The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Bringing Human Rights to Bear in American Literature

Crystal Parikh

The travels and fate of human rights with respect to American literature and culture have been characterized by distance and disavowal. Human rights are regularly understood to be that which others, elsewhere (almost invariably, victims in the Global South) are in need of, and which – sometimes – Americans deliver unto them, whether in the guise of humanitarian NGOs, religious missionary enterprises, or military interventions. Back at home, throughout the twentieth century, human rights remained a largely inoperative question, with little purchase in legal discourse, political struggle, or American literary and cultural studies. As might be readily apparent, this disparity has much to do with American exceptionalism (i.e., the enduring belief that the United States proves a singular and superior nation, especially where rights, liberties, and democracy are concerned), which has defined not only how commercial culture and mainstream media represent the nation, but the critical lenses through which scholars approach the relevance of human rights to US culture and politics.

After all, the institution of the international human rights regime with which we are most familiar, particularly in regards to the founding of the United Nations, took place in the cataclysmic postwar reorganization of great power relations and ascendance of the United States (along with the Soviet Union) as a military and economic superpower. As publisher Henry Luce argued in his influential Life magazine essay in 1941, Americans had an obligation “to defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world” and to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit” (1941 [1999]: 160, 165). According to a logic that came to define the long “American century,” Luce described a US-led internationalism harnessed to a unique national character, that shared “with all peoples … our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution … . It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people” (1941 [1999]: 169).

Since then, the self-image and corresponding statecraft of American exceptionalism has been rooted in, and expressed as, a myriad of realist, cultural, institutional, and political dimensions of national life (Ignatieff 2005: 11–20). Especially with regards to institutions such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, American exceptionalism manifests as “exemptionalism” (i.e., it refuses to ratify any number of “core” human rights treaties), double standards, and failure to abide by those treaties and agreements to which it does sign on (Ignatieff 2005: 4–11; Lewis 2008: 123). Within domestic jurisprudence, a regular resistance to extranational legal sources evinces an American rights culture and “a broad popular sentiment that the land of Jefferson and Lincoln has nothing to learn about rights from any other country” (Ignatieff 2005: 8). Less readily apparent, but equally pressing, is how often American resistance to submitting to international legal norms, even those it helped define and negotiate, served to maintain the racial “color line” around which so much American domestic life has been organized.

This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the history of the “domestic jurisdiction” clause in the Preamble of the UN Charter. Inserted by US advisor John Foster Dulles in the United Nation’s founding document, this crucial language deemed: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter” (Normand and Zaidi 2007: 135–36). In insisting that the clause was a non-negotiable precondition for the United States to sign on to the Charter, Dulles principally satisfied a Congressional Southern bloc vexed by the possibility that UN membership would imperil Jim Crow segregation (Anderson 2008: 91–93; Lewis 2008: 118). I highlight this particular episode to underscore that – insofar as the domestic jurisdiction clause has functionally limited the application of human rights principles, and scholars and activists alike have identified it as the source of the United Nations’ “failure to act” in countless instances of international crimes and atrocities ever since – despite leading the charge in its formation, the United States effectively vitiated the practicability of the United Nations and its various human rights instruments (Moyn 2010: 59). And, even more damningly, it did so in good part to maintain the legal and social order of white supremacy at home.

Although more recently political liberals have confidently proposed that “[t]his dire historical experience may now be over” (Ignatieff 2005: 19), the US state has always had its legal and social fictions by which to justify its “disappearance” of the humanity of other lives. Because the liberal American democratic project has been intertwined with a tradition in which white men of property determine who is and is not fit for self-government, both domestic and global integration into a liberal democratic order has always been informed by social and cultural assumptions about what type of subject, in the United States and in other parts of the world, has the capacity to be, or to become, the rights-bearing person of modern liberalism (Singh 2004: 37; Melamed 2011: 58; Weiner 2006: 1–11). As Lisa Marie Cacho argues with respect to her conception of “racialized rightlessness,” which renders specific groups “ineligible for personhood,” these are not only “people who occupy legally vulnerable and criminalized statuses,” but who are “imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists” in the first place: “Certain populations’ very humanity is represented as something one becomes or achieves, that one must earn because it cannot just be” (2012: 5–6).

