Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore
As the first large volume of its kind, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights aims to provide a transnational, interdisciplinary overview of the field while also featuring insightful and innovative new critical readings of our topic. Even though it foregrounds literature, cultural forms, and literary analyses, the volume necessarily crosses disciplines, especially between the social sciences and the humanities. The concept of human rights is at once an idea, a set of discursive norms, a legal practice, and a political claim; it attaches to a sense of community and to the construction of the victimized other; and it depends on storytelling and on practical political advocacy. The stakes of representation are high in the context of human rights violations, and this volume focuses attention on the subjects, forms, contexts, and limits of literatures (broadly conceived) of human rights. Analysis of these literatures illuminates how human rights circulate in the social imaginary, demonstrates the role of literature in imagining rights, and explores the complexity and contrasts among cultural representations of rights. Thus, the study of human rights and literature must always navigate a range of fields, incorporate a variety of research methods, and understand these practices across multiple contexts.
The primary aims of this project are:
• to make the interdisciplinary field of human rights and literature and culture accessible to nonexperts by providing chapters that survey its core concepts, introduce major themes and issues, provide historical background, and outline a range of central contexts and literary works.
• to offer those working in the field an overview of the interdiscipline’s core issues and debates through innovative and insightful chapters that expand, critique, and test the existing boundaries of our work.
• to offer critical frameworks for understanding the field that span history and regions while also providing chapters that delve into the complexity of contexts and concepts that shape human rights literary and cultural production.
• to expand the idea of human rights literature to include texts that have often been excluded from the literary such as legal texts, performances, visual culture, social media, and human rights reports.
• to denote human rights literature not as a set of texts, but as the outcome of a reading practice that focuses on the interplay of literary representation and juridical-political rights work.
• to contribute foundational scholarship to this field with the hope that the chapters here will inspire future research and discussion.
The strength of this volume lies in the range of its contributions and in the diversity of our contributors’ scholarly expertise. Many of our contributors have dual appointments that bridge their work across fields such as law and literature, and many have published research related to more than one region and more than one time period. We are fortunate to work in a dynamic field with newer and established scholars in dialogue with one another in the production of excellent innovative research. And, although it is not possible to include every important voice, our contributors are scholars at the forefront of the field whose research influences both its methodologies and subject matter. In addition, each chapter frames a question or topic germane to the field in general and then intervenes with more specific argumentation and textual readings. A project of this nature cannot possibly cover all of the potential examples, methods, and contexts of scholarship on human rights and literature; however, the structure of this volume is designed to introduce readers to a representative array of scholarly approaches to the topic. To that end, this introduction develops three critical frameworks that provide the structure of this book: the current critical background of this project, a deeper history of the interdiscipline, and the conceptual apparatus that structures the organization of this volume.
The pairing of human rights and literature is at once logical and fraught. Again and again, as a number of the chapters in this volume illustrate, the theoretical, esoteric, and aesthetic properties of the concept of human rights hold an uneasy connection to the legal, practical, and political instruments that are often more commonly associated with human rights activism, advocacy, adjudication, and enforcement. One of our goals in this volume is not to resolve this tension, but rather to call attention to its ongoing and productive dialectical relationship. To do so, we analyze the use of “and” as the pairing conjunction joining this volume’s attention to human rights and literature. In addition, we provide an overview of the history of the field of human rights and literature. How and when did scholars begin to work across literature and human rights? And how does that story connect, if at all, to human rights–related cultural and literary production itself? Or are those scholarly shifts byproducts of larger geopolitical shifts? Some scholars have focused a great deal of attention on the founding moments of human rights, whereas others are deeply suspicious of any historiography that implies the inevitability of human rights as an approach to social justice. In this introduction, we briefly orient readers to the story of how literary studies has approached the topic.
We also describe the rationale for the organization of the volume into four different clusters of chapters. Each part of this book has an introduction of its own that outlines its major themes and provides an overview of each chapter; however, the organization of the volume as a whole reflects our explicit intent of highlighting specific ways that humanist perspectives enhance the understanding of human rights. What is gained by taking a humanist view of human rights? What happens when the aesthetic is part of the understanding of human rights ethics? Here we explain why this is a volume that draws on literary scholars and humanists in general as sources of valuable insight into debates over human rights.
Why “and”? Why literature?
