Considering the limitations of liberal democratic states and transnational organizations in safeguarding human rights in contemporary Africa and the black diaspora, this edited volume repositions the rights-based conversation by exploring representations of it across different cultural forms. The essays in this volume bring together a broad range of issues, including political repression, forced migration, gender-based violence, criminalization of the LGBTI community, racial discrimination, and the lack of social justice, by using multiple narrative genres.

Effectively, the book maps a counter discourse against the contemporary forms of representational politics that denude the figure of the human. Collectively, the contributors argue that by engaging with the creative cultural practices in Africa and the black diaspora we can discover a powerful assertion of human rights ideas in our contemporary history. The signs in Creative Incursions stand as a referent to such modes, ones that resist the practices that constantly produce life as bare and precarious.

This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin.