Date and Time
November 20, 2009
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Availability
Open to Stanford faculty, students, staff, and visiting scholars

The Center for the Study of the Novel is pleased to present a discussion of Professor Joseph Slaughter's new book, _Human Rights Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law_.  Prof. Slaughter (Columbia) will be in conversation with Prof. Saikat Majumdar (Stanford) and Prof. Michael Rubenstein (UC Berkeley) in the Terrace Room of the English Department (Building 460, Room 426) on Friday, November 20th, at 3:30 pm.  A reading selection from this book is available as a pdf by email request and in hard copy on the second floor of the English Department, under the grad mailboxes.

_Human Rights Inc_ is, in Simon Gikandi's words, "one of the most intense and intelligent reflections on the relation between the novel and human rights....a model of how students and scholars of literature can respond to the great humanitarian crisis of our time and transform the culture of human rights itself."

Joseph Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His many publications include articles on the narrative foundations of human rights in _Human Rights Quarterly_, "Humanitarian Reading" in _Humanitarianism and Suffering_, torture and Latin American literature in _Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature_, ethnopsychiatry, Nigerian literature, and globalization in _African Writers and Their Readers_, colonial narratives of invoice in _Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe_, city space and the national allegory in _Research in African Literatures_, human rights, multiculturalism, and the contemporary Bildungsroman in _Politics and Culture_, a short story translation of Argentine Elvira Orphée's "Descomedido" in _The Southwest Review_, as well as a co-authored article on contemporary epistolary fiction and women's rights in _Women, Gender, and Human Rights_. His essay, "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law," appeared in a special issue on human rights of PMLA (October 2006) and was honored as one of the two best articles published in the journal in 2006-7; another, "The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality," was named a winner in the Interdisciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at UCLA in 2004. He has co-edited a special issue on "Human Rights and Literary Form" of _Comparative Literature Studies_.