The interdiscipline of human rights and literary studies has no definitive ontology, and, indeed, many of the chapters in this volume analyze the ways in which rights talk emerged out of contexts far removed from that of normative human rights, encapsulated by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 and its subsequent legal instruments. We focus in this part on a more recent history of the interdiscipline, beginning with the attacks of September 11, 2001. In doing so, we are wary of the way this might reinforce critiques of US-centric scholarship and, at the same time, we remain mindful of the global actions that the attacks precipitated. Despite our concerns, we wish to highlight how these events have led to a much sharper consideration of why reading human rights and literature matters. Shortly after the attacks of September 11, a number of humanities scholars in the United States turned to human rights as a productive way to interrogate a new age of empire, geopolitical conflict, and human suffering. These scholars were joined globally by a chorus of faculty working from afar who also noticed that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center had opened up a unique moment for both the advancement of and the assault on human rights. Whether working in Manhattan or Dubai, scholars recognized that the attacks had radically changed the geometry of global power and the language of rights. All one had to notice was the way that President George W. Bush spoke of defending the rights of Afghan women while ordering the destruction of the Afghan state to realize that we had entered a new level of imperial hypocrisy (Bush 2001). We also remember the historic moment in February 2003 when a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica, was shrouded at the United Nations so that US Secretary of State Colin Powell could argue for an invasion in Iraq absent the glaring reminder of the ravages of war. Not only did Powell act as an agent of unilate,ral power that day, but we also witnessed the censoring of the power of human rights stories. Had the discourse of human rights been entirely coopted by empire, or was there a way to rescue some elements of their promise without succumbing to the logic of hegemony? And were the universalizing tendencies of human rights concepts inevitably a measure of oppression? These were some of the questions that preoccupied scholars as they contemplated the way that human rights discourse was being used to justify their violations. Jacques Derrida wrote a seminal essay shortly after the 9/11 attacks, which laid bare the core tension:
We must (il faut) more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need (il faut) human rights. We are in need of them and they are in need, for there is always a lack, a shortfall, a falling short, an insufficiency; human rights are never sufficient.
(Derrida 2003: 132–33)
Added to these worries were genuine concerns about what role humanists might play in the debates over human rights. A number of conferences and volumes took up the question of what the humanities brought to conversations about rights, justice, and social violence. One of the first special journal issues to tackle the subject was edited by Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava for South Atlantic Quarterly: “And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights,” which appeared in 2004. Contributors to that volume, like much of the work that followed it, were both invested in supporting the notion of human rights and troubled that the idea of human rights had been usurped by discourses of power. How to square the obvious and blatant violations of the rights of Afghans, Iraqis, and Palestinians, for instance, with the official rhetoric of the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and the White House? As Balfour and Cadava explain in their introduction, the essays they compiled “ask fundamental questions about human rights, questions that sometimes leave the foundations of human rights discourses trembling, and this even if they were already tremulous from the very start” (2004: 279). They go on to explain the particular intervention offered by the humanist perspective:
This inquiry is conceived largely in the spirit of human rights and its discourses in an effort to open the possibility for human rights that would ask us to broaden our understanding of both rights and the human, even while acknowledging that these discourses are not simply all of a piece.
(Balfour and Cadava 2004: 279)
Such theoretical inquiry and critical angst was generally not at the center of social science work on human rights at the turn of the century; it was a relatively unique feature of humanist approaches to human rights. The point is that at precisely the same time that scholars in the humanities were asking human rights discourse to live up to its promise, they were also wondering whether the very notion of human rights was not in and of itself the basis for human rights violations.
These questions were at the heart of one of the most significant conferences dedicated to human rights and the humanities held in the early post–9/11 era. “Human Rights and the Humanities” took place at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in October 2005 and then led to a special issue of PMLA edited by Domna Stanton and Judith Butler. The goal of that conference, Stanton explains, was “to explore the mutually illuminating possibilities that emerge from the intersection of two apparently disparate fields” (2005: 3). In a call for heightened collaboration between the humanities and human rights, she writes:
Humanists can meaningfully bring our modes of analysis and interpretation to bear on human rights discourse and in turn our teaching and research can become richer, more nuanced and more relevant by engaging with the ethical and philosophical imperatives of human rights.
(Stanton 2005: 3)
In the introduction to the 2006 special issue of PMLA that grew out of the conference, though, Stanton comments that the conference may have opened up more questions than it answered. One of those was the question of whether the conjunction “and” was the right one to yoke the humanities to human rights. In the end, the volume used “in” – “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics” – but Stanton’s introduction to the issue explored the pros and cons of a series of conjunctions, “ANDs, INs, and BUTs.”
From Stanton’s view, the use of “and” is both “grammatically necessary and conceptually false” since both the humanities and human rights are not bounded entities, but rather in “process and flux” (Stanton 2006: 1519). As she describes these processes, she notes a range of ways in which both the humanities and human rights have been “grappling, more or less self-consciously, with some of the same issues in the last two decades,” but she insists that these intersections should not obfuscate “salient disjunctions between the humanities and human rights” (2006: 1509, 1520). According to Stanton, the disjunctions, which include disparate notions of the nation-state and disciplinary power, might better indicate the use of “but” or “versus” (2006: 1520). In the end, however, she explains that
Judith Butler and I decided to foreground the IN relation, to accentuate and thus explore heuristically the insertion of the humanities in the human rights discourse and movements, the intersecting inseparability of the two praxes, specifically on crucial matters of language, narratives, and the constructions and limits of current meanings, all of which always already involve the political.
