Human Rights And The Arts

This book highlights the use of art in human rights, specifically within Africa. It advances an innovative pattern of thinking that explores the intersection between art and human rights law. In recent years, art has become an important tool for engagement on several human rights issues. In view of its potency, and yet potential to be a danger when misused, this book seeks to articulate the use of arts in the human rights discourse in its different forms. Chapters cover how music, photography, literature, photojournalism, soap opera, commemorations, sculpting and theatre can be used as an expression of human rights. This book demonstrates how arts have become a formidable expression of thoughts and a means of articulating reality in a form that simplifies truth and congregates resolve to advance change.

Human Rights and the Arts: Perspectives on Global Asia approaches human rights issues from the perspective of artists and writers in global Asia. By focusing on the interventions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and dramatists, the book moves toward a new understanding of human rights that shifts the discussion of contexts and subjects away from the binaries of cultural relativism and political sovereignty. From Ai Wei Wei and Michael Ondaatje, to Umar Kayam, Saryang Kim, Lia Zixin, and Noor Zaheer, among others, this volume takes its lead from global Asian artists, powerfully re-orienting thinking about human rights subjects and contexts to include the physical, spiritual, social, ecological, cultural, and the transnational. Looking at a range of work from Tibet, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Macau as well as Asian diasporic communities, this book puts forward an understanding of global Asia that underscores “Asia” as a global site. It also highlights the continuing importance of nation-states and specific geographical entities, while stressing the ways that the human rights subject breaks out of these boundaries.

Fernando J. Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. Prior to this, key literary and artistic projects articulated Latin American modernity by attempting to address and supplement the state’s inability to embody and enact justice. Rosenberg argues that since the topics of emancipation, identity, and revolution no longer define social concerns, Latin American artistic production is now situated at a point where the logic and conditions of marketization intersect with the notion of rights through which subjects define themselves politically. Rosenberg grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political refoundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries). In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

For more than 150 years, thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to residential schools across Canada. Artist Carey Newman created the Witness Blanket to make sure that history is never forgotten. The Blanket is a living work of art—a collection of hundreds of objects from those schools. It includes everything from photos, bricks, hockey skates, graduation certificates, dolls and piano keys to braids of hair. Behind every piece is a story. And behind every story is a residential school Survivor, including Carey's father. This book is a collection of truths about what happened at those schools, but it's also a beacon of hope and a step on the journey toward reconciliation.

This timely book builds bridges between the notions of art and aesthetics, human rights, universality, and dignity. It explores a world in which art and justice enter a discussion to answer questions such as: can art translate the human experience? How does humanity link individuality and community building? How do human beings define and look for their identity? The fields of human rights and art are brought together in order to open the discussion and contribute to the promotion and protection of human rights.

Featuring international contributions from leading and emerging scholars, this innovative Research Handbook presents a panoramic view of how law sees visual art, and how visual art sees law. It resists the conventional approach to art and law as inherently dissonant – one a discipline preoccupied with rationality, certainty and objectivity; the other a creative enterprise ensconced in the imaginary and inviting multiple, unique and subjective interpretations. Blending these two distinct disciplines, this unique Research Handbook bridges the gap between art and law.

Talks on Human Rights & the Arts 2: The Lawlessness of Rights is the second volume of talks by activists, scholars, and artists from around the globe, presented at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA). In their own words and in conversation with others, they make evident the richness and range of contemporary practices at the intersection of human rights and the arts.