Drawing (Upon) Human Rights: Reading the Illustrated Version of the UDHR

This essay examines the illustrated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The use of stick-figures, it argues, is a verbal-visual discourse that performs the human subject as an anonymous yet identifiably human person. Emphasising the constructed nature of the human, the combination of text and image functions as an instance of ‗expository discourse‘. In the second section of the essay I propose that the UDHR‘s illustrated version uses the aesthetics of ‗figurative realism‘ wherein the representation of the human person as a stick means that we see a figure who stands in for the person. It concludes by arguing that these minimalist representations signal the UDHR‘s foundational nature rather than its simplicity. The UDHR‘s reliance on the drawn line forces attention to the process, the mechanics by which we make human persons, or unmake them

How to Include Artificial Bodies as Citizens

This essay ponders on the thorny issue of including artificial beings under the category of "citizen." The increasing humanization of the artificial being, it suggests, prevents us from seeing and treating the machine as a being. But if the humanoid robot performs all the functions of a human being, and acquires cultural traits such as emotional intelligence, rational thinking, or altruism, then on what grounds do we deny it the same status as a human person? Conversely, as more and more humans are cyborged, through transplants, implants, and prostheses, resulting in an erasure of their "core" humanity, then what is the difference between such a cyborged human with human rights and an artificial being

Brand Postcolonial. ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global

This book studies the making of the postcolonial author and text as a brand. It examines specific themes, wherein the postcolonial text acquires global visibility, even determining the nature of global debates: the authenticity of representing ‘native’ cultures, subalternity, indigeneity, and humanism. It studies the circulation of the postcolonial as literary-ethnic chic and the author as a globally mobile celebrity

Biopower, Biopolitics and Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading the Covid Chronicles Comics

This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable

Helff, Sissy & Stefanie Michels (Eds.). Global Photographies: Memory, History, Archives. Transcript Verlag, 2018.

Book review

The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

This essay argues that Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) presents an interracial sublime in the form of the dissolution of the European home/family. Dacre, I suggest, traces this dissolution to the European woman’s assertion of agency by stepping outside spatial, familial, racial and sexual boundaries. In the first section it examines the crisis of European domesticity where the family and the parent/s fail in their responsibilities toward the children. In section two I suggest that within the dissolving home/family we see the European woman, Victoria, subverting further the dissolution. The arrival of the Moor within the house compounds the blurring of hierarchies and ordering. In the final section I trace the features of the interracial sublime. I conclude by proposing that Dacre’s interracial sublime serves the purpose of demonstrating the permeability of European borders - a permeability that wreaks disaster. Dacre’s tale therefore ultimately functions as a caution against the woman’s emancipated and agential actions

The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India

This essay discusses the use of aesthetics in poetry from Northeast India. It detects the aesthetic of the picturesque and demonstrates how the aesthetic serves particular political purposes. Moving from a discussion of the “natural” picturesque where variety and harmony in the landscape suggest pleasure and beauty, the poetry turns to an aesthetic of suffering where civic- and ruin-picturesques map the transformation and degeneration of lands, the corruption of people and the collapse of harmonious identities. This shift within the aesthetic marks the savage/d picturesque and encodes the politics of the region