Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Global Perspectives by Becker, Florian N., Paola S. Hernández, and Brenda Werth (review)

Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater might seem prematurely retrospective as we start the second decade of this century, but the timing is fitting for scholarship that works in the interventionist spirit of its subjects. The links that this essay collection makes between theater and human rights are well framed in its introduction. Here the editors propose a broader connection of human rights to culture and to the imagination, arguing that “human rights—both as a field of interrelated and often competing philosophical conceptions and as a network of actually existing social and legal practices and institutions—depend at every turn on acts of imagination”(3). They then develop this assertion through a more specific discussion of the role of the theatrical imagination and of humanist ethics in the formation of a critical public sphere.

The book’s foreword promises that it will “illuminat[e] the relation of theater practice and this still-emerging modality of human rights, in which rights to participatory citizenship adhere to personas rather than national territories” (xii). Illumination is an apt term not only for the essays in Imagining Human Rights, but also with respect to the theatrical practices that they analyze, for these essays take up often-obscured subjects and mechanisms of human rights violations and make them visible to their audiences. The image of illumination in the foreword anticipates the editors’ emphasis on the Enlightenment roots of human rights as a phrase and concept. Their introduction traces the invention of the concept of human rights to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment concepts of individual identity and communal values. The editors locate the “point of contact” between theater and human rights in the Enlightenment’s philosophies of individual rights and of communal responsibility and in its concurrent notions of theatrical imagination and identification. They argue that what makes theater and performance distinct from other imaginative forms is that “the representations [that theatrical performances] produce arise through shared acts of imagination about actually present human bodies” (4). Embodiment and the representation of pain and trauma form a core preoccupation of the book, many of the essays concern themselves with demonstrating the potential and the limits of that ‘liveness’ and of the dimensionality of theater in its impact on audiences.

Imagining Human Rights poses several crucial questions at the outset: How should or do we define and frame human rights? How might human rights be linked to or distinguished from other issues of social and political justice? And what can or should we expect theater or performance to do for human rights? In posing and responding to these questions, the book implicitly answers Sophia McLennen’s call for a public critical dialogue about how the “comparative imagination plays an essential role not only in considerations of political power and representational practices but also in the very ways that we understand agency, democracy, civic responsibility, and human rights” (17). Her editorial introduction to a 2007 issue of Comparative Literature and Culture on the relationships between the humanities and human rights activism stressed the urgent need to bridge the divide between humanities scholarship and human rights policy and practice. McLennen’s work goes unmentioned in Imagining Human Rights, which is a pity, as this anthology would benefit greatly from building more explicitly on her investigations of the relationships between aesthetics, ethics, and human rights (particularly in her work on Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman).

Yet there is much to celebrate in this eclectic and deeply informative collection. Its introductory focus on European humanism belies the breadth of the essays, which address theatrical productions or performance in the extra-theatrical sense on nearly every continent (although many of the contributors are based in the United States). These essays provide the reader with diverse and productively dissonant readings of the relationships between human rights and theater. In...