Crooked lines: utopia, human rights and South Asian women’s writing and agency

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Abstract

My article focuses on the relationship between human rights and utopia with
special focus on South Asia and women’s writing and agency. Utopia offers
possibilities to capture, in writing and practice, the impossible good place.
Utopia has the dimension of the anticipatory consciousness, but also the impulse
to narrativise that not-yet. Human rights too have a dual impulse of a strong
drive to articulate a desired set of norms, while knowing that their actualisation is
partly elusive. I examine in this article the oeuvre of South Asian women writers
who were also actors from civil society, important in realising utopia in the
domain of international law. I argue that feminist rights activism has an enriching
critically utopian dimension; that the ‘crooked’ bildungsroman, with utopian and
dystopian dimensions, creatively imagines vernacularised human rights; and that
contemporary speculative fiction emanating partly from South Asia enriches
human rights discourse in edgy, intriguing ways.
Keywords: speculative fiction, Hansa Mehta, utopia, dystopia, human rights,
South Asia
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)103-122
Number of pages20
JournalAustralian Journal of Human Rights
Volume22
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Keywords

  • speculative fiction
  • human rights
  • Hansa Mehta
  • utopia
  • dystopia
  • South Asia

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