“The book I have been waiting for. Combining deep archival research with an extraordinary literary historical range, Bakara returns the study of human rights and writing to the question posed by Orwell in his dark times: ‘Why do I write?’ The result is both an urgent and deeply scholarly study that will reset debate in the field. Necessary, thoughtful, and most definitely a book for our times.”

Lyndsey Stonebridge, University of Birmingham

“A powerful rethinking of the relationship between literature and human rights, one that emphasizes writing as a creative, material act bridging individual and collective life. Bakara’s focus on the struggle for human rights in the ‘dark times’ of the twentieth century holds profound relevance for thinkers and writers today.”

Amanda Anderson, Brown University

“There are many histories of human rights, and it is by now a commonplace that literature and the arts have played an important part in this history. Proponents and critics share this claim, but in doing so, they tend to take the meaning of ‘human rights’ for granted. Bakara disrupts this silent consensus by ranging across the globe and the twentieth century to chart what happens when writers adopt the language of human rights and then, in turn, transform that language. Bakara’s brilliant book shows us that this is a radical event—historically, theoretically, and politically.”–

Thomas Keenan, Bard College

“What can writers contribute to a theory of human rights? Surprisingly, Writing for Dark Times demonstrates that many of the twentieth century’s most prominent writers emphasize literature’s creative potential, not as an alternative but as part of writing’s value as a form of protest and witness. Bakara illustrates that the right to create ought to be near the center of a capacious intellectual history of human rights. Through a combination of deft close readings and institutional histories of PEN International and Amnesty International, this compelling book treats writers as thinkers whose creative practices ask fundamental questions about the nature of writing and the basis of rights.”

Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky

“Writing for Dark Times is an original and compelling account of the relationship between literature and human rights. Refugees, activists, prisoners, and witnesses come together in this study as writers connecting writing and rights as they seek to make sense of human cruelty through their literary works. I do not know of any other study that takes such an approach to that relationship and explores both the relevance of writing to human rights and the relevance of human rights to the act of making literature. The conceptual depth of this work fresh and exciting.”

Priscilla Wald, Duke University

“In Writing for Dark Times: A Literary History of Human Rights, Baraka urges a provocative new perspective on the relationship between literature and human rights discourse. Instead of accepting the longstanding notion that literature exists in ancillary relation to this discourse, often as a critique of state stricture and state violence, he argues persuasively that novelists, poets, and essayists generated their own poetics of human rights, in the process transforming the social meaning of imaginative writing. Bakara examines a richly diverse group of littérateurs—Arendt, Brecht, Camus, Coetzee, MacLeish, Milosz, Neto, Weil—and demonstrates an extraordinary talent for virtuoso close reading. Spanning the globe and ranging across most of the twentieth century, this stunning literary study will appeal to any reader concerned about the fate of the human in dark times.”

Harilaos Stecopoulos, University of Iowa