(Stanton 2006: 1520)
Following the publication of the Stanton and Butler other special journal issues and collected volumes emerged as momentum built around the topic of human rights and the humanities. Among numerous conference panels, workshops, and other publications that engaged a wide range of scholars were works that we directly organized: Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror (McClennen and Morello 2010); Human Rights and Literary Forms (McClennen and Slaughter 2009); Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (Goldberg and Moore 2012); “Human Rights and Cultural Forms” (Goldberg, Moore, and Mullins 2013); Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (Moore and Goldberg 2015). In these texts, we generally favored “and” in order to signify the imbrication of law and culture, whereas in the case of the last volume cited above, the emphasis falls on how pedagogies in literature and cultural studies might address human rights issues.
The entanglement of human rights discourses and atrocities with US and other military interventions in the years following 2001 provided a significant catalyst for scholarship in the field. As just a partial recounting that focuses on US actions, we note the almost-immediate retaliation for 9/11 in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2004 discovery of the torture memos (which dated back to 2002), and the release of photos of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and torture in 2004. In 2006, the George W. Bush administration passed the Military Commissions Act that defined the category of the “enemy combatant” in an effort to create a new category of humanity that could be disciplined according to rules defined by the US government. The testing ground for these practices was the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, also called Camp X-Ray. Around the same time, news broke of “extraordinary rendition”: the rendering of suspects to “black sites” in third-party states like Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, or Syria. Once there, detainees were kept outside of judicial oversight without ever entering US territory.
Salman Rushdie immediately pointed out the disturbing connection between language and human rights abuses in the use of the phrase “extraordinary rendition”: “Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper – a crime against the word” (Rushdie 2006). Rushdie reminded us of the intimate ways that language played a central role in aiding and abetting the designs of torture. That same year, the world heard the US government explain that it could not adhere to the Geneva Convention because the language of the document was too vague. In a press conference on the subject, President Bush declared:
This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, “outrages upon human dignity”? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation.
(Bush 2006)
For many of us working in literature and the humanities, such a claim struck us cold. Weren’t we the ones that had, in fact, been saying that everything was “wide open to interpretation”? If the humanities had been the source of the critical theorizing meant to destabilize empire and deconstruct western epistemes, it was time to rethink our strategies.
That rethinking, though, was no easy task. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the humanities had largely separated itself from many of the material and practical concerns that defined human rights work. Even though Stanton reminded readers in 2005 that there has long been a conceptual connection between human rights and the humanities through the “mediation of humanism” and the Enlightenment notions of “freedom, equality, justice, tolerance, secularism, and cosmopolitanism” (Stanton 2005: 3), she noted that since the signing of the UDHR in 1948, much had taken place to split the fields. For some, though, the story has a longer history and dates back to the Enlightenment and what C. P. Snow later dubbed the “two cultures” (Snow 1959). Immanuel Wallerstein explains that the “division of knowledge of the two cultures came to mean as well creating a high barrier between the search for the true and the search for the good and the beautiful” (2004: 3). In simple terms, the two cultures theory signals the break between quantitative and qualitative research – a breakdown that would logically affect scholars working on the culture of human rights, since such work must necessarily blend the empirical with the contemplative. This division, though, would intensify during the postmodern era, as many scholars in the humanities came to question the very foundations of humanist thought – including such notions as rights, justice, freedom, and so on. For instance, Costas Douzinas argues in Human Rights and Empire that human rights are often nothing more than the political philosophy of hegemonic power, and he claims that human rights now codify and “constitutionalize” the normative sources of empire. Such questions needed to be asked, to be sure, but as evidenced by the assaults on rights after 9/11, the rejection of totalizing and normative concepts needed to be buttressed with a commitment to rescue rights from those who were using vague language to create legal norms that guaranteed a system of ongoing power and impunity. Masao Miyoshi called US scholars to task when he critiqued them for their “undeniable common proclivity […] to fundamentally reject such totalizing concepts as humanity, civilization, history, and justice, and such subtotalities as a region, a nation, a locality, or even any smallest group” (Miyoshi 2002: 41). If the goal was to question everything, how were scholars to defend anything, let alone a complex and contested notion like shared human rights?
As these debates raged, scholars began to uncover and rediscover a different story about human rights, one that was certainly more intricate and nuanced than postmodern critics may have assumed. Archival research revealed a questionnaire administered by UNESCO in 1947 to help the drafters of the UDHR determine if there was a global consensus on the notion of human rights. Based on the responses of what came to be known as “the Philosopher’s Committee,” a report was prepared, showing that – despite cultural differences and diverse nationalities – member states of the United Nations shared two great principles and common ideals, including “the right to live a life free from the haunting fear of poverty and insecurity” (UNESCO 2014). After the report was filed, the drafting of the UDHR began with the diverse members of the Commission on Human Rights debating and deconstructing every single article. For instance, Mary Ann Glendon points out that Hansa Mehta, the only woman beside Eleanor Roosevelt on the Commission and a member of the Constituent Assembly in India, “objected to Article 1’s use of what would today be called noninclusive language” (Glendon 2001: 90): “All men are equal.” Mehta argued for “All human beings are equal in dignity and rights,” reasoning that “the words all men would be construed literally in some countries so as to exclude women” (2001: 90). Her voice resonated alongside many others, including Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, who had argued at the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco in 1944 for the central importance of full sovereignty and rights of colonized peoples, and continued to press for these rights as a member of the Commission (Glendon 2001: 12). Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, member of the drafting subcommittee, wrote:
I perceived clearly that I was participating in a truly significant historic event in which a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing – which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality. In the Great Hall … there was an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood among men and women from all latitudes, the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting.
