Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature

Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Alexandra Schultheis Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136646379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits de l'homme

What can literary theory reveal about discourses and practices of human rights, and how can human rights frameworks help to make sense of literature? How have human rights concerns shaped the literary marketplace, and how can literature impact human rights concerns? Essays in this volume theorize how both literature and reading literarily can shape understanding of human rights in productive ways. Contributors to Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature provide a shared history of modern literature and rights; theorize how trauma, ethics, subjectivity, and witnessing shape representations of human rights violations and claims in literary texts across a range of genres (including poetry, the novel, graphic narrative, short story, testimonial, and religious fables); and consider a range of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights and their representations. The authors reflect on the imperial and colonial histories of human rights as well as the cynical mobilization of human rights discourses in the name of war, violence, and repression; at the same time, they take seriously Gayatri Spivak's exhortation that human rights is something that we "cannot not want, " exploring the central function of storytelling at the heart of all human rights claims, discourses, and policies.

Part I

Histories, Imaginaries, and Paradoxes of Literature and Human Rights

1 “Literature,” the “Rights of Man,” and Narratives of Atrocity

Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony¹

Julie Stone Peters

“Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais[!]”

—Maurice Blanchot, La folie du jour

In response to the horrifying state-sponsored atrocities of the past decades, our era has seen the rise of what is essentially a new phenomenon, quasijudicial, quasi-political, quasi-theatrical in nature: the truth commission and other national and international venues in which victims may bear witness to what they have suffered, and in which the narration of atrocity may serve at once as testimony, redress, and public catharsis. In addition to truth commissions, there are international and national post-atrocity tribunals of various sorts, personal testimonials in public venues, televised confessionals, documentary films, internet sites featuring human rights victims telling their stories, all devoted to giving voice to those who have suffered.² While the truth commissions differ in significant ways from the international tribunals and these differ from victim testimony in more general media outlets, they (and other public displays of post-atrocity narrative) share an underlying aspiration to redress through storytelling. Narrative has come to be used instead of (or alongside) punishment or victim compensation: not as evidence (even where it is also used as evidence) but as a form of remedy, in and of itself. That is, narrative in human rights has come to have an independent legal-political function.

We are told that—even if they offer no other form of redress—truth commissions and other testimonial venues are necessary because trauma victims must tell their stories, that through narrative they create a memorial to suffering, that confession can redeem even the perpetrators. We are told that storytelling can bind the community, and thus serve as a force for healing, moving us past atrocity and into a healthy future. Institutions in which victims can speak “affir[m] the value of ‘narrative’ as well as of ‘forensic’ forms of truth.”³ “Narrative truth” contributes to “the process of reconciliation by giving voice to individual subjective experiences.”⁴ Victims have a “right” to “tell their own stories,” the “right of framing them from their own perspectives and being recognized as legitimate sources of truth with claims to rights and justice.”⁵ Allowing victims to tell their own stories offers them relief, we are told, even in the absence of other forms of redress. Thomas Buergenthal, a judge on the International Court of Justice and former member of the El Salvador Truth Commission, describes the victims’ “silence and pent-up anger” before “finally, someone listened to them.” Their testimony produced “a record of what they had endured.” But “the mere act of telling what had happened was [also] a healing emotional release.”⁶

If the healing power of testimony seems to offer narrative closure for victims, it also offers narrative closure for society as a whole. Through “‘narrative’ … truth,” nations can achieve “reconciliation, national healing, and moral reconstruction.”⁷ Indeed, Homi Bhabha argues, such narrative is not only an individual human right, whose exercise is necessary to the prevention of further atrocity, but essential to our more general humanity:

The right to narrate is … a metaphor for the fundamental human interest in freedom itself, the right to be heard, to be recognized and represented. … When you fail to protect the right to narrate you are in danger of filling the silence with sirens, megaphones, hectoring voices carried by loudspeakers from podiums of great height over people who shrink into indistinguishable masses. Once we have allowed such “walls of silence” to be built in our midsts and our minds, … we are compelled to return to the silent killing fields of the past and the present—be it Colonisation, Apartheid, the Holocaust, or Vietnam, Palestine, Afghanistan, South Africa, Rwanda, Kosovo—to try and give voice to those who were silenced.⁸

