Sponsor
English
Co-Sponsor(s)
Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI); Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI); International Comparative Studies (ICS)
Writing for Dark Times
Tuesday, October 6,
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Speaker(s): Hadji Bakara, Associate Professor Michigan
Duke English and the Franklin Humanities Institute will host a talk by Hadji Bakara, Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. Bakara will explain how writing has shaped the history and ideas of human rights. While writers have helped highlight human rights, scholars and the public mostly see literature as a way to show when human rights are broken. This means people understand human rights by noticing when they are missing.
Writers themselves thought differently. Looking at the lives and work of writers like B. Traven, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'O, Agostinho Neto, Nadine Gordimer, Archibald MacLeish, Seamus Heaney, Muriel Rukeyser, Czesław Miłosz, and Toni Morrison, Bakara shows that writers who faced the loss of human rights frequently asked questions about their own work: What is writing? Why write? What can writing do? They agreed that writing creates something new, and that making and inventing can support human rights by bringing new things into the world rather than only removing bad things. According to them, human rights are not only something we have and protect but something we create. By making this point, the writers added what critics have long thought was missing from modern ideas about human rights: a positive, creative side to human rights politics.
Professor Hadji Bakara's Bio:
Hadji Bakara is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in Comparative Literature, Modern Greek, and the Donia Center for Human Rights at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century global, Anglophone, and American literatures in their relation to histories of political violence, empire, migration, and human rights. His first book, Writing for Dark Times: A Literary History of Human Rights (University of Chicago Press 2026), centers on twentieth-century writers who were refugees, prisoners, legislators, and witnesses at the center of human rights history. He is co-editor, with Josephine McDonagh and Charlotte Sussman, of the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration (Oxford University Press 2027). His current book project is Refugee Futures, which examines the ways that refugees have come to influence the politics of time and especially the future, parts of which were published in PMLA as "Time, Sovereignty, and Refugee Writing."
Writers themselves thought differently. Looking at the lives and work of writers like B. Traven, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'O, Agostinho Neto, Nadine Gordimer, Archibald MacLeish, Seamus Heaney, Muriel Rukeyser, Czesław Miłosz, and Toni Morrison, Bakara shows that writers who faced the loss of human rights frequently asked questions about their own work: What is writing? Why write? What can writing do? They agreed that writing creates something new, and that making and inventing can support human rights by bringing new things into the world rather than only removing bad things. According to them, human rights are not only something we have and protect but something we create. By making this point, the writers added what critics have long thought was missing from modern ideas about human rights: a positive, creative side to human rights politics.
Professor Hadji Bakara's Bio:
Hadji Bakara is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in Comparative Literature, Modern Greek, and the Donia Center for Human Rights at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century global, Anglophone, and American literatures in their relation to histories of political violence, empire, migration, and human rights. His first book, Writing for Dark Times: A Literary History of Human Rights (University of Chicago Press 2026), centers on twentieth-century writers who were refugees, prisoners, legislators, and witnesses at the center of human rights history. He is co-editor, with Josephine McDonagh and Charlotte Sussman, of the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration (Oxford University Press 2027). His current book project is Refugee Futures, which examines the ways that refugees have come to influence the politics of time and especially the future, parts of which were published in PMLA as "Time, Sovereignty, and Refugee Writing."
