Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Global Perspectives by Becker, Florian N., Paola S. Hernández, and Brenda Werth (review)

Abstract

Becker, Florian N., Paola S. Hernandez, and Brenda Werth, eds. 2013. Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Global Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $85.00 hc. 326 pp.Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater might seem prematurely retrospective as we start second decade of this century, but timing is fitting for scholarship that works in interventionist spirit of its subjects. The links that this essay collection makes between theater and are well framed in its introduction. Here editors propose a broader connection of to culture and to imagination, arguing 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). They then develop this assertion through a more specific discussion of role of theatrical imagination and of humanist ethics in formation of a critical public sphere.The book's foreword promises that it will illuminat[e] relation of theater practice and this still-emerging modality of rights, in which to participatory citizenship adhere to personas rather than national territories (xii). Illumination is an apt term not only for essays in Imagining Human Rights, but also with respect to theatrical practices that they analyze, for these essays take up often-obscured subjects and mechanisms of violations and make them visible to their audiences. The image of illumination in foreword anticipates editors' emphasis on Enlightenment roots of as a phrase and concept. Their introduction traces invention of concept of to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment concepts of individual identity and communal values. The editors locate point of contact between theater and in Enlightenment's philosophies of individual and of communal responsibility and in its concurrent notions of theatrical imagination and identification. They argue that what makes theater and performance distinct from other imaginative forms is that the representations [that theatrical performances] produce arise through shared acts of imagination about actually present bodies (4). Embodiment and representation of pain and trauma form a core preoccupation of book, many of essays concern themselves with demonstrating potential and limits of that 'liveness' and of dimensionality of theater in its impact on audiences.Imagining Human Rights poses several crucial questions at outset: How should or do we define and frame rights? How might 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 rights? In posing and responding to these questions, book implicitly answers Sophia McLennen's call for a public critical dialogue about how comparative imagination plays an essential role not only in considerations of political power and representational practices but also in very ways that we understand agency, democracy, civic responsibility, and rights (17). Her editorial introduction to a 2007 issue of Comparative Literature and Culture on relationships between humanities and activism stressed urgent need to bridge divide between humanities scholarship and policy and practice. McLennen's work goes unmentioned in Imagining Human Rights, which is a pity, as this anthology would benefit greatly from building more explicitly on her investigations of relationships between aesthetics, ethics, and (particularly in her work on Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman).Yet there is much to celebrate in this eclectic and deeply informative collection. …