The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

Sophia A. McClennen, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Sophia A. McClennen, Alexandra Schultheis Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317696278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Derechos humanos

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics. The first of its kind, this volume covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines between the social sciences and humanities. Sections cover:

• subjects, with pieces on subjectivity, humanity, identity, gender, universality, the particular, the body
• forms, visiting the different ways human rights stories are crafted and formed via the literary, the visual, the performative, and the oral
• contexts, tracing the development of the literature over time and in relation to specific regions and historical events
• impacts, considering the power and limits of human rights literature, rhetoric, and visual culture

Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the study of literature and human rights for the first time, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in new directions for future scholarship.

Contributors: Chris Abani, Jonathan E. Abel, Elizabeth S. Anker, Arturo Arias, Ariella Azoulay, Ralph Bauer, Anna Bernard, Brenda Carr Vellino, Eleni Coundouriotis, James Dawes, Erik Doxtader, Marc D. Falkoff, Keith P. Feldman, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Audrey J. Golden, Mark Goodale, Barbara Harlow, Wendy S. Hesford, Peter Hitchcock, David Holloway, Christine Hong, Madelaine Hron, Meg Jensen, Luz Angélica Kirschner, Susan Maslan, Julie Avril Minich, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Greg Mullins, Laura T. Murphy, Hanna Musiol, Makau Mutua, Zoe Norridge, David Palumbo-Liu, Crystal Parikh, Katrina M. Powell, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Mark Sanders, Karen-Magrethe Simonsen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Sharon Sliwinski, Sidonie Smith, Domna Stanton, Sarah G. Waisvisz, Belinda Walzer, Ban Wang, Julia Watson, Gillian Whitlock and Sarah Winter.

Part I

Subjects

The idea of human rights depends on the idea of the person to whom those rights attach. And the question of whether or not human rights can or should be universal is often connected to the idea of whether or not humans share common traits. Taking up these two facets – universality and personhood – of the “subject” of human rights writing, this part addresses foundational questions about who can claim human rights as well as the kinds of subjects they constitute. Both areas of inquiry have undergone rigorous historicizing and critique, most notably in recent years concerning the biases and exclusions written into normative human rights through the process of their development and dispersion. At the heart of these queries are interventions into the idea of western subjectivity as the model for the rights-bearing person, interrogation into the relationship between the human subject and a legal subject, ideas about the definition of the human in human rights, and research on the embodiment of rights. A central feature of literary studies scholarship on the subjects of human rights is the notion that the “subject” of rights never has an easy answer. Thus, while the journalist may simply track down the “who” of a story, humanists are more deeply concerned with the circumstances of the person. How, when, why, and to what end is the subject of human rights defined? This part includes chapters that build on this scholarship, offer new approaches, and map key critical trajectories central to these core questions.

Of the many paradoxes that beset human rights in general and human rights literary production in particular (e.g., Brown 2002; Dawes 2009; Mullins 2012; Rancière 2004; Slaughter 2011), perhaps none is more central than that of the ostensible universality of human rights. From the founding debates over the language in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) (Glendon 2001), theorists and commentators have challenged the concept of universality as impossible and illogical, although few have concluded that rights should not be available to all. Writing in the Philosophers’ Committee Report to UNESCO that collected philosophical and cultural approaches to human rights from around the world at the time the UDHR was drafted, Richard McKeon wrote, “the problem is not found in compiling a list of human rights […] . The differences are found rather in what is meant by these rights” (1948: 24); and he argued that a universal declaration could not resolve differing philosophical underpinnings of human rights, but could succeed pragmatically to “achieve an effect on the political and social practices” of the future (1948: 26) (see also Walzer, Chapter 41 in this volume). In the same report, Jacques Maritain also underscored the importance of practical over theoretical agreement on a universal declaration (1948: 59). While Harold J. Laski reminded readers that European declarations that preceded the UDHR are “deeply involved in a Protestant bourgeois tradition, which is itself an outstanding aspect of the rise of the middle class to power, and that, though their expression is universal in its form, the attempts at realization which lie behind that expression have too rarely reached below the level of the middle class” (1948: 65). These comments speak not only to the unequal access to rights that are defined as inherent, but also to long-standing debates over universality versus cultural relativism in defining as well as pursuing human rights claims (see e.g., Merry 2003). Moreover, because universality is attached to rights through institutions of power as well as the conceptual apparatus that descends from Enlightenment philosophy, the universal in the UDHR carries with it the abuses of imperial history through which it has been and continues to be promoted, alongside its promises.

Critiques emerging from and in concert with postcolonial studies have further illuminated the ways in which human rights discourses and human rights as a conceptual apparatus have served the interests of empire. And although historians differ on the extent to which anticolonial discourses of the twentieth century called upon the language of human rights (Burke 2010; Cooper 2012; Jensen 2014; Moyn 2012), there is important new theoretical work on how the concept of universalism is not solely a western cultural product (Mangharam 2013), as well as on how scholars might resignify universalism for the future as open-ended and attendant to particularity (de Bolla 2013). Domna C. Stanton’s chapter here provides a significant contribution to this conversation.

