HUMAN RIGHTS SUFFERING AESTHPB

This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature while probing the intersections of suffering politics and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives it demonstrates how literary insight enhances the study of human rights Covering varied geographical and geopolitical regions this collection encourages comparative analyses and crosscultural understanding Seeking to interrogate linguistic structural and cultural constructions of the political prison experience it highlights the literary aspects without losing sight of the political and the theoretical The contributors cross various disciplinary boundaries and adopt different interpretive perspectives in analyzing prison narratives especially memoirs from such diverse countries as China Egypt Morocco Syria Romania Russia Uruguay and the US The volume emphasizes the literary works produced since the second half of the twentieth century particularly since the political seismic shift in 1989 The authors treated range from the canonical to the less wellknown Nawal El Saadawi Varlam Shalamov Zhang Xianliang Cong Weixi Wumingshi Carlos Liscano Fatna El Bouih Nabil Sulayman Faraj Bayraqdar Hasiba Abdalrahman Tahar Ben Jelloun Nicolae Steinhardt Irina Ratushinskaya etc Critical issues investigated include how the writers represent their sufferings experiences and emotions during incarceration their strategies of survival and how political prison literature can reveal hidden violations of human rights while resisting official discourse and serving other functions in society Examining the commonalities and differences in global experiences of imprisonment the eight chapters engage with the aesthetics of selfmaking and resistance individual and collective memory denial and conversion catharsis and redemption and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma Topics also include the poli