The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Hanna Musiol

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women-of-color … . Thus we need teorías that will enable us to interpret what happens in the world … . Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries – new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods.

(Anzaldúa 1990: xxv)

Can the “Other” of Philosophy speak?

(Butler 2004: 232)

The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the [defiant] oppressed of the earth … is the cultural bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s beliefs in their names, in their language, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.

(Ngũgĩ 2004: 3)

Human rights theory is often blamed for being inadequate, for translating poorly into political action that can redress human rights violations. However, the critics of the United Nations (UN) universalist human rights regime see a direct relationship between theory and political action (Weizman 2012; Santos 2007; Hopgood 2013). They argue that international human rights derive in large part from western legal and philosophical epistemologies, that is, theories of rights, the human, and property that stand in stark contrast to epistemologies of rights and liberty that emanate from, for example, aboriginal decolonizing or queer communities around the globe (Weizman 2012; Santos 2007; Moyn 2012: 84–85). In other words, UN-supported international human rights aspire to find an all-inclusive formula of rights for all, but, as Stephen Hopgood provocatively argues, “[w]ith no shared identity, concrete interests (beyond the abstract ‘bodily and mental integrity’), or socioeconomic circumstances, there cannot be one [human rights] movement” (2013: 96).

Theories that enable current international humanitarianism are thus often seen as part of the “cultural bomb” that disempowers precisely those subjects whose rights it aims to ascertain (Ngũgĩ 2004: 3). What rights are and how we define the human are central concerns in human rights theory across fields (Sarat and Kearns 2002; Butler 2004; Douzinas 2007), but the geopolitical location of human rights theory – what counts as a theory and where it is generated – commands less attention (Anzaldúa 1990: xv–xxviii). Where does human rights theory come from? Where does human rights theory circulate, geospatially and in terms of media, and how does it affect human beings differentially around the globe? This chapter addresses these interrelated problems by focusing on the location of human rights – the sites of production of human rights theory and the genres in which human rights theory circulates – and on the relationship between geospatially situated human rights theory, new media, and literature.

Human rights regime

Articulated by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and later consolidated on the international scale as the domain of the UN and NATO, human rights have become an indispensable tool in international law and politics. Yet, its humanitarian rhetoric often obscures its alignment with the interests of the most powerful state and corporate regimes. For instance, the 2001 NATO-supported intervention and the ensuing war in Afghanistan called “Operation Enduring Freedom” as well as the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea have both been described as humanitarian interventions undertaken to protect women’s and ethnic minorities’ rights, respectively. Like national power-players, corporate actors also routinely deploy human rights rhetoric to gain the support of international communities and markets. In such mainstream international form, the “human rights empire” (Hopgood 2013: 119–41), the UN-centered regime, serves less to enable people’s “social emancipation” (Santos 2007: vii) than to strengthen hegemonic state and corporate control, often reinscribing the gendered and racialized neocolonial spheres of influence. Eyal Weizman argues that in this context, the “moderation of violence” has become the core mission of the international human rights (2012: 3), depending on an arbitrary disapproval of some kinds of violence only in some geopolitical sites. For example, LGBT rights violations in Uganda are swiftly condemned by the international community as human rights abuses (Harris and Pomper 2014), but child labor and environmental violence perpetrated by tobacco companies in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia are not (Bader 2014; Human Rights Watch 2014). This relative silence of international human rights on the relationship between human rights and the “slow violence” of economic and environmental exploitation is particularly troubling (Nixon 2011).

The failures of the current international human rights regime therefore do not simply result from the disjuncture between perfect, universal, and aspirational human rights law and the imperfect enforcement of the universal justice such laws aspire to, but have to do with theory, or more specifically with what Chela Sandoval calls the “apartheid of theoretical domains” (2000: 67). Who the we who conceptualize rights are, whom we theorize as social subjects who can claim rights, and how we define human rights, agency, violence, and victimhood underpin cultural and legal human rights norms in the first place. And while it is common knowledge that human rights are theorized differently in different fields – in philosophy, political science, law, or the humanities – the geopolitical terrain of human rights theory and its always racialized, gendered, and classed global geography, and the medium in which theory is allowed to take place, are often neglected. Yet if most globally circulated theories of human rights (policy, after all, is theory in motion, in translation, and in practice, so to speak) emerge from within very few geopolitical locations that occupy the most powerful econo-political and cultural position in the region, such theories are bound to reflect local understandings of rights. Boaventura de Sousa Santos defines this process of monopolization of human rights as globalization of “localisms” (2007: 7), that is, the process through which one culture dominates and monopolizes rights discourse, turning its own local norms into “false universalisms” (2007: viii). Such a global “standard” of rights ends up marginalizing other equally important, but often contradictory, concepts of human dignity embedded in, for instance, local customary practices, epistemologies, and cultural norms (see Indigenous Affairs 2010). Since theorists unaffiliated with the world’s key educational, cultural, and political institutions, writing in native languages, or producing theory in other media, are rarely featured in global human rights discourse, human rights theory fails to become “a cosmopolitan, counterhegemonic” force of global reach (Santos 2007: 11). For some, the location of the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court in Europe only epitomizes the spatial concentration of human rights’ theoretical and institutional capital in the Global North. The differential approach to the prosecutions of international human rights violations taking place outside of Europe and North America leads critics of international human rights to see it “as a forum in which the North put the countries of the South in the dock” (Alston and Goodman 2005: 695).

