Joseph R. Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, human rights, and narrative approaches to international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His book Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, won the René Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory. He has co-edited a volume of essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and African literatures and culture entitled The Global South Atlantic (2017), and is currently finishing two books: New…

Adam Domby argues that the Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. This was not only an insidious goal, but was founded on falsehoods, including those peddled by one of Duke’s primary early benefactors, Julian Carr. As a graduate student, he resurfaced from archives the speech Julian Carr delivered at the inauguration of UNC-Chapel…

Carolyn Forché’s timely book, “What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” (Penguin Press, 2019), is the winner of the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. “What You Have Heard is True” is an account of a poet’s engagement with a country going through violent change, in part funded and propelled by U.S. foreign policy. Forché first visited El Salvador in the 1970s, brought there by an enigmatic stranger who…

This documentary follows the personal journeys of three former ‘comfort women’ who were among the 200,000 girls and young women kidnapped and forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Some 70 years after their imprisonment in so-called ‘comfort stations,’ the three ‘grandmothers’- Grandma Gil in South Korea, Grandma Cao in China, and Grandma Adela in the Philippines – face their twilight years in fading health. After decades of living in silence and shame…