Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature

by Wu, Yenna; Livescu, Simona; Scott, Ramsey; Slyomovics, Susan; Stefano, Eugenio Di; Taleghani, R Shareah; Williams, Philip F.

• ISBN13: 9780739167410
• ISBN10: 0739167413
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-16
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

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 cross-cultural 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 U.S. 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 well-known: 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 self-making and resistance, individual and collective memory, denial and conversion, catharsis and redemption, and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma. Topics al

Author Biography

Yenna Wu is a distinguished teaching professor at the University of California, Riverside. Simona Livescu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Reviving Muted Voices: Rhizomatous Forces in Political Prison Literature	p. 17
Surviving Traumatic Captivity, Arriving at Wisdom: An Aesthetics of Resistance in Chinese Prison Camp Memoir	p. 47
The Argument from Silence: Morocco's Truth Commission and Women Political Prisoners	p. 87
The Persistence of Spectacle in PRC Modes of Punishing Criminality and Deviance	p. 107
The Cocoons of Language: Torture, Voice, Event	p. 117
A Primer for the Politics and Literature of Resistance: Apparitional Subjectivity in The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21	p. 139
Remembering Pain in Uruguay: What Memories Mean in Carlos Liscano's Truck of Fools	p. 163
Deviating from the Norm?: Two Easts Testify to a Prison Aesthetics of Happiness	p. 185
Appendix: Cup Poems	p. 207
Index	p. 209
About the Contributors	p. 215
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.