This book aims to show how arts perform human rights and how aesthetic engagements with human rights violations testify to art’s capacity to create alternate worlds, which with their creative modes do provide alternate semantics to the legal failures and the state’s official silence. This book shares the conviction that, after all, artistic articulations allow ethico-aesthetic considerations of “questions that are broader than the law and the institutions of the political, precisely because they are prior to law … and...

Reverse Joy looks at the role of mysticism in the perpetual protest movement at the heart of the Shi’a faith for its radical reconsideration of history and justice. Inserting oneself, flesh and faith, into the events that transpired thirteen centuries ago; the collapse of traditional understandings of time; the reversal of the roles of men and women; and joy through mourning are only some of the topics discussed in this essay. Though each one of them demands an equally elastic...