This chapter considers the particular significance of theater as a genre that works at the intersection of imagination, spectacularity, and embodiment for the representation of human rights, as well as drama as a critical lens for understanding the “performance” of human rights in other public venues. Live drama can carry with it the aspects of temporal urgency, public activity, and personal embodiment on which human rights have also been centered, and documentary theater in particular holds significance in human rights discourse due to its relationship to archive, evidence, and the real. Examining three forms of documentary theater (the tribunal, the auto-biographical, and the site-specific), the chapter argues that this genre has become an essential mode for framing human rights both in its advocatory potential and in its posing of questions about the relationship of theater and documentary to truth and legitimacy.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.