There is extraordinary diversity, depth, and complexity in the encounter between theatre, performance, and human rights. Through an examination of a rich repertoire of plays and performance practices from and about countries across six continents, the contributors to this volume seek to open the way toward understanding the character and significance of this encounter. Divided into three interrelated sections, the book focuses on a range of critical and timely human rights questions as they relate to transitional justice, memory politics, citizenship, the 'War on Terror,' transnational spectatorship, and the global economic order. Authors ask what artists, audiences and readers imagine, expect, and desire from the engagement of theatre and performance with these crucial questions. Ultimately, this book aims to provide nuanced, global perspectives on the emerging and transformative aesthetics, ethics and effects of this encounter at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Foreword: J.Lane
Introduction: Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre; F.N.Becker, B.Werth & P.Hernández
SECTION I: TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND CIVIL SOCIETY
1. Dead Body Politics: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani at Peru's Truth Commission; A.Lambright
2. Where 'God is Like a Longing': Theatre and Social Vulnerability in Mozambique; L.Madureira
3. The ESMA: From Torture Chambers into New Sites of Memory; P.Hernández
4. Surpassing Metaphors of Violence in Postdictatorial Southern Cone Theatre; B.Werth
SECTION II: THE 'WAR ON TERROR' AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
5. Place and Misplaced Rights in Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom; L.Mantoan
6. Challenging the 'fetish of the verbatim': New Aesthetics and Familiar Abuses in Christine Evans's Slow Falling Bird; C.Wilson
7. Stages of Transit: Rascón Banda's Hotel Juárez and Sarah Misemer Peveroni's Berlín; S.Misemer
8. Migrant Melodrama, Human Rights, and Elvira Arellano; A.Puga
SECTION III: TRANSNATIONAL PUBLICS
9. 'Get up, Stand up, Stand up for your Rights': Transnational Belonging and Rights of Citizenship in Dominican Theatre; C.Stevens
10. Theatres of Vigil and Vigilance: A Playwright's Notes on Theatre and Human Rights in the Philippines; J.Barrios
11. 'The Spectacle of Our Suffering': Staging the International Human Rights Imaginary in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul; E.Anker
12. Broadway Without Borders: Eve Ensler, Lynn Nottage, and the Campaign to End Violence against Women in the Democratic Republic of Congo; K.Bystrom