Special Issue of Literature: Technologies of the Human: Assembling the Subject of Rights
Due Date: 11-01-2022
Rights discourses have become a primary “technology” of the human, across the globe. That is to say, we recognize others, as human beings, through an international language of rights and the institutions and infrastructures that disseminate it, even as the actual legal and juridical protection of human rights remain profoundly uneven and limited—in the scope of their protections and of their political imaginaries. Since at least the eighteenth century, literature and other expressive cultural forms have served as resources for, at turns, imagining the human subject of rights; fortifying a universalizing discourse of the human person; or challenging, particularizing, and pluralizing the forms that the human subject takes. For this special issue of the journal Literature, we invite submissions that investigate relations between international human rights and literary and cultural production, with a particular focus on the myriad modern technologies that articulate them with one another. Technologies of the Human probes the myriad ways in which artists and writers reassemble the human, and contribute to the future forms that human rights will take. In this respect, we especially welcome submissions that consider literary and cultural traditions from the Global South as well as non-English literatures that prompt us to consider the subject of human rights in robust and heterogeneous terms.
More details and guidelines for submission can be found at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/literature/special_issues/hum_rig_lit.