Human Rights in a Global World

In Rathlef's and Ziegler's plays the need for human rights becomes tangible through the seemingly Other, disrupting the quotidian order of the (bourgeois) realm. The plays explore racial premises placed in close relationship with intertextual correlates, in particular bourgeois tragedies where the female protagonists embody complex moral values in a challenging environment: both plays under scrutiny here similarly rely on the moral impeccability of their Black protagonists to promote the idea of universal human rights. Moral performance and deficiency as well as perfectibility become an intrinsic part of humanness, which resonates with the nascent notion of Herder's ‘Humanität’ (understood as a common property inherent in human beings but in need of being cultivated and brought out). The article analyses the dynamic of these developmental arguments and seeks to show how these notions of a morally charged ‘Humanität’ offer a different, transcendent and in many ways transcultural starting point for the discussion of human rights: human rights emanating from the ‘Humanität’ inherent in all people can be regarded as universal in these plays precisely because they transcend specific sovereign realm(s) and political rights regimes dominant in the eighteenth century

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