From Revolution to Human Rights in Mario Benedetti's Pedro y el Capitán

摘要

This essay addresses the central role human rights literature has played in Latin American literary and political culture. My particular focus is on Mario Benedetti's 1979 play Pedro y el Capitán. Latin American literary criticism has usually considered Benedetti's play a foundational text of the human rights discourse, but this essay argues that this ‘humanitarian’ reading comes at the expense of the ideological project that is at the play's center. To this end, this essay will first consider the work of several leading critics who make the question of torture paramount to Benedetti's play while pushing aside the text's commitment to the primacy of the conflict between competing ideologies: namely, the conflict between socialism and liberalism. Second, it will take up the ways in which the emergence of human rights discourse in Uruguay and the various forms of literary criticism associated with this discourse have themselves been part of the conceptual framework through which the Left has become increasingly disarticulated from the commitment to economic equality.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2011.588512