ABSTRACT
Many oral traditions, including Appalachian stories, Aboriginal folktales, Maori songs from New Zealand, and the oral performances of griots in Africa, to name a few, resist linear plot lines. The various oral forms of indigenous cultures, and the subsequent contemporary written literature influenced, are often in "opposition to European tradition and the rejection of rationalism, in particular. Understanding the linkages between oral traditions and contemporary written forms can impact the ways in which we understand multiplicities within human rights discourses and how different cultural spaces might define what counts as human rights. As several scholars of human rights literature have suggested, since the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the human rights narrative has emphasized individual testimony and overcoming insurmountable odds. In human rights scholarship, much of our understanding of what constitutes human rights is based on written documents and not on spoken stories and histories.
