International Institute faculty book series features human rights around the world

Celebrating the contributions that University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty bring to the study of human rights, this semester’s International Institute book series offers diverse perspectives and voices to shed light on these complex issues.

This popular and long-running book series, sponsored by UW–Madison’s Division of International Studies, the International Institute and the University Book Store, brings together avid readers and UW–Madison faculty for discussions about topics from around the world.

All the talks take place at 7 p.m. at the University Book Store in the Hilldale Mall, 702 N. Midvale Blvd., and are free and open to the public; future dates will be announced.

On Tuesday, Feb. 12, Gay Seidman of the Department of Sociology will discuss the book "Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism" (Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2007). "Beyond the Boycott" examines three campaigns (in South Africa, India and Guatemala) in which activists successfully used the threat of a consumer boycott to pressure companies to accept voluntary codes of conduct and independent monitoring of work sites. As trade and capital move across borders in growing volume and with greater speed, civil society and human rights movements are also becoming more global. Highly original and thought-provoking, "Beyond the Boycott" vividly depicts the contemporary movement to humanize globalization — its present and its possible future.

Upcoming authors include:

• V. Narayana Rao, Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, will discuss "Girls for Sale: Kanyasulkam, A Play from Colonial India" (Indiana University Press, 2007). First staged in 1892, the South Indian play "Girls for Sale (Kanyasulkam)" is considered the greatest modern work of Telugu literature and the first major drama written in an Indian language that critiqued British colonialism’s effects on Indian society. Filled with humor, biting social commentary, parody and masquerade, the plot revolves around a clever courtesan, a young widow and a very old man who wants to buy as his wife a very young girl. Rao has prepared the first idiomatic English translation, with notes and a critical essay. Itself a masterpiece of Indian literature in translation, this edition makes Apparao’s work available to new audiences.
• Robert Skloot, departments of Theatre and Drama and Jewish Studies, will discuss "Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Armenia" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). In this pioneering volume, Skloot brings together four plays — three of which are published here for the first time — that fearlessly explore the face of modern genocide. The scripts deal with the destruction of four targeted populations: Armenians, Cambodians, Bosnian Muslims and Rwandan Tutsis. Taken together, these four plays erase the boundaries of theatrical realism to present stories that probe the actions of the perpetrators and the suffering of their victims. A major artistic contribution to the study of the history and effects of genocide, this collection continues the important journey toward understanding the terror and trauma to which the modern world has so often been witness.
• Leigh Payne, Department of Political Science, will discuss "Unsettling Accounts: The Politics and Performance of Confessions by Perpetrators of Authoritarian State Violence" (Duke University Press, 2007). Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form: from blanket amnesty to conditional amnesty based on confessions to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what perpetrators say and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting and reception of their confessions; and the different ways in which the perpetrators portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.