Human Rights, Culture, and Literature. An Example in the Narrative of Latin American Social Criticism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15359/rldh.28-2.4Keywords:
human rights, public sphere, culture, Latin American literature, narrative of social criticism, nation-stateAbstract
Following the theoretical proposal of Amartya Sen to consider human rights as demands of an ethical nature, capable of articulating a particular type of moral reciprocity, the article proposes to deepen the idea of human rights as cultural artifacts inseparable from the public sphere and from their logic of creation and legitimization of political and social identities. To do this, the paper adopts the advances of a recent field of research exploring the relation between literature and human rights, and discusses their possibilities for the case of Latin American literature. Through the analysis of four novels, belonging to the social criticism narrative in the middle of the twentieth century, the article shows the way in which the literary discourse has been involved in the promotion and expansion of human rights, and in the defense of new subjects of rights. When studying the way in which these fictions build arguments in favor of the expansion of the political space and of a more equitable reorganization of the national community, the article dares to contribute to a better understanding of both the way in which human rights are integrated and consolidated in other discourses, and the key role that literature claimed to have in the construction of a democratic ethics in the Latin American national states.References
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