Undoubtedly, for several decades now, many critics in American literary and cultural studies have grappled with and shrewdly refuted American exceptionalism and assessed its often-injurious impact in the world beyond the borders of the United States. There has emerged within American Studies a trenchant critique of how often human rights discourses and humanitarian campaigns are deployed, whether cynically or in earnest, to rationalize and shore up the hegemony of American internationalism over the long haul of the “American century.” At the same time, scholars have focused on the egregious and now well-known US violations of international human rights law and laws of war. In this line of inquiry, literary scholars have excoriated what Elizabeth S. Anker calls the “human rights bestseller,” those contemporary narratives that “marshal many well-rehearsed conventions of imperialist discourse, along with paternalist conjectures about the need of the ‘Third World’ for salvation through recourse to the very values that those conventions smuggle in” (2012: 35). Serving as “apologias for humanitarian intervention,” these well-known texts – including Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea (2007) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), amongst many others – serve as “imaginary stave[s] against late imperial decline,” with little “sincere concern for the postcolonial lives” they portray (Anker 2012: 35, 45).

Such critiques are certainly well-positioned to unmask the self-serving and contradictory exceptionalism of American humanitarian rhetoric or so-called “human rights talk,” not least insofar as such discourses arrive as “part and parcel of the US desire to establish neoliberal economic dominance across as much of the world as possible” (Bové 2002: 171). But they tend also to obviate the forms of recognition or standing that human rights politics – and human rights as politics – make available, or seek to make available, for subjects who are, in Hannah Arendt’s famous words, “nothing but human,” for whom “no law exists” (1951: 376). The “bare life” of human rights mostly worried Arendt and many other critical observers, precisely because it designates human life to which no political community (i.e., nation-state) offers formal recognition and therefore protection, depriving it of political belonging and agency. Yet if literature participates in what Jacques Rancière terms the “redistribution of the perceptible,” by introducing “new objects and subjects onto the common stage,” it might offer an arena in which “those who don’t count make themselves count” (2011: 4, 40, my emphasis). A human rights approach to American literature seeks out precisely those subjects left wanting or made impossible despite and by the very “natural” and “universal” norms that characterize American exceptionalism.

Moreover, human rights norms articulate bare life to positive conceptions of “good life” too, i.e., robust forms of personhood beyond the mere absence of devastating violence and extreme forms of deprivation. As such, a human rights approach enables us to ask about the domestic and international value and distribution of American good life, which unrelentingly heralds possessive individualism, affluent consumerism, and the transcendence of social and cultural limits as universal ideals. That is to say, scholars insist that human rights comprise an indivisible panoply, such that the conceptual distinctions between “negative” and “positive” rights and those of first-, second-, and third-generation rights should not be mistaken as constituting any real and practical differences in human life. Political and civil rights, such as the right to free expression, depend upon social and economic rights (e.g., the right to education), as well as cultural ones. It is therefore less helpful for us to designate a body of texts as a “human rights literature” than to devise a human rights approach that unlocks political claims for thinking “the human” and its “good life” in terms that exceed conventional imaginaries.

We might take two of our most prominent contemporary American writers, Junot Díaz and Dave Eggers, as case studies in the cultural politics that a human rights approach materializes. Eggers’s What Is the What (2006), the hybrid “autobiographical novel” (as indicated by the text’s subtitle) of Valentino Achak Deng, a former Sudanese “Lost Boy” living in the United States, most readily seems to fit the liberal criteria of a “human rights bestseller.” Indeed, most of the secondary criticism available for What Is the What addresses precisely the related themes of trauma, humanitarianism, refugee displacement, and human rights (notwithstanding that most critics also recognize the text to be reworking the testimonial form that typifies the genre, such that Eggers issues an incisive “posthumanist critique” of voguish “misery lit”) (Peek 2012; Twitchell 2011). However, rather than simply attempting to demarcate a canon of human rights bestsellers or humanitarian literature, a human rights methodology might also raise central questions regarding human vulnerability, belonging, and security in Eggers’ groundbreaking and astoundingly popular first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). In particular, I suggest, it is through the internationally recognized norm of “the right to family” that we might articulate a potent critique of the race and gender hierarchies by which social and economic security are or are not made available in the United States.