What lies behind claims about the value of post-atrocity narration are a set of views influenced by ancient religious ideas about redemption through confession and memorial, more modern political discourses of rights and medical discourses of healing, as well as a view—borrowed from literary and narrative theory of the past decades—that narrative (“subjective”) truth has a special value. These views were promulgated most directly by what became known in the 1980s as the “law and literature movement,” with its 1990s offshoot, the “legal storytelling movement.” These movements entered into dialogue with less narrowly legal and more global sub-disciplines and theoretical movements: holocaust studies, with its discussion of the nature and limits of the representation of atrocity and the paradoxes of memorial; feminist criticism and critical race theory, with their discussion of the liberating force of counter-hegemonic narrative; Latin American “testimonio” and trauma studies, with their discussion of the importance of bearing witness and the curative power of truth. Under this optic, not only could victim narratives be viewed as potentially subject to the interpretive tools of literary criticism, but the narration of atrocity could also be seen as a good in itself, offering its own special form of redress through catharsis and of rectification through the truths of storytelling. There are many reasons for the proliferation of testimonial venues, not least the institutionalization of human rights in the late twentieth century. But this proliferation also owes something to the conversion of studies of legal and witness testimony into a storytelling imperative.

How we got here can be best understood by stepping back for a moment and looking at the intertwined histories of modern literature and modern rights, histories that are (as I will suggest) inextricably linked from the eighteenth century onward. Understanding these linked histories may help us not only to contextualize contemporary claims about the function of narrative in the representation of human rights abuses, but also to look critically at some of their strongest assumptions. I offer what follows not as a final word, but more in the spirit of a theory or set of hypotheses: a template for further exploration of, first, the mutually imbricated histories of literature and human rights and, second, the past decades’ focus on narrative as a kind of post-atrocity remedy—the exercise of a fundamental right in the service of memory, truth, and healing.

THE EMERGENCE OF “LITERATURE” AND “RIGHTS”

Historiographic work of the past few decades has given us a better understanding of the genealogy of the modern concept of literature, which arguably achieved a recognizable modern shape only in the later eighteenth century. While the distinction between poetry (the making of imaginary stories) and history (the making of true stories) reaches back, of course, to the ancients, there was, until the later eighteenth century, as yet no inclusive class of works of imaginative literature distinct from other kinds of works. For sixteenth- or seventeenth-century writers, the term “literature” meant either the quality of being well-read (something like what we mean by “learning”), the capacity to read well (something like what we mean by “literacy”), or the collection of works representing learning—a broadly inclusive category comprehending, essentially, all human knowledge in written form. Jean de La Bruyère, for instance (writing c.1688), praises those who have “wit and pleasing literature.”⁹ Sir Francis Bacon lauds James I for being “learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human,” possessing a conjunction as much of “divine and sacred literature as of profane and human.”¹⁰

By some time in the eighteenth century, however, the term had come to refer to a narrower category of “polite letters,” privileging classical texts (and those modeled on them) and segregating works worthy of preservation from the mass of cheap ephemera being circulated by the popular press: “literature” was opposed to the “whole heaps of trash” to be found in the ordinary booksellers’ shops.¹¹ By the turn of the eighteenth century, the modern usage had (largely) emerged, in which fictionality takes a central place. The histories of literature produced in the last decades of the eighteenth century (Les Siècles de littérature française [1772], Storia della letteratura italiana [1772], Herder’s Über die neuere deutsche Literatur [1767]) treat poetry, drama, and (notably) novels as a unique class—the works that define the national spirit.¹² “Literature” had become, primarily, the worthiest works of the vernacular imagination. Like art, literature was an object of “aesthetics” (a term first emerging during this period): to be set apart from the more prosaic works of science and of the popular press. Simultaneously (and, in a sense, constitutively), literary criticism was born in the coffeehouses and the news press, confirming the identity of “literature,” legitimizing such new (or relatively new) genres as the novel, creating doctrines of literary judgment, and establishing the canon of works through which a national literature could recognize itself. From the vernacular criticism of the coffeehouse and news press, professional literary study was to emerge in the nineteenth century.