(quoted in Glendon 2001: 169)
Thus it is important to recall that the question of universality versus cultural relativism is far more complex than some may assume. For instance, in the early years after the UDHR it would be the nonWest that often advocated for a universal language of human rights, because such a stance ratified their claims to self-determination, sovereignty, and free expression. As Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde point out, “during this early phase of the human rights era, it was the Western colonial powers rather than the Third World representatives who made a case for cultural relativism,” since in their view “giving colonial subjects equal rights would endanger the public order” (2012: 10). This background is only part of the story, of course, but it is one part that is often forgotten by those who associate human rights with universalism, monolithic Eurocentric norms, and imperial designs.
This misperception about the conceptual basis of human rights advocacy reveals a fundamental flaw that has affected many whose work derives from a profound distrust of those who struggle to support human rights. And it helps explain why after 9/11 it seemed that there was an impossible gap between humanists and human rights workers. In 2005, Anne Cubilié noted that “the gap between critical theorists and practitioners and grassroots political organizers […] seems as wide as ever, if not wider” (2005: xi). Again and again, it has been assumed that human rights practitioners are inevitably unaware of the complexity of holding to common notions of rights and the humans that bear them. Not only do these theories fail to grasp the fitful historical development of the ideas and defense of human rights, but they also create a dangerous dichotomy that holds that instability of meaning is less oppressive than fixed meaning. Or, that critique itself is sufficient. One of the great pitfalls to this line of argument is the inability to read contributions to rights advocacy from parts of the world that are not dominated by western norms. According to this logic, if the critique of human rights as a cover for western empire is true, then there have been no other nonwestern contributions to these notions and to their defense. Such thinking fails to recognize the multiple and various contributions and critiques to the notions of universal human rights from all corners of the globe (and dismisses the efforts of national human rights institutions and regional declarations of human rights). Ironically, then, the antiwestern theorists may have done more to advance an aura of a monolithic West controlling the idea of human rights than matches with reality. The exercise of western power to dominate human life is certainly real; but it has never been the case that the West’s control over the meaning of rights has been absolute.
One result of these negative assumptions has been what some see as a relentless critique of rights where the worries and attacks on the notion of rights have outweighed the defense of their ideals. As Zackary Manfredi puts it in his introduction to a special issue on human rights for Qui Parle:
If the critique of such rights amounts to little more than their utter disavowal – as opposed to their transformation, re-signification, or displacement – then those on the Left appear to have conceded an extraordinarily wide array of institutions and sites of contestation to those liberal and conservative thinkers who deploy the language of rights to suit their own projects.
(Manfredi 2013: 7).
Manfredi explains that he is not suggesting that we should abandon radical critique, but rather that “if such critiques hope to offer genuine possibilities for political theorization, they must articulate how and under what conditions novel vocabularies for making justice claims might challenge the hegemony of human rights” (2013: 8). The key phrase for our interests in the present volume is Manfredi’s use of the phrase “novel vocabularies” since it suggests both the new and the literary.
This background explains why now, almost a decade after Stanton and Butler chose to foreground “in,” as in “the humanities in human rights,” we are foregrounding “and.” What we can note from a decade of work on humanities and human rights is that the idea of the need to “insert” the humanities into human rights does not hold the same tensions it did in the early years after 9/11. If anything, the notion that both the humanities and human rights are concepts in flux has come to be understood as not only a given but a permanent and productive aspect of our interdiscipline. The use of “and” does not necessarily imply a static relation, nor does it demand a static definition of the relational terms. Since the moment of the 2005 conference at CUNY, there is now a significant body of research on human rights and the humanities, so much so that the notion that one would have to apologize for connecting the two no longer makes sense. As we will explain in more detail below, what we gain by the connecting conjunction “and” is the notion that, while both literature and human rights are discrete concepts, there is real critical value, historical logic, and productive insight when we join them together. The disciplinary divide has not dissipated even if it has been widely debated and explored. The difference today is that there is now a significant and diverse body of scholarship on literature and human rights.
A brief survey of key approaches to the interdiscipline
We have traced the recent development of the interdiscipline, specifically as it related to the events of September 11, 2001. Let us now offer a broader overview of the various approaches to the field and how they have developed over time and in different contexts. There are at least three ways to trace the story of how scholarly approaches to literary culture and human rights have shifted over time. The first one notes the specific use of the terms “literature” and “human rights” and studies that link as it was produced primarily in English-language scholarship. Another looks at the relationships between struggles for justice and their expression through literary forms that have taken place in a global framework, across multiple languages, and that, consequently, may have different operative terms at play. And a third takes a deeper historical view that connects key concepts of human rights to specific aesthetic innovations.
