Call for vol.17, no. 35 - literature, self-reports and human rights

Call for vol. 17, no. 35 - Submission deadline: 01/12/2024 a 30/04/2025
Publication: October 2025

THEME - Literature, self-reports and human rights
Guest Editors: Anna Klobucka (U. MASS – DARTMOUTH) and Tatiana Pequeno (UFF)

What are the limits and relationships between literature and human rights in the context of Portuguese, Angolan, Guinean, Cape Verdean, Mozambican or San Tomean literary production? How does literature engender and mediate conflicts and differences between the self and the other? In Giving an Account of Oneself: A Critique of Ethical Violence, the US philosopher Judith Butler draws on Nietzsche to consider that the account of the self is usually elaborated in response to being interpellated by an other. When one is implicated by the other's call - affirmative, negative or simply questioning – one is urged to respond in a narrative (or lyrical) way, using one’s voice or writing as a form of defense. In the context of the impasses that threaten acts of subjectifications rooted in race, class, gender and sexuality, such reactions to interpellation often respond to a desire or need to affirm and/or maintain the survival of the subject, who creates, invents or bears witness to oneself in search of an alternative outside the perennial condition of otherness. As Butler writes, “We start to give an account only because we are interpellated as beings who are rendered accountable by a system of justice and punishment” (Butler, 2005, p. 10), which leads us to reflect on when and how literary production can attest to or mimic this need to affirm a way of life, generally shaped by race, sex, class and/or gender, as noted above. This issue of Revista Abril aims to bring together articles debating, interrogating and amplifying literary works that operate as accounts of oneself. It also welcomes manuscripts that problematize literary negotiations of the self in relation to the O/other, as well as practices of mediation - often imbued with power and violence and still far removed from an ethics of alterity - between the self and the O/other.

Keywords: The o/ Other; otherness, political violence; literature and human rights; interpellation; narratives