/22/07)*
*Location:* 	Mexico
<http://www.h-net.org/announce/geography.cgi?geography=Mexico>

	

	

	

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting April 19-22,
2007 in Puebla, Mexico

The Politics of Representation: Human Rights Violations, Witnessing, and
Transnational Readership

In the discussion of human rights violations, the emphasis on violence
and repression often portrays the violated as victims needing to be
rescued by the “west” or by the rich “north.” Scholars and members of
violated communities have challenged this representation to show how
“victims” can be the site of both oppression and resistance. The drive
is toward how texts, with their transnational readership, became sites
of revitalization of the image of different victim groups as agents of
their own history. Targets of human rights violations have turned
against the elite politics of representation of human rights abuse which
have depicted the violated as mere “victims.” In a classic example, the
lower caste woman turned bandit turned Parliamentarian “Phoolan Devi”
attempted to block the release of a film about her life produced by
Channel 4 in the UK.

In light of the vehement criticism of the cultural politics of the
elite-subaltern relationship, this panel seeks to examine the politics
of representation. Instead of confining ourselves only to the text, the
panel will also examine how such representational politics inflects the
political in the material world of human rights activism. Thus papers
might also consider the influence of these texts on legal and public
opinion, as seen in the courts, political discourse, and media. In other
words, we would like to situate texts and textual traditions in the
material politics of human rights and explore how textual
representations of violence enable the disenfranchised to exert
“pressure on sign systems that uphold existing political and moral
hierarchies,” as Bishnupriya Ghosh says. Well-known examples include
such texts as I, Rigoberta Menchu and India’s Bandit Queen whose
circulation marked and influenced the real world of activism, but the
panel is open to discussions of texts from any cultural or linguistic
context.

Although we are looking forward to examining new interventions in this
topic, the following questions might also suggest possible routes of
exploration:

• How do we responsibly archive violence in postcolonial contexts so
that we do not strengthen the imperial claim that certain juvenile
nations need to be parented by others?

• How do we avoid commodifying violence for a global market thriving on
profit from texts on postcolonial violence that enhance the
self-righteous claims of the discipline of the “north”? Instead, how are
we to mobilize sensitivity and accountability in a transnational
readership that rallies against such violence? How can that readership
co-operate in acts of resistance with the disenfranchised, thus avoiding
a patronizing ideology of protection?

• Is there an ethical imperative for writers and scholars depicting and
studying violence in postcolonial contexts to trace how postcolonial
violence is generated out of cumulative structures of oppression that
place the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial in a continuum as
agents of violence?

• Can the representation of violence in Northern Ireland, indigenous
Australia, and the 9/11 and post-9/11 United States take us further than
the literal and geopolitical connotation of “post-colonial” to
re-signify the term itself?

• How does integrating the “small” voices of women in the project of
historical violence galvanize a politics of human rights representation
that makes audible the “smaller” voices of children, the aged, and the
disabled during geopolitical upheavals?

• Can historic injustice against certain communities be addressed within
the boundaries of the post-conflict nation-state, or is the only forum
for reconciling the rights of violated groups with those of the state
the transnational venue of human rights politics?

This panel will meet on two or three consecutive days (depending on the
number of papers), and presenters are strongly encouraged to plan to
attend all sessions of the panel. This is a unique conference format
that allows a small group of researchers to pursue a particular topic in
depth within the context of a larger conference.

For questions about the panel, please contact the seminar organizers:
Annedith Schneider (schneider at sabanciuniv.edu)
Basuli Deb (debbasul at msu.edu)

For more information on the conference and to submit paper proposals,
please visit the official conference website at
http://acla2007.complit.ucla.edu/.

	Annedith Schneider: schneider at sabanciuniv.edu
Basuli Deb: debbasul at msu.edu