Although these three lines of inquiry intersect and overlap, let’s start with the first version of the story, which is generally connected to 1977: the year that Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize, US President Jimmy Carter focused on human rights in his inaugural address, and Charter 77 was published in Czechoslovakia, accusing the Czech state of failing to uphold human rights. This is the year that Samuel Moyn highlights in his study of the origins of human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010). But while this may be a pivotal year for the appearance of the term “human rights” in public discourse, it is also a key year for its documented connection to literature. As Joseph Slaughter points out in his essay, “Rights on Paper,” Amnesty International’s Nobel Peace Prize award highlighted the value of “the personal story” in human rights advocacy (Slaughter 2012: xi). The Amnesty case may be one of the most visible examples, given that lawyers, writers, and publishers chose to highlight the centrality of literary expression as a key part of human rights advocacy and succeeded by using stories to release prisoners, but it was not alone. As Slaughter explains, “the rise of personal story politics and memoir culture in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with mass movements for decolonization, civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedoms” (2012: xiii–xiv). In these years, the direct and overt link between literature, specifically personal story telling, and “human rights” was solidified.
The next pivot point in the trajectory of human rights and literature takes place in the 1990s as the first global efforts to enforce human rights take place. In this era, the United Nations set up ad hoc criminal courts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and began trying individuals, especially state leaders, accused of violating human rights. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith explain, for instance, that Michael Ignatieff called the post–Cold War decade of the 1990s the decade of human rights since, for him, “human rights [had] become the dominant moral vocabulary in foreign affairs” (2004: 1). They note, though, that it was also the decade of life narratives. In Human Rights and Narrated Lives, they argue that these two developments are not epiphenomenal but rather, “multidimensional domains that merge and intersect at critical points, unfolding within and enfolding one another in an ethical relationship” (2004: 2). Thus, one view of literature and human rights suggests that, starting in the 1970s, there was clear and direct attention to the connections among human rights, literature, and personal stories, as well as to the ways in which these connections emerge out of geopolitical contexts. Following that, we note that by the 1990s, the production of life narratives – especially memoirs – had become a central, if not ubiquitous, feature of human rights campaigns – one that, according to Schaffer and Smith, often played a major role in both public advocacy and in the “business” of rights. The next turn in the trajectory might be noted in the work of James Dawes, who argues in an essay drawn from his 2007 book That the World May Know that
human rights work is, at its heart, a matter of storytelling. Many of the most recognizable organizations that intervene in humanitarian crises do so in large part by using language instead of food, medicine, or weapons; the most important act of rescue for them is not delivering supplies but asking questions, evaluating answers, and pleading with those of us who observe from a distance.
(Dawes 2007: 394)
Dawes finds, then, that storytelling provides the fundamental vocabulary and forms of rights work.
We can tell this story a different way, though, specifically through a postcolonial, global lens that notices the connections between literature and rights in the struggles for social justice that have happened outside of, or directly in opposition to, western norms, western aesthetics, and western vocabularies. Tracing the components of that trajectory is too complex for such a brief introduction, but let’s begin by noting that all of the examples of literary scholars working in human rights cited above take a far more global view than the one offered by historians, like Moyn, who look specifically for the term “human rights” to appear in printed speech.
For Moyn, the ascendancy of international human rights marks the failure of postcoloniality as a political process. Perhaps ironically, Moyn’s conclusion (and focus on 1977) dovetails with postcolonial – understood here as a theoretical approach rather than a geopolitical formation – approaches to human rights. If the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 may be said to provide a major catalyst to the development of this field of study, then Said’s lifelong engagement as a humanist scholar and a human rights activist also bears further consideration. At the end of the essay, “Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire Builders,” Said reasserted his call for a new or critical humanism as “the only and I would go so far as saying the final resistance we have against inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history” (2004). The idea that humanism – in the form of critical consciousness, particularly in its capacity for transdisciplinary readings of literature and culture – might provide a bulwark against human wrongs is at once central to the intellectual legacy of Said and to many critiques of human rights. Because of and beyond his importance to the field of postcolonial studies, Said’s call for a critical humanism also raises larger questions about the intersecting genealogies of postcolonial studies and human rights literary criticism.