A number of human rights instruments stipulate the human right to family; for example, Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights observes: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” (1948). The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child likewise obligates states to respect family unity, except where it threatens the security of the child, which it is also meant to protect. Yet these documents hardly impart anything like a unified definition of family, and, indeed, as legal scholars have noted:

In order to protect the rights of all family members adequately, international law must be both sufficiently flexible to accommodate a wide range of different family structures and values, while simultaneously enshrining universally-agreed upon minimum standards on the rights of those family members.

(Van Bueren 1995: 734)

Even as “[f]amily life is perceived as being a product of its historical time and its culture,” human rights norms accordingly recognize the family as a crucial site where “care” (potentially) takes place, as individuals foster affective, psychological, and bodily well-being in the name of intimacy, love, or duty (Van Bueren 1995: 736). In narrating the loss of family life, Eggers – and Díaz – contemplate the variable but incontrovertible forms of precarity to which the vulnerable human is subject without such care.

Eggers’s poignant memoir is preoccupied with the conditions that make family life viable, as he recounts the deaths of both his parents within weeks of one another and his new ensuing responsibility, at the age of 21, for his 8-year-old brother, Toph. With its experimental blend of fractured and self-reflexive postmodern narrative form and confessional content, the text’s striking achievement, as most reviewers and critics observe, is its ability to simultaneously skewer sentimental expectations regarding the representation of such devastating loss, while nevertheless imparting the tremendous uncertainty and vulnerability under which the brothers live. The first chapter of A Heartbreaking Work intertwines a detailed portrait of the Eggers’ family house in a Chicago suburb with an account of his mother’s decline and his father’s sudden death, both from cancer. He describes, for example, the wallpaper that “could not be uglier” and which serves as “evidence of a family with no pressing interest in addressing obvious problems of décor, and also proof of a happy time, an exuberant, fanciful time in American history that spawned exuberant and fanciful wallpaper” (Eggers 2000: 6). It is a house that, like the family it shelters, does not quite live up to the decorous expectations regarding happiness and the good life that its suburban neighbors might harbor.

Nevertheless, the siblings are able, after both parents have died, to sell the house and finance their move to northern California, where the next chapter opens and most of the narrative takes place. To be sure, the forms of protection and security the elder Eggers (Dave, but also his brother Bill and sister Beth) are charged with providing for Toph become extremely tenuous after their parents’ deaths. The third chapter begins with an “enemies list” that is “growing quickly, unabated” with all those who threaten the brothers’ relationship to one another:

… that idiot in the van, who backed over our little Civic, with both of us in it … that gaunt and severe woman on the BART … who sat across from us, kept looking over her book at us, disapproving as I rested my feet on Toph’s lap, like I was a molester – And the secretary at school, with her blaming look at me when he’s late for school – … And the owners of the Berkeley hills sublet, who kept our deposit citing (or claiming) damage to just about everything in the house. And most of all, those real estate people. Cruel, vicious, subhuman. Those fuckers were unbelievable.

(2000: 71–72)

Realizing the “dingy reality of our new lives,” which are in a state of “decline,” Eggers poses landlords and real estate agents as especially menacing to his irregular family. But if we are disinclined to see the two brothers at the heart of the memoir as human rights subjects, it is because the inheritance left them by their parents (the house, built in the postwar heyday of white flight into the good life of American suburbs, as well as the Social Security income Toph collects) garners some degree of the social and economic security and the right to (remain a) family they enjoy across the plot, despite Dave’s agonizing that social services might take Toph away from him. The parents’ legacy guards against the harshest forms of insecurity that might otherwise plague them. Indeed, such financial and physical security at once marks them as figures of resilient American personhood, resourceful and endearing as they stumble through a tragic loss for which they are considered innocent.

In contrast, Yunior and Rafa, the brothers who appear throughout Junot Díaz’s short story collections Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), are depicted in alternately humorous, distressing, and (especially when, in the latter text, we learn that Rafa eventually dies of cancer) pitiful terms, but are hardly posed as innocent or easy objects of sympathetic identification. Yet, lest this lack of innocence be conflated with the “flat character” of criminality so readily ascribed to young black and brown men, Díaz also continually rewrites the brothers, recasting them from their boyhood and into young adulthood so often that they come to seem to be contradictory, if not altogether heterogenous characters every time they are encountered, whether in the New York metropolitan area or in the Dominican Republic. The critical reception of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her has accordingly focused on the complex formation of diasporic Dominican masculinity, especially in relation to the boys’ father, Ramón. While Ramón remains mostly absent in their stories (and when present often physically abusive and emotionally distant towards his sons), Díaz also (again in Anker’s terms) “fleshes” the father out, even as his character is always narrated by others (Díaz 2012: 71). For example, the final chapter of Drown narrates Ramón’s arrival for the first time in the United States, and in “Otravida, Otravez” from This Is How You Lose Her, one of Ramón’s lovers tells of her affair with him and of his struggle to buy a house in the United States for his family who remain in Santo Domingo.

