In this open access book, contributors explore new and alternative ways of belonging in the world through critical examination of the arts, human rights, and the ethics of representation. This book argues that paradigms of becoming, self-translation, and transformation are important for understanding the shifts in the (self) representation of human rights subjects. These paradigms provide a crucial alternative to the enduring discourses of exposure, revelation, and retribution in human rights literature, which, though important, have limited the primary impulses of human rights to revealing and remembering atrocity. Chapters cover a range of genres and art forms, including novels, films, theatre, video art, site-specific memorials and monuments, and media campaigns. Concerned throughout with the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, contributors analyse works spanning a broad geographical range by authors and artists from Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Korea, Finland, Canada, Syria, Egypt, Germany, Sri Lanka, Congo, Nigeria, Tanzania, Northern Ireland, the US and the UK.

Lotta Strandberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Norway. Her research interests are human rights and literature, narrative ethics and postcolonial literature with emphasis on South Asia. She has also published on education and feminist pedagogy.

Brenda Werth is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at American University, Washington DC, USA. Her research interests are Latin American theatre and performance, memory politics, and Latin American feminist movements. Her most recent book is Fictions of the Real: Synergies Between Screen and Stage in Argentine Performance (2026).