Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Global Perspectives.

Link to Book

Author Names:
Paola Hernández
Florian Becker
Brenda Werth

Publisher:
Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Year:
2013

Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater argues that “human rights—both as a field of interrelated and often competing philosophical conceptions and as a network of actually existing social and legal practices and institutions—depend at every turn on acts of imagination”(3). Focusing on theatre and performance from Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this book claims  that the representations that theatrical performances produce arise through shared acts of imagination about actually present human bodies. To this end, the critical introduction, as well as the accompanied chapters, tackle key questions: How should or do we define and frame human rights? How might human rights be linked to or distinguished from other issues of social and political justice? And what can or should we expect theater or performance to do for human rights?