Spectacular Rhetorics

Spectacular Rhetoricsis a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating the criticism of visual culture and the interpretation of written texts, Wendy Hesford scrutinizes #x1C;spectacular rhetoric,#x1D; the use of visual images and imagery to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in particular cultural artifacts, primarily documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, the works she analyzes address a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, Hesford demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and ultimately, to govern, human rights subjects.