(Necro)politics, human rights and literature: escrevivências of other subjectivities towards new imaginaries

Abstract

Everything is political. Mobilized by the understanding of this statement, the present article originates. Observing the modus operandi of human rights in contemporary societies some contradictions can be revealed as those rights are intimately involved in dynamics that permeate them – and even surpass them. Those dynamics includes oppressions and silencing of subaltern voices, power relations, decision-making processes, recognition – and maintenance- of one's own condition as a subject of rights. These processes demonstrates the necessary entanglement between human rights and politics. In this sense, the struggles that constitutes human rights, must consider these power relations, acknowledge oppressions and listen to marginalized people voices, as they are tellers of their own stories. In this scenario, I argue that the concept of escrevivências, created by Conceição Evaristo is a literary tool that relates to standpoint theory, necropolitics denunciations and allows us a critic and an insurgent perspective of getting closer to social justice through human rights practices. Therefore, the methodological path traced here has the contribution of sociological studies and critical theory of human rights in order to surpass its legalist perspective and achieve an interdisciplinary one. For the theoretical path aforementioned, this is an arte-based research in the sense that it suggests that the work of art here analysed is critical in achieving self and other knowledge. It is concluded that the use of escrevivências as a possible methodological concept, leads us to a more critical and inclusive academic writing as it comes closer to real life of marginalized people, and to the comprehending of their subjectivities that are outside the standard one. That should be the register of human rights, the way people actually live.