Culture and human rights

Without the integration of human rights legal norms into daily and localized practices, justice, or human dignity, means very little. Penelope Andrews shows how despite the “widely ratified Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEFDW)” (2012: 72–85) as well as national laws prohibiting violence and discrimination against women, such violence is common because it is culturally accepted; it is often ingrained in the norms of public and private behavior. Yet culture – literature, music, video games, graffiti, and the minutia of daily life practices – is rarely looked at seriously as a site of not only human rights enforcement or violation, but also reconceptualization. But culture is a place not only where dominant human rights norms and ideas are applied but also where they are generated, where they are theorized. Contributors to Indigenous Affairs (2010) stress, for example, that customary law be taken into account in the context of indigenous human rights and that the liberatory potential of customary practices be acknowledged, even if such cultural practices do not derive from UN-supported human rights concepts.

Literature

Therefore, cultural analysis can show how international human rights test in specific geopolitical locations, and can also uncover alternative and geospatially inflected narratives of human dignity. World literature plays a significant role here as one such platform of human rights discourse (Slaughter 2007). After all, slave narratives, romances, sentimental novels, detective fiction, memoirs, ghost stories, sonnets, and so on are full of representations of historically and geopolitically situated human suffering and emancipation. Writers such as Carlos Bulosan, Gayl Jones, Agha Shahid Ali, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amitav Ghosh, Marjane Satrapi, Arundhati Roy, Tadeusz Różewicz, Sorayya Khan, Duong Thu Huong, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and countless others, cover large swaths of the earth in their works and show us what rights mean to bodies scattered around the globe. Literature, of course, as well as any other form of expression, is not simply content, and scholars have developed multiple approaches to recovering old and new, metropolitan and peripheral epistemologies of human rights from literary texts in a comparative, “remedial,” and not only thematic fashion (McClennen and Slaughter 2009; McClennen 2014: 1–4). Reading literary texts comparatively and with attention to what genre itself communicates can reveal complex human rights frameworks, failures, aspirations, and imaginings and pinpoint the ways in which, for instance, novels of formation, elegies, or science fiction become narrative vehicles that make rights claims legible to wider publics (Slaughter 2007; Hunt 2008; McClennen and Slaughter 2009; Nixon 2011). Finally, literary texts are crucial not simply because they engage with human rights thematically, or because they create polylingual and multicultural cartographies of human rights that are absent from UDHR, but also because their subjective realities force readers to imagine multiple possibilities of human coexistence. This speculative and comparative dimension, most prominent in science fiction but not limited to it, enables the comparative theorizing of new aspirations of human rights that is so needed for human rights legal theory to transform.

Nontextual theory in old and new media

It is important to remember here that dominant theories of what constitutes human rights emanate not only from particular geopolitical spaces but also from particular cultural spaces, primarily the professional and scholarly disciplines of law, philosophy, or political science, for example, and not from others, such as sports, popular music, or the realm of the domestic life. As a result, globally circulated human rights theory is still dominated by the written word, and this textual and disciplinary fixation also has profound ramifications when it comes to what is considered “Theory” of the human and rights and whose theory counts and whose does not. Speculative and comparative human rights theory should then be truly transnational and interdisciplinary and also transmedial.

Thus, another way to consider the space or location of human rights theory is to look at it from the vantage point of medium. Some scholars already suggest we move away from a “paper trail of human rights” (Sliwinski 2011: 19) and focus on visual forms (Azoulay 2012). Other critics suggest that we expand into other culture practices. Alice Walker (1983), Gloria Anzaldúa (1990), Jolanta Brach-Czaina (1998), Siobhan Senier (2001), and Penelope Myrtle Kelsey (2008) insist that epistemologies are expressed not only in local and indigenous languages but often in different cultural practices – gardening, pictorial codices, basket weaving, corn planting and harvesting ceremonies, sewing, quilting, and domestic chores – that fall outside the rubric of theory in the western intellectual history. Such nontextual practices are important expressions of marginalized social subjects’ views of rights, and often speak to “what counts as theory” to those most affected by environmental and colonial injustice and sexual violence.