Said’s new humanism has been the subject of much scholarly attention, largely devoted to critiquing humanism – new and old – for its association with Eurocentrism and colonialism, while admiring Said’s own far-reaching intellect and committed activism. Writing as a former student, admirer, and critic of Said, R. Radhakrishnan, for example, notes, “Said is asking […] for a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of literature and cultural texts, i.e., a reading that will acknowledge the complicity of culture in matters of empire and political power without at the same reducing the aesthetic to the political” (2007: 15). Radhakrishnan takes Said’s lifelong work on behalf of Palestinian nationalism in concert with his theoretical disavowal of “the claims of nationalism” as an example of the “necessary” inconsistencies within his approach (Radhakrishnan 2008: 147, 25). At the same time, Radhakrishnan insists that humanism in its various iterations masquerades its ideological priorities, “disallows the possibilities of heterogeneous critique,” and refuses to investigate fully the “human” at its core (2007: 18). When he writes “that racism and colonialism and anti-Semitism and patriarchy have all been versions of humanism, although it can be added that these -isms are chapters in the long and unending book called The Historical Progress of Humanism through Civilization and Barbarism” (Radhakrishnan 2008: 149–50), it is easy to add human rights to the ur-text. Indeed, he insists later, “only those groups, nations, and collectivities that have enjoyed dominance have secured for themselves the right to talk about rights in a universally prescriptive manner” (2008: 212). Many other scholars, in postcolonial studies and other fields, have similarly underscored how the paradoxes within the structure and concepts of rights not only reflect their liberal roots, but also predict their unequal application. However, we note the significance of the codevelopment of postcolonial and human rights literary studies in addition to the ways in which a postcolonial approach demands recognition of alternative discourses of rights and issues valuable critiques.
This more global, postcolonial view recognizes that the phrase “human rights” is not a necessary indication that the concept of human rights is being deployed. Of course we can look for translations, such as “droits des hommes” or “derechos humanos,” but such an approach is too limited to catch the multiple ways that literature and human rights have interacted, intersected, and built on one another. Each instance of colonization was counteracted by modes of resistance and storytelling of that resistance, but many of these literary examples were specifically rendered in idioms designed to be unintelligible to colonizing powers.
What we note, in general terms, is that the story of literature and rights that emerges in the global, postcolonial context still largely features the personal narrative, but that the key registers significantly shift. Beginning in the Latin American context with colonial stories of witnessing, such as that of the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, these stories emphasize the link between truth-telling and the literary, and this is why they are so often studied alongside genres like the slave narrative. The use of literature as a vehicle for human rights advocacy is at once a way to illuminate the humanity of the speaking subject as it is a mode of reflecting a true “story” that has been erased by official “history.” Literature functions as a source of truth and of struggle, thereby challenging the presumed western overemphasis on history as a claim to authenticity. This was the case with the most well-known nonwestern human rights literary genre, that of the testimonio.
Scholarly attention to these patterns, though, does have an interesting intersection with the framework described above. Arguably the real burst of literary studies of nonwestern human rights texts emerges in relation to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the 1960s independence movements of Africa, the rise of dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and Africa, and the launch of subaltern studies, which was founded in the 1980s in South Asia. In these cases, the personal story, too, became a defining genre, but again it was inflected by a deep urge to bear witness and to offer alternatives to official history. This is why the testimonio held a distinct aesthetic from that of the personal story. And it offered literary scholars ample opportunity to explore the particular features of this human rights genre. As John Beverley famously explained in 1989,
[b]y testimonio I mean a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a “life” or a significant life experience. Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of the following categories, some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir, confession, diary, interview, eyewitness report, life history, novela-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or “factographic” literature […] . This situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, and so on.
(1989: 11–12)
Besides the urge to map a new literary genre related to, but distinct from, other forms of life writing, what is noteworthy in Beverley’s description of the testimonio is the absence of the term “human rights” as a descriptor of the problems of repression the genre identified. Foundational texts on the testimonio genre like John Gugelberger’s edited volume The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America reference the phrase rarely – in the case of Gugelberger’s volume, only nine times, and this often in relation to the specific names of organizations and commissions. This same pattern holds for scholars working on postcolonial forms of human rights–oriented life writing from outside of Latin America as well. Thus, the scholars who analyzed postcolonial literature interestingly often worked specifically on genres directly connected to human rights, even though the term appeared less often in their scholarly work. The big shift would take place in the 1990s with the increased implementation of truth commissions that created opportunities for scholars to directly connect the work of human rights organizations with literature, but as shown above with Gugelberger’s text, which appeared in the late 1990s, it has been the case that many postcolonial scholars work on the topic of human rights without necessarily referencing the specific term.
How, then, do we understand the work of scholars working on literature and human rights who do not use the phrase “human rights”? Is it legitimate to categorize research in terms its authors avoid? Or can we even say that such an approach makes sense? Peter de Bolla invites the kind of expansive reading of human rights we offer here, through his analysis of human rights as a cultural concept. Such a tack is what might be understood as a third way to think about the ties between literature and human rights. De Bolla proposes in The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights that a teleological study of human rights and literature is insufficient, because it does not give adequate attention to how the concept developed unevenly and nonlinearly over time and in distinct contexts. As de Bolla explains, “Concepts activate and support cognitive processing and enable us to sense that we have arrived at understanding” (2013: 4). De Bolla is less interested in the singular appearance of a term than he is of its idea and circulation, and indeed his project is to provide an analysis of the concept of human rights as a “cultural entity” that indicates it is not just individuals but also culture that “has ways of thinking” (2013: 40, 31). Although de Bolla’s research concerns eighteenth-century Anglophone texts, his approach speaks to the existence of constellations of concepts and vocabularies, in any given context, that might provide a point of comparison with familiar discourses of human rights.
