Introduction: On Texts and Performatics

Abstract

At heart rights project for both its supporters and detractors lies problem how rights may be claimed and by whom; or in other words, question derivation discursive and institutional norms that govern legibility suffering, sufferer, and perpetrator. If, as Kate Nash argues, human rights are not just supported by culture: rights are (2009, 8; emphasis in original), then interplay between different forms rights storytelling-both juridical and cultural-becomes vital to our understanding how its norms develop and who and what they protect or exclude. The essays in this special issue are bound by their collective desire to interrogate how literary and cultural texts engage with and repertoire rights storytelling (Taylor 2003). The 'first wave' scholarship in rights and literature primarily addressed textual archive, as opposed to what Diane Taylor has called performatic: the nondiscursive realm performance where digital, and visual fields [are] separate from, though always embroiled with, discursive one so privileged by Western logocentrism (6). In other words, this initial burst scholarly interest focused on those texts (historical, literary, cinematic, etc.) that are supposedly resistant to change (19), although course their enunciations, interpretations, and effects are anything but static. Consequently, scholars focused largely on intersections law and literature; on ethics representation in contexts violations defined by their 'unspeakability'; and on role literary narrative, particularly bildungsroman form, in charting (and disrupting) growth rights and its incumbent 'person' (citizen). Working from that foundational scholarship,1 authors represented here consider how literary and cultural texts also call for closer analysis performatic texts as well as literary archive, and indeed performatic dimension archive. Whereas Taylor's groundbreaking analysis maintains a distinction between discursive archive and performatic repertoire, essays that follow in this special issue focus on entanglement those categories-in forms ranging from narrative literature and poetry to dramatic texts and performance, film and video, and other technologies perception and surveillance-in order to investigate how historical context, aesthetic representation, and staging give shape to material, embodied suffering. In these essays, archive is performative, experiential, material.In her recent essay Reading Living Archives: The Witness Literary Art, Carolyn Forche finds one dimension this dynamic exchange between literary and experiential within witness poetry. Such poetry, Forche demonstrates, constitutes an archive evidence not only through its content-which bear[s] legible trace atrocity (2012, 141)-but also through its form, in its rupture first-person and language itself, which too has been damaged by catastrophe (140). In this way Forche envisions archive as living rather than static and sees witness as a mode reading as well as writing. This practice, which requires responsibility from and faith in reader, comprises what she calls an ethical (141, 140). Given its etymological origins in Latin forensis (meaning of or before forum), term forensics refers to both presentation legal evidence and category public presentation, affording it a distinctly rhetorical, performatic, and representational significance. For Forche, poetry written in wake rights catastrophe is not written after such experiences, but in their aftermath-in languages that had also passed through-languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in line-breaks, in constellations imagery, in ruptures utterance, in silences and fissures written speech (137; emphasis in original). …