Therefore, as we examine concrete geopolitical sites of human rights theory, we must look beyond textual theory and explore old and new, mixed-media and digital forms as potent sites of theorizing human rights. For example, contemporary critical designers – who create objects decoupled from their default utilitarian function or from the logic of the marketplace in order to open the space in which human–material object interactions can be “de-habituated” and reflected upon – see nontextual objects, machines, and furniture as tools for theory and inquiry (Dunne and Raby 2013: 33–46; McPherson 2014). Dunne and Raby’s “Is This Your Future?”, for instance, features interior designs, including furniture, house appliances, and clothing, all reminiscent of what one could find in any décor or furniture catalogue featuring “the perfect home” (Dunne and Raby n.d.). Except their “home” of the future was conceived primarily as an energy production unit. Thus, its design environment includes such unlikely objects as factory-like uniforms for the entire family, child labor contracts, waste-to-biofuel lunchboxes, and blood-bag teddy bears, children’s water-bottle-like hydrogen containers, and more. These speculative home powerplant appliances are, of course, meant not for immediate consumer use – producing hydrocarbon power using the labor of one’s own children – but rather for reflection on the human and environmental costs of energy production, on the work exploitation within domestic spaces, and on the disappearance of a boundary separating family life, playtime, and work. These critical design objects, then, operate as discursive tools enabling philosophical reflection, forcing us to confront possible futures much like essays, poems, or novels do.

However, it is wrong to assume that digital tools are intrinsically emancipatory, or that they are more human-rights-oriented than analog or premechanical media, or that advanced technology can offer better theoretical and practical solutions to human rights crises. In fact, it is the long-neglected indigenous repositories that offer the great example of nontextual human rights theories. As mentioned, scholars now insist that we look at nontextual indigenous practices (Kelsey 2008; Santos 2010) and learn to interpret them as expressions of localized epistemologies and philosophical traditions rather than simply as artifacts to be stored in the museums of natural history of humankind. Second, such indigenous theories, with their vital preoccupation with questions of the place of the human within the environment, pinpoint the crucial shortcoming of the UN anthropocentric human rights concept, which aims to articulate humans with rights outside of the context of the actual physical and econo-political environments they inhabit.

Coda: comparative human rights

There are many alternative conceptions of human rights to those epitomized by the UDHR, ones that favor communitarian values over individual rights or that de-anthropomorphize rights altogether, stressing, for example, balanced coexistence of the human and the nonhuman as the central value (Santos 2007). There are also many discursive practices that people engage in to reflect on and express such conceptions of human rights epistemologies. Even if such articulations do not explicitly invoke human rights as understood in western philosophical and legal traditions, they raise important notions of human dignity, peace, environmental and economic justice, and so forth. Such under-represented, delegitimized narrative forms in human rights theory – oral narratives, environmental activism, visual texts, ephemeral performances – often correspond to global maps of communities most afflicted by unprosecuted, rampant human rights violations.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that “so long as human rights are conceived as universal human rights they will tend to operate as globalized localism, a form of globalization from above” (2007: 11). As such, they “will always be an instrument of … Western imperial cosmopolitanism against alternative conceptions of human dignity that are socially accepted elsewhere” (Santos 2007: 11). Diverse cultural practices, such as music, literature, or design, not only offer important windows into “alternative conceptions of human dignity,” they also lead to a “redistribution” of what is “perceptible” (Rancière 2011: 4) as a human right. And, as we witness “endtimes of [the] human rights” regime (Hopgood 2013) – the collapse of an international and universalistic human rights – engaging with local cultural understandings of human needs and rights can help us move toward a comparative, dialogical, and compassionate human rights theory, or a theory of rights that is as cosmopolitan and transnational as it is local and spatial: a theory that acknowledges the tremendous archive of cultural practices related to humanitarianism that both predates and follows the 1948 UDHR and that engages in critical comparison. Literary and nontextual articulations often challenge the hegemonic universalism of the dominant human rights theory and practices (Douzinas 2007; Hopgood 2013), and, if studied together, alongside one another, can help develop the comparative and speculative frameworks of human rights (Santos 2007: ix; Harrell 2013).