These approaches to understanding the story of literature and human rights are only a few of many possible ways to think through these connections. In fact, as many of the chapters in this volume show, the field of literature and human rights continues to develop and explore new critical avenues as one of its constant interdisciplinary features. One advantage to thinking about human rights in and through literature is that such a tactic illuminates when a text has offered the idea of human rights without the idiom. It allows scholars in the field to avoid an overdetermined emphasis on western productions of meaning as the only places where rights-thinking has taken place. Rather than seek a defining moment, then, such a project allows us to consider the intersections of particular historical events, specific documents, and the figurative thinking that is at the heart of literary communication.
From facts to circumstances: on the organization of this volume
To close this introduction, we would like to briefly outline four key sets of questions that are constantly a part of human rights advocacy, law, policy, public perception, and cultural representation: these questions concern the subjects, forms, contexts, and impacts of human rights. These four notions denote avenues of inquiry – which also align with specific reading practices – that define the structure of this book, and we aim to show that each depends in very specific ways on humanities research. Moreover, all four engage the material, ethical, and political valences of human rights as they manifest in cultural production. One of the core anxieties in human rights writing is the tension between the need to report, to demonstrate authenticity, and to bear witness versus the literary urge to develop empathy, to coax the imagination, and to offer the catharsis of expression. These two contrasting sets of impulses are often understood to be in conflict in human rights literature. Is the text meant to be true? Or is it meant to be meaningful? And can it be both? Can the text intervene directly in real world events and have an impact? Or is it profoundly personal, intimate, and ephemeral?
In essence, the debate is over human rights literature as truth-telling, as a representation of truth-telling, or as something imaginary that bears only a distant relation to juridical evidence. The problem for human rights literature scholars has been the difficulty of navigating the conflicting ways in which the literary might represent human rights and of charting how the cultural expression of human rights matters outside of the world of the text. To state the problem slightly differently, it is the difficulty of attempting to navigate what can often appear like a binary opposition between fact and fiction. Too often those of us who work between court reports, truth commission hearings, witness testimony, and poetry, plays, and novels find ourselves drawn to translate the knowledge produced by the literary into the fact-based vernacular that dominates much human rights discourse. But what if this were not the right approach at all? What if rather than prove that the humanities offer key insights into the realities of human rights struggles we should work the other way? What if there were a specific value in the qualitative approach of the humanities? What we argue is that there is a unique benefit to the study of the messy, unquantifiable category of circumstances over facts.
Of course, the facts of atrocity are crucial. Human rights advocacy depends on the key information derived from journalism’s foundational questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how – often referred to as the five Ws and one H. The core concept behind journalism’s five Ws and one H is the notion that a report on the truth answers each of these key questions, providing necessary facts for the reader. The same basic principles apply to police investigations, military interrogations, and legal proceedings. Following this, the investigator must determine all of the primary facts in each case. The idea is that there is one clear answer to each of these questions and that it is the task of the journalist, interrogator, or prosecutor to get to the concrete answer. One can imagine all of the extremely valuable ways such a line of inquiry could serve in the struggles over human rights, since having answers to these questions would appear to offer all the key evidence needed to adjudicate a rights claim.
The problem, though, is that such an approach by itself misses the larger complex contexts for rights struggles and assumes that the answer to rights dilemmas is to be found in the facts, rather than in the circumstances. It also misses the ways that facts themselves may be disputed and are always already part of a larger story, needing narrative, imagination, and conjecture to make sense. This, then, is why it becomes useful to draw on the history of humanities scholarship in the study of human rights. Few recall that the five Ws and one H that frame journalism and interrogation have a deeper history. In fact, those very questions were derived from ethical philosophy, specifically from Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. In that text, Aristotle outlines a set of seven circumstances by which to judge human acts. The question for Aristotle was: what information would one need to assess the ethics of an individual’s behavior? He arrived at seven categories of information, which he referred to as “circumstances,” since it was understood that they did not have easy, concrete answers: (1) circumstance of person, (2) circumstance of quality of the act, (3) circumstance of place, (4) circumstance of helps or influences, (5) circumstance of intention, (6) circumstance of mode or manner, (7) circumstance of time. While many misattribute the origin of the “Seven Circumstances” to Hermagoras of Temnos and then follow Cicero’s revision of it, the specific history of that trajectory is less important to us here than the idea that there is a significant difference between inquiry guided by a search to better understand the seven circumstances and the fact-finding mission behind the five Ws and one H. It is important to remember that starting with Aristotle and moving through classical legal philosophy to medieval theology, scholars have long sought to identify the ethics of actions. And they have known that ascertaining the truth is a necessary step towards ethical judgment. But what is interesting to uncover in this history is the notion that the original efforts to map out the key questions one would ask were well aware of the difficulties of offering an easy answer. The question “who?”, for instance, might simply reveal a name, which for an interrogator might be all that is sought. But for the humanist the name is only part of the circumstance of the person. Negotiating the information offered by both the name and the circumstance of the one that bears the name is a primary task of humanist inquiry. What we want to suggest is that the humanities can foreground the seven circumstances in human rights contexts in order to enhance and complicate the six fact-based questions.