At the same time, the concept of “rights” was becoming central to political discourse. “Natural rights” in European political and legal theory can be traced back at least to the twelfth century, when various theorists began to develop the idea out of Roman natural law principles.¹³ And modern notions of subjective natural and inalienable rights were, in a sense, fully formed in seventeenth-century political theory (for instance in Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke). But until the later eighteenth century, “rights” still tended to refer to specific privileges (for instance those specified in the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights). For Samuel Johnson, a “right” is a “just claim,” “Property,” “interest,” “Power,” “prerogative” (i.e. . powers specifically granted by law).¹⁴

That the modern concept of rights—rights possessed innately by virtue of one’s humanity, inhering in the individual, grounded in reason and nature, neither granted by nor capable of obliteration by any earthly power—emerged in the late eighteenth century is, of course, a familiar story: usually told through such major political manifestos and programs as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen or the American Bill of Rights, or philosophical works like Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. However, in the absence of a discursive history of rights—a history tracing the language of rights and its vicissitudes in the byways of the popular press and imaginative literature—it is hard to see fully the political, ethical, and—at the same time—personal purchase that rights talk gained in the last decades of the eighteenth century. “Say to yourself often,” commanded the Encyclopédie article on “Natural Right”: “I am a man, and I have no other truly inalienable natural rights than those of humanity.”¹⁵ The discourse of rights certainly did not displace the various other political vocabularies available to eighteenth-century writers and orators (duty, virtue, obligation to the public good). But its cultural force can be gauged by such parodies as Thomas Taylor’s Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792) (a sign of the conventionality of the genre). (“The next stage of that irradiation which our enlighteners are pouring in upon us,” wrote Hannah More derisively, “will produce grave descants on the rights of children.”)¹⁶

As important, the discourse of rights was transformed, in the late eighteenth century, by its fusion with various doctrines of humanitarianism. Humanitarianism as a philosophical doctrine had been developing since the late seventeenth century, in arguments for the natural benevolence of humankind–as a humanist counter-discourse to Hobbesian arguments about the depravity of human nature. But, like rights, it became a part of popular discourse only in the later eighteenth century, with the absorption of moral theories of natural benevolence (propounded by such thinkers as the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson), in reaction, in part, to various mechanistic theories of power as right, which accompanied the beginnings of industrialization.¹⁷ Human beings were naturally driven by “irresistible compassion” to relieve the suffering of others. Natural human compassion gave rise to an equally natural human moral obligation: a duty to aid those whom one perceived to be in distress. “Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Rights on Paper
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Human Rights and Literature: The Development of an Interdiscipline
• Histories, Imaginaries, and Paradoxes of Literature and Human Rights
• “Literature,” the “Rights of Man,” and Narratives of Atrocity Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony1
• Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law
• Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Horizontally Resignifying the Universal in Human Rights Discourse
• The Social Imaginary as a Problematic for Human Rights
• Intimations of What Was to Come Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones and the Indivisibility of Human Rights1
• Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and Human Rights
• Questions of Narration, Representation, and Evidence
• Reading the Living Archives The Witness of Literary Art
• Narrating Human Rights and the Limits of Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown
• Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine
• Dark Chamber, Colonial Scene Post-9/11 Torture and Representation
• Rethinking the “Subject” of Human Rights
• Human Rights as Violence and Enigma Can Literature Really Be of Any Help with the Politics of Human Rights?
• Imagining Women as Human
• “Disaster Capitalism” and Human Rights Embodiment and Subalternity in Indra Sinha's Animal's People
• Do Human Rights Need a Self? Buddhist Literature and the Samsaric Subject
• Epilogue
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index