In Díaz’s stories, the internationally and racially uneven distribution of social and economic resources, and the heteropatriarchal norms that shape and constrain the development of Yunior and Rafa, render his characters’ right to family profoundly precarious. Where the state does offer minimal support to Yunior’s fragile family unit, these same young men experience it as charity that detracts from their manhood, and the local drug economy appears to them a more viable and ultimately respectable option to provide for those they love (as does Yunior in “Aurora” and in the title story “Drown”). Thus, in the midst of the fragmented family romance of Drown, a teenaged Yunior offers a primer, narrated in the second person, on “How To Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” (Díaz 1996: 141–49). While the story leads “you” through the varying intricacies involved in seducing women from divergent racial and class backgrounds, it is framed with the opening instruction to “clear the government cheese from the refrigerator,” to “[l]eave yourself a reminder to get it out before morning or your moms will kick your ass,” and the closing directive to “[p]ut the government cheese back in its place before your moms kills you” (1996: 143, 149). Yunior’s bravado is undercut by the state provisions, which embarrass him even as his family remains dependent on them. The story calls to mind the vulnerability shared by each of Díaz’s and Eggers’ young men, all subject to the emotional, social, and physical insecurity that the loss of family and family life entails, even as the sources of that vulnerability would be ascribed in starkly different terms by official state and popular media discourses.

Like Eggers, Díaz’s œuvre includes another work of prose fiction that seems to hew more closely to conventional human rights concerns and humanitarian violence, namely, his 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Oscar Wao seems to return the humanitarian gaze to what American exceptionalism has long deemed the proper object of such critique, insofar as it deals, at least in part, with the repressive authoritarian regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, abuses of police power, and the corruption of state officials in the postcolonial nation. While, in the United States, the title character Oscar Wao might be, like any number of boys who populate the comic and science fiction fanworlds in which Oscar is immersed, a nerdy, overweight social outcast, it is in the Dominican Republic that he, and his family before him, face the murderous violence of state power and the impunity with which it is carried out. But Oscar Wao also introjects, once again, the character of Yunior as one of its narrators. Yunior’s recurring appearance might ask us to read humanitarian violence so easily located in novels like Oscar Wao and What Is the What, where the subject of human rights can only be known in the negative – his personhood eradicated in the Global South or salvaged and wholly remade by American citizenship in the United States – alongside the vulnerability and insecurity that nevertheless pervades A Heartbreaking Work, Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her.

In other words, a human rights politics challenges us to articulate the historical and structural relations between social and economic (in)security in the United States and the spectacular “crimes against humanity” that always seem to be occurring only elsewhere. (This is pointedly the case in the Dominican Republic, given decades-long military and economic involvement, and the support of Trujillo’s dictatorship, by the United States throughout the twentieth century.) The racialized forms of rightlessness and social endurance that American literature recovers through such disavowed histories, entanglements, and knowledges might, in turn, direct us towards alternative or more expansive conceptions of the good life. A human rights method also then locates these works of American literature according to the coordinates of a newly deterritorialized “planetary” terrain of literature that a host of critics, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003) and Wai Chee Dimock (2006), have conceived from older notions of “world literature.” As Dimock writes, when read “through other continents,” the category of “American literature” comes to name a “complex tangle of relations” and is best seen, not as a “discrete entity,” but as

a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures. These are input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment – connective tissues binding America to the rest of the world. Active on both ends, they thread American texts into the topical events of other cultures, while also threading the long durations of those cultures into the short chronology of the United States.

(2006: 3)

If, in Henry Luce’s terms, it is “our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution” that have been brought to other peoples in other places under the auspices of American internationalism, a human rights method brings to bear “other geographies, other languages and cultures” on the nation that has too long “excepted” and “exempted” itself from a shared humanity.