20/21 C. Colloquium: Joseph Slaughter “Hijacking Human Rights; or, History in the Passive Voice”

Event time: 
Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), LC319 See map
63 High St.
New Haven, CT 06511
(Location is wheelchair accessible)
Event description: 

Joseph Slaughter specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, and Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” was honored as one of the two best articles published in PMLA in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.

He is co-editing a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a coherent region. He is currently working on two monographs, “Pathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanities” and “New Word Orders: Intellectual Property and World Literature,” which considers the role of plagiarism, piracy, and intellectual property regimes in the globalization of the novel, as well the work the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual creations.

203-432-2233