Sophia McClennen and Joseph Slaughter in “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms” warn: “Human rights are under threat everywhere, especially when the language of human rights is used to justify their violation” (Comparative Literature Studies 2009). They argue that through double-speak the states exercise violence to advance their jingoist agenda in the name of protecting the rights of children and women, as George Bush did while invading Afghanistan in 2001. James Dawes complements this foregoing view in his “Human Rights in Literary Studies” when he posits that aesthetics captures human rights because both these categories deal with “human dignity” (Human Rights Quarterly 2009). In his The Novel of Human Rights (2016) Dawes brings the American novel in tension with the ethical pressures on the novelists to engage civil rights in literary narratives. In their recent edited book Technologies of Human Rights Representation (2022), Moore and Dawes connect the question of human rights with representation: “Human rights as representation, then, ask questions like these: How do new technologies not only change the modes available to us to shape and disseminate information but also set the parameters for what counts as information, what counts as representable?” This volume demands that the peripheral representations of human rights be acknowledged, and information therein be recognized as valid testimony to the gross rights violations of minorities, vulnerable, and peripheral populations.

Drawing on the above scholarship, this panel engages with the unconventional and peripheral literary and cultural expressions of rights violations and resistance against them. Nimisha Sinha opens the panel with her theoretical paper on the rights of the climate refugee who is legally unrecognized, socio-politically vulnerable, and ecologically displaced. She argues that a climate refugee is a visual category as they are made visible and concealed through various legal and cultural representational technologies. This paper posits new ways of witnessing and spectatorship which urge us to reflect on the rights of climate refugees.

Slater Lee turns her attention to the possibility of resistance against infringemnt of rights. She explores the tension and paradox inherent in the relationship between technology and human rights by focusing on the complex dynamics of cultural expressions of protest and spoken words of poetry. She considers how social media allows global visual protest art and spoken word poetry to transcend and extend the moment and space of the protest with a technological afterlife. She argues that the voices of these artists and spoken word poets adopt clever plays of coded language, including satire, humor, irony, and neologisms that offer compelling expression to human experiences and struggles in spaces at risk of compromise by technological surveillance. The sharing of such work via social media employs a subversive yet powerful use of technology to tell the stories of human rights.

While the above two papers delve into the visual and verbal content, Muhammad Waqar Azeem dissects the form of the representations of technology-driven rights violations. He explores interplay between literary/cultural forms and social forms, and develops a contrapuntal framework to study human rights through literature and culture. Using Caroline Levine’s influential study Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), he argues that literary forms are part of the broader networks that surround us. Referring to Gregoire Chamayou’s argument that after 9/11 the US launched a “network-centric warfare” that exploited “Social Network Analysis” through drone-based surveillance of the racialized other (A Theory of the Drone, 2015), this paper proposes a counter-network of cultural and literary forms, the structures capable of intervening into our worldview, and our conceptualization of human rights.

Connecting the post-9/11 imperial violence indicated above with its pre-9/11 history, Lopamudra Basu offers a comparative analysis of the phenomenon of state surveillance and impingement of human rights through a close reading of scenes from Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night. She argues that we tend to focus most on surveillance mechanisms that have been unleashed since the development of the internet in the 1990s and deployment of drones during the War on Terror. However, the violation of civil rights of profiled minorities predates the development of internet and drone technologies and can be witnessed in representations of the Sri Lankan Civil War. She examines the depiction of state sanctioned violence on Tamil minorities in Sri Lanka and the profiling and arbitrary detention of Sri Lankan youth as a precedent of the trend of racial profiling and detention of Muslim, Arab, and other brown youth in the aftermath of 9/11 in the US.