When circumstances frame questions of human rights, they highlight the idea that any relevant details will need to be understood as a relationship of ideas, rather than only as a clear-cut set of evidence. The circumstances, then, are topoi, or topics, that cluster groups of ideas together, but it may be more useful to follow de Bolla and think of these as the circumstances related to the concept of human rights. As de Bolla explains:
[I]f one is interested in the history of ideas, of how we come to think of certain things the way we do, where things refers not to concrete objects but to abstractions, a theory of concepts, or at least a more detailed account of how concepts are formed and operate over time and how they function in particular local instances of thinking, would be useful.
(2013: 1)
But there is more at stake. Human rights violations are thought of not only as concepts but also as claims. They refer in specific ways to particular rights grievances. They take place in time and space. They are committed by humans toward other humans. Each act has intentions, influences, and modes of action. It is in the apparent disjuncture between the concept and the claim that the difference between the empirical inquiry of the five Ws and one H and the qualitative study of the seven circumstances clearly emerges. Both the six fact-based questions and the seven circumstances are grounded in the notion that asking good questions is at the heart of the search for knowledge, but the embedded sense of relationality, complexity, and cultural nuance that follows from the seven circumstances can get lost in the apparently calculating set of empirical questions that constitute the five Ws (and one H). It is a mistake, however, to see these two sets of information seeking as fundamentally oppositional. The circumstances do not signal an abandonment of the empirical, and they do not deny the need to make a claim, but they do acknowledge the difficulty in pinning down the facts. The pull of both concept and claim may at once undermine the coherence of the category of human rights while offering human rights resonant power as a juridical and discursive frame. As Frederick Cooper explains, “The notion of ‘rights’ is not the only way of doing politics, but it is an important one precisely because the articulation of a right is the making of a transcendent claim, going beyond the give-and-take of a particular political situation” (2012: 474).
This, then, is where the humanities steps in to help make greater sense of human rights – its conceptual inconsistencies, political applications, and lasting claim on the imagination. And this is why we have chosen to organize the volume in a way that puts pressure on the typical, journalistic categories used to structure humanities work on human rights. Rather than lean back toward the empirical as the answer to critiques of humanist human rights scholarship as overly invested in abstract theory or imaginative aesthetics, we have purposefully refused the binary between the quantitative and the qualitative for the simple reason that human rights research demands it to be so. We recognize that human rights are always both an idea and an act. And one where, as de Bolla points out, the concept itself is always in a process of transformation that may or may not be easily named.
To this end, we have replaced the “who” of human rights with a part on the subjects with chapters that investigate the circumstances of the person, the development of the concept of the rights-bearing person, and the messy question of who counts as a bearer of rights and by whom. A second part takes up “what” and “how” by looking into the forms of human rights expression. Here authors read literarily for the ways in which the media, forms, styles, and genres of human rights representation shape their content and circulation. The third part moves beyond traditional categories of geography and temporality to include the variable contexts of human rights advocacy, discourses, and violations, thereby taking up the familiar questions of “where” and “when,” but in a more open-ended interest in both the occasions and the locations within which we understand, redefine, and recognize human rights and their representations. The last part engages with questions of power and practice by focusing on the impacts of human rights and literature, blending, as it were, questions of intention (why?) with those of influence and power. This last part highlights a key circumstance omitted in the five Ws and one H – that of the circumstances of helps and influence. It could easily be argued that ignoring that question is exactly what is wrong with neglecting the contributions of humanities thought when interrogating questions of rights.
These sections also speak to the central paradoxes of rights since by framing them this way we are likely to open up more questions than offer answers. As many of the chapters in this volume show, the ongoing complication for the study of human rights literature is the interrogation of the various representational strategies available to defend or destroy rights and the material bodies these representational forms purport to reflect. These are not merely abstract ideas and they do affect bodies that matter, to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase, but without some sense of the role that the abstract plays, a key part of the story remains missing. One of the specters that haunts human rights humanist scholarship is the problem of relevance, of scholarship operating in and for the “real” world, of the tension between scholarship and activism. This, of course, will always be an uneasy relationship, one that not only cannot easily be resolved, but also likely never should be. Nonetheless, we find that the stories we tell ourselves as readers or practitioners necessitate critical reading practices that lie at the heart of the humanities and of literary scholarship.
The chapters and parts that follow in no way exhaust all of the rich and complex ways that human rights stories have been narrated, visualized, and otherwise communicated; however, they offer readers a wide range of styles, forms, and genres through which to think about the complicated connections between the forms of human rights literature and our ideas of rights. In addition, readers will note that many of the chapters could easily fit into and inform more than one part. We invite readers to read thematically across the parts. Whereas no single volume can provide a comprehensive guide to or survey of this active and vigorous field of study, we hope that each chapter contributes substantively to the scholarly conversation and prompts additional questions for its future, and that the volume as a whole offers the best map of the field to date.
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