Performing Human Rights

Book excerpt: The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting "performance" as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices--such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived--this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.