This panel seeks to engender a conversation on the representation of Human Rights across genres. The normative aspirations of the Human Rights discourse mandate a reckoning with the ‘visibility’ of the subject and an acknowledgement of their subjecthood. Consequently, representations (both literary and otherwise) centered around such issues have historically focused on visibilising the vulnerable (non)subject. However, in recent years we have seen a more intimate and nuanced interaction with the concept of in/visibility which goes beyond the simplistic logic of a progressive movement from the one to the other.

The panel thus situates itself within a scholarly tradition that examines the symbiotic relationship between human rights discourses and literary theory. Scholars such as James Dawes, Joseph Slaughter, and Elizabeth Anker have significantly contributed to this discourse by delineating the intricate intersections of literary forms and human rights praxis. While Anker's scholarly inquiry delves into the affective terrain of eighteenth-century novels, elucidating the emergence of sentimentality as a pivotal mechanism for galvanizing humanitarian movements, Dawes and Slaughter pivot their analyses towards the inherent subject formation latent within both the novelistic genre and human rights discourse. Dawes's seminal conceptualization of the "American Human Rights Novel" delineates a distinct literary category that serves as a crucible for probing issues of justice, ethics, and human dignity. Slaughter scrutinizes the Bildungsroman as a narrative trajectory wherein protagonists traverse from states of subjection to self-regulation, mirroring the progressive ethos intrinsic to both literary Bildungsroman and the normative trajectories of human rights law.

Drawing from such works, and contending with several other theorizations of spectrality (Derrida, Trouillot, Mbembe, Hartman and Gordon), this panel broadens this interrogation into questions of genre to investigate the dialectical tension between visibility and invisibility (and legibility and illegibility) within narratives of Human Rights, unsettling conventional modalities of subjectivity, agency and historiography.

***

I open the panel discussion with an analysis of contemporary Postcolonial Human Rights novels to examine how global Necropolitical powers take on peculiar forms, the narrativization of which leads to a breakdown of what we traditionally understand as the form of the novel. I suggest that it is through these breakdowns that meaning (or a semblance of it) ultimately emerges. To this end, I look at how Human Rights novels emerging at the cusp of the century exhibit a generic departure from the earlier novels not just in their decentering (via invisibilization) of embodied subjectivities, but also in suggesting a departure from the conventional modes of magic/realism in doing so, articulating instead, a spectral reality which straddles the two.

Next, Arielle Stambler broadens the conversation with her analysis of narratives depicting the experiences of economic refugees in postcolonial literatures shedding light on the multifaceted dimensions of human rights struggles within global contexts. Through close textual analysis, she illuminates how literary texts serve as sites of resistance and resilience by foregrounding the agency and subjectivity of economic refugees in narratives that disrupt hegemonic narratives of victimhood and offer alternative frameworks for understanding the structural inequities underpinning global systems of oppression. Arielle brings two invisibilities together—liberal human rights’ erasure of economic violence and the overlooked economic refugee narrative—to ask how the study of human rights and literature might encompass questions of transnational, structural harm.

Furthering the conversation to move beyond literary representations, Melissa S Karp’s exploration of atmospheric histories within South Korean memorial museums offers an illustration of the ways in which physical spaces are utilized to evoke affective responses and prompt critical reflection on historical invisibilities. By immersing visitors in darkened spaces, ghostly interactions, and reflective surfaces, these memorial museums invite audiences to imaginatively inhabit the lived experiences of those who endured mass tragedies, thereby challenging conventional modes of historical remembrance and fostering a deeper engagement with the specter of past violence. Melissa’s work questions how these experiential exhibits present a normative model for institutional memory policies propagated by and through human rights ideology.

Finally, Ryan Rodriguez closes the discussion with a meticulous examination of in/visibilities as historical phenomena within literary and cinematic texts. His work offers insight into the complexities of in/visibility in narratives of oppression and resistance, contributing to a broader understanding of how storytelling shapes our apprehension of historical memory and collective identity. Rooted in the concept of historical narrative as a ‘composite of silences’, his comparative analysis elucidates the failure of photographic and sonic invisibility against the formidable challenge posed by linguistic erasure. Ryan’s work considers linguistic erasure as a potent form of violence, manifest in the dehumanization of individuals made illegible within a genocidal procedure.