Life Writing, Human Rights, and the Humanities

Workshop G: seminar room P110 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Sabine N. Meyer, Peter Schneck (Osnabrück)

 

1. Sabine N. Meyer (Osnabrück), Opening Statement—"(W)Righting Lives"

2. Katja Kurz (JGU Mainz), "Human Rights and the Aesthetics of Collaborative Life Writing"

3. Johannes Völz (Frankfurt am Main), "The Fugitive Slave as Model Citizen: Collective Insecurity and Human Rights in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents"

4. Kerstin Knopf, (Greifswald und Rostock), "'This place had a stillness to it like some kind of bizarre death row' – Human Rights and Incarceration in American Women's Prison Literature"

5. Christina Gerken (Indiana University South Bend), "The DREAMers: Narratives of Deservingness in Pro-Immigrant Activism in the 21st Century"

6. Peter Schneck, (Osnabrück), Closing Statement—"Legal Lives: The Autobiography of Law"

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Contact:

Katja Kurz, M.A.
kurzka@uni-mainz.de

Johannes Völz
voelz@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Kerstin Knopf
knopf@uni-greifswald.de

Christina Gerken
cgerken@iusb.edu

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The opening lines of Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004), draw a direct connection between law, human rights, and life writing:
The post-Cold War decade of the 1990s has been labeled the decade of human rights […]. Not incidentally, it has also been described as the decade of life narratives […]. Many of these life narratives tell of human rights violations. Victims of abuse around the world have testified to their experience in an outpouring of oral and written narratives. […] [Through these narratives people] begin to voice, recognize, and bear witness to a diversity of values, experiences, and ways of imagining a just social world and of responding to injustice, inequality, and human suffering. Indeed, over the last twenty years, life narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. (1)

Life narratives and (human) rights campaigns have increasingly and conspicuously converged over the past decades. On the one hand, life writing is used by legally disadvantaged groups – be they defined along the lines of ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality, disability, etc. – in order to demonstrate the lack of, and need for, laws preventing the injustices of which they complain. If rights legislation exists, life narratives may plead for its stricter enforcement or an alleviation of legal irregularities. They might, by contrast, also negotiate the ways their authors have benefited from the laws in question. On the other hand, of course, life writing is also often used to confirm existing legal master narratives and discourses, especially in (post-)colonial contexts. Irrespective of the writers' perspectives, the law often functions as the primary context in which life narratives emerge, that is, the social space, in which these narratives are shaped, is saturated with the language of law – life writing thus emerges at the convergence of legal and literary imagination and rhetoric.

The peculiar complexity of the role and function of life writing within the larger global context of human rights advocacy also presents a challenge to the humanities, in general, and literary studies, in particular. While they may claim evidentiary value and veracity as documents of suffering and acts of true testimony and witnessing, life narratives at the same time more often than not employ highly effective rhetorics of empathy and engagement that aim at affective identification – thus constantly oscillating between forms of objective observation and rational argument on the one hand, and emotional arousal and persuasion on the other – that is, between stating facts about human rights and staging fictions of human rights.

This workshop seeks to explore the multi-dimensional, multi-directional, and ambivalent relations between life narratives, literature, and human rights. It therefore invites all kinds of papers exploring the synergies between law and life writing from a variety of angles and historical perspectives, encompassing, but not limited to, slave narratives, indigenous life writing, testimonies, disability memoirs, war memoirs, etc.