The concept of universality is tethered to the question of what sorts of subject positions are implied by it. Here, too, paradoxes abound. In his excavation of the circulation of the concept of human rights in eighteenth-century Anglophone texts, Peter de Bolla traces one source of ambiguity to different notions of possession that linked rights to personhood: on the one hand, the subject could be said to possess specific rights as properties or claims, and, on the other hand, rights were understood more properly to constitute the subject as such (de Bolla 2013: 64). The space between these two meanings persists in the gap between the human being and the legal person (Slaughter 2011: 55–63), one who might lack or claim rights and one whose rights already confer legal standing and, thus, a more powerful form of personhood. This gap between the human being and the legal person tends to parallel other, global structural inequalities, and raises questions about whether human rights offers the best framework for the pursuit of social justice. These questions manifest in multiple ways in literary scholarship of human rights narratives: to what extent do the legal person and the literary protagonist parallel and reinforce one another (Slaughter 2011)? If individual autonomy, often conveyed through literacy and voice, is essential to staging a human rights claim, how do illiterate, silenced, and/or communal human rights subjects become legible? If rights and literature circulate through the same institutions and markets as do violations, how might the literary imagination of human rights revive a subject consigned to abandonment or “social death” (Cacho 2012)? Perhaps most broadly, the chapters in this part investigate ways of reading for particularity without reinstantiating liberal individualism (see also Butler and Athanasiou 2013).

Elizabeth S. Anker has forcefully shown that liberal human rights discourses produce “a highly truncated, decorporealized vision of the [ideal] subject – one that paradoxically negates core dimensions of embodied experience” (Anker 2012: 2). Given the ways in which colonial discourse often reproduced the Cartesian mind/body split, ascribing reason, will, and freedom to the colonizers and physical, passionate existence to the colonized, the liberal subject of rights of mind over matter conceptually forecloses claims grounded in material and affective existence. Many of the chapters that follow in this part, including Anker’s, address this lacuna within normative human rights of embodied experience as well as claims by those who would otherwise be merely human by virtue of age, sexuality, gender, debility, or statelessness.

As human rights discourses and institutions continue to legitimate neocolonial and neoliberal interventions into lesser-developed states by those more powerful, questions of human rights’ universality and personhood remain urgent. Advances in corporate legal personhood and trans-species advocates also press on the conceptual and legal integrity of human rights. From animal rights initiatives to legal cases such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) in the United States, which grant the rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religious belief, respectively, to corporations, the role of the human in human rights appears to be shrinking even as rights discourses proliferate. The chapters that follow foreground the human, examining both those who are excluded from full political participation by normative human rights and those who claim rights and full humanity in non-normative discourses.

The first chapter in this part, Stanton’s “A New Universal for Human Rights?: The Particular, the Generalizable, the Political,” begins with the ambiguous place of the universal in normative human rights institutions and discourses. Stanton’s task is to resignify the universal away from its Enlightenment inheritance. In place of universalism grounded in Eurocentric humanism, she argues for universalism from the bottom up, where particularity and plural claims find points of connection and can be “generalizable” across their differences. Crucial to Stanton’s articulation of universalism is its open-endedness. Resignifying universalism in this way does not posit an ideal human rights subject; rather, it recognizes what Stanton calls, following Etienne Balibar, “a universal right to politics” (Balibar 1994: 49–51). Her careful thinking through the work of different human rights institutions and actors, as well as of various theorists, insists that human rights is most importantly political work as opposed to an abstract set of ideals.

The next three chapters turn their attention to the bearer of human rights. All three authors challenge the primacy of the liberal subject of rights. They interrogate the ways in which the human becomes legible within legal, philosophical, and literary discourses of human rights, and they provide specific approaches drawn from theories of embodiment, disability, and queer studies, to expand the range of bodies, identities, and subject positions those discourses recognize. In “‘Commonly Human’: Embodied Self-Possession and Human Rights in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,” Anker launches this discussion with a “counter-liberal odyssey of the human” (37, this volume) that is grounded in embodied experience. Anker argues that in imagining a world of sexual pleasure and pain, rich sensory experience, and both physical and mental self-fashioning, Kincaid offers an alternative foundation for shared humanity to the anemic model of the liberal subject. The novel’s protagonist, Xuela, stages her claim to personhood precisely within the discourses of embodiment and suffering that have conventionally relegated the (formerly) colonized subject to the margins of humanity. Julie Avril Minich extends this inquiry into the limits of the subject in her chapter, “Who is Human? Disability, Literature, and Human Rights.” With reference to Justin Torres’s novella, We the Animals, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), Minich demonstrates, first, the ways in which discourses of animality have historically been used to deny rights to persons with disabilities; and, second, how disability studies interrogates the category of the human to expand its scope. Such expansion is necessary to recognize the claims of those with “non-normative minds and bodies” (46, this volume); and it may also break down the distinctions between human and other living beings. Greg A. Mullins evinces a similar skepticism of the liberal subject, drawn from queer theory and the use of human rights rhetoric in campaigns for the rights of sexual minorities, in his chapter “Queer Rights?”. For Mullins, the term queer can open up heteronormativity to challenge and critique even as the term runs the risk of homogenizing non-normative identities, and he sketches these effects through a brief history of the use of human rights language in the United States on behalf of rights of sexual minorities in the short-lived Society for Human Rights (1924–25) and Human Rights Campaign today. The danger of entrenching normativity through the pairing of human rights and queer is only magnified in transnational campaigns on behalf of sexual minorities, an outcome that increases the demand for a “post-liberal analysis” (58, this volume) of both concepts.

