Lyndsey Stonebridge, Elleke Boehmer, and Ankhi Mukherjee

The activity of reading gives us powerful ways of posing and exploring important questions about human rights, representation and justice today. Reading invites us to think together.

In this talk to the Oxford Postcolonial Writing and Theory seminar on 4 May 2021, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers readings from three texts to think about the different timelines—a time of exile, a moment of devastation, a time of waiting without end—that narrative and poetry invite us into. 

Looking at Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946, trans. Willard R. Trask, 1953), Mahmood Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut, 1982 (1986, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi, 1995), and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018, trans. Omid Tofighian, 2019), she argues that writing can help us to relate better to other human life-times.

Lyndsey was speaking about her 2020 collection of essays Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (Oxford UP) in which she makes the case for a renewed collaboration between the work of writing and the politics of human rights.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her other recent books include: Placeless People: Rights, Writing, and Refugees (OUP, 2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize, 2019, and The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). She is currently writing a book, Thinking with Hannah Arendt, which will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2022.

Cite this: “Lyndsey Stonebridge: ‘The Times of Rights and Writing’.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-stonebridge-times-of-rights-and-writing. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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