From these critiques of the liberal subject at the core of human rights, this section moves to address how literary and humanitarian narratives construct particular human rights claimants – women, child soldiers, and refugees. We begin with Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg’s “Gendering Human Rights and Their Violation: A Reading of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee,” the story of abuses suffered by a 15-year-old Nigerian girl, first through the oil industry’s destruction of her family and later in the denial of her individual rights when she seeks asylum in England. Through an analysis of the refrain “what the men did” that echoes through the novel, Goldberg shows how rights and their violation are often implicitly if not explicitly gendered. In response to this pattern of gendered violence, she argues, the novel’s narrative strategies offer the contours of a transnational feminist solidarity.

The two chapters that follow provide cautionary examinations of how legal and cultural narratives frame the paradigmatic human rights subjects of the child soldier and the refugee. Wendy S. Hesford investigates vulnerability theory’s aims to bolster human rights action on behalf of specific groups such as former child soldiers. In “Contingent Vulnerabilities: Child Soldiers as Human Rights Subjects,” she gives a history of vulnerability in the human rights legal theory of Martha Albert Fineman and Anna Grear. Turning to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and its attendant protocols, Hesford demonstrates how the transformation of child soldiers into human rights claimants takes place through stereotypical narratives of victimhood and passivity that, despite their normativity, are nonetheless unequally distributed among children who have participated in war. This tendency makes the legal benefits of vulnerability available only to some and often at the cost of political agency.

Eleni Coundouriotis’s “In Flight: The Refugee Experience and Human Rights Narrative” reads a wide range of refugee narratives for the way they transform stories of victimization into stories of action. Central to this transformation is a temporal and spatial narrative frame that contrasts movement and flight to the stasis of the camp. From analysis of Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s memoir to fiction by Dave Eggers, Ghassan Kanafani, and Nam Le, Coundouriotis demonstrates how the focus on flight builds narrative tension and, more importantly, counteracts images of dehumanization and abandonment with the normative values of freedom and autonomy, although the stories may also end in death and the failure of both flight and rights.

Our next chapter focuses more directly on the dead through an analysis of self-sacrificing immolation and how it functions within human rights representations practices. For Peter Hitchcock, immolation raises the question of the sacrifices necessary in political struggles, problematizing human rights claims at once “imaginable and often, necessarily, impossible” (86, this volume). Framing his analysis in terms of Gayatri Spivak’s question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, he looks at examples of immolation ranging from sati to Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi (the Tunisian street vendor whose death is often said to have sparked the Arab Spring) to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s fiction. Immolation, Hitchcock concludes, always poses a question about the human rights subject as a political subject whose commitment may not be wholly determined by reason and will.

Inquiry into the subjects of human rights would be incomplete without mention of the perpetrators of rights violations, and the final chapter in this part, “Remembering Perpetrators: The Kunstlerroman and Second-Generation Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker” by Sarah G. Waisvisz, reminds readers that the perpetrator “inhabits all survivor narratives in some way” (94, this volume). Drawing on trauma theory and Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacité, Waisvisz argues that acknowledging perpetrator memories of their atrocities might enhance understanding of rather than compete with the human rights claims of survivors. Waisvisz turn to Danticat’s novel for the way the daughter who learns of her father’s crimes and translates that knowledge into her work might provide a model for how to read the entangled stories of victims, perpetrators, and survivors.

References

Anker, E. S. (2012) Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Balibar, E. (1994) Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, New York: Routledge.

Brown, W. (2002) “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights,” in W. Brown and J. Halley (eds.), Left Legalism/Left Critique, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 420–34.

Burke, R. (2010) Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Butler, J. and Athanasiou, A. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Cacho, L. M. (2012) Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, New York: New York University Press.

Cooper, F. (2012) “Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization,” Humanity 3(3) (Winter): 473–92.

Dawes, J. (2009) “Human Rights in Literary Studies,” Human Rights Quarterly 31(2): 394–409.

de Bolla, P. (2013) The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights, New York: Fordham University Press.

Glendon, M. A. (2001) A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, New York: Random House.

Jensen, S. L. B. (2014) “The Jamaican Broker: UN Diplomacy and the Transformation of International Human Rights, 1962–68,” in E. M. Lassen and E. A. Andersen (eds.), Europe and the Americas: Transatlantic Approaches to Human Rights, The Hague: Martinus Nijhof...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Aporia and Affirmative Critique: Mapping the Landscape of Literary Approaches to Human Rights Research
• Part I: Subjects
• Part II: Forms
• Part III: Contexts
• Part IV: Impacts
• Index