The power and impact of human rights literature is contested terrain, and Part IV offers readers chapters that take up this issue from various vantage points. Human rights literature is a source of political struggle and productive advocacy, but it can equally be the source of imperialism, hegemony, and discrimination. Human rights literature can be an act of solidarity or it can be an act of commodification – at times it is both. What remains true about this literature is that it attempts to exert power of one form or another and to a range of ends. Human rights literature and culture are not impartial observers to the tales they tell. They exist with agendas, motives, and desires, some of which may not even be readily apparent to those that create them.
Whereas we might all agree that the cultural forms that depict human rights have power, we would likely disagree as to what that actually means. There seems to be an almost equal breakdown between those who believe that human rights literature is too powerful and those who insist that it is not powerful enough. And of those who recognize its power, we hear that it is not powerful in ways that support rights claims, but rather, on the contrary, its power is to convince readers that rights violations can be justified. This was the line of argument followed by Elaine Scarry when she cautioned that literature was not necessarily a source of rights support in her seminal essay “The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons” (1998). Scarry argues that literature often depicts “others” in ways that either stereotype them or relegate them to nameless, faceless others. Those tendencies actually do damage to the ability to “imagine others,” and they often create the conceptual frameworks by which we can accept the rights violations of groups of others “foreign” to us, however that group is constituted. She does note, however, that some literary works can, in fact, help us imagine others. Texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she argues, break down social structures and call attention to violence in ways that can have a measurable impact on how readers understand the lives depicted in the text.
Costas Douzinas takes an even more cynical turn on the power of human rights. He begins Human Rights and Empire by asking, “Are human rights a defensive barrier against domination and oppression or the ideological gloss of an emerging empire?” (Douzinas 2007: viii). He concludes that they are more squarely the latter, claiming that in their current practice human rights are more appropriately an accomplice to neoliberal capitalism than they are to any real commitment to social justice. His concern, and one which is debated in this part with regards to empathy, is that human rights lend themselves too often to individual moralizing that reinforces the global logic of empire and capital. He argues instead for abandoning human rights in favor of radical equality.
Douzinas’s concern with the role that individual moralizing plays in the discourse of human rights is one that is essential to debates about the power of rights literature. If the text promotes self-satisfaction and a comfortable sense of superior morality, then does it not follow that it reinforces a moral hierarchy that allows the reader to occupy a position of privilege? How, then, can a text connect with a reader without creating such an outcome? And if human rights advocacy requires a commitment to radical social restructuring, then shouldn’t the text shock the reader out of complacency? What then would the ideal human rights text look like? How can it reach the reader in the most productive way? How can it depict a victim while defending his or her dignity? Or are such ideas fraught from the outset?
The question of the impact of human rights literature is not solely linked to the exercise of power, though; human rights literature is also governed by its own set of limits. The limits of human rights literature reflect the inability of any form of writing or cultural expression to adequately address the grievances at the heart of its stories. But they also reflect the limits of the literary in the face of political, juridical, and economic processes that govern most aspects of human rights policy and practice. What can this literature do? Another issue to consider is why certain types of grievances are more often the “stuff” of human rights literature. Are there limits to which stories are told and if so, why? In addition chapters in this part explore the ways that this literature can be coopted, commodified, appropriated, and apprehended.
At the heart of many of the chapters in this part is concern over the power, limits, and impacts of human rights literature on the reader’s emotions. Questions of empathy, pathos, altruism, apathy, and guilt blend with questions about how literary and cultural forms might generate productive action. Similarly, it is worth wondering about the impacts of this literature on those depicted therein. Does human rights literature of witnessing offer catharsis, therapy, or healing for those whose stories are told, or does the storyteller always suffer again when revealing a personal pain offered for public consumption?
A corollary set of questions wonders at what happens to these texts. Can they become judiciary evidence? What role can they play in rights claims? And what about the market for rights literature? There is little doubt that human rights literature has become a thriving market. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith explain in Human Rights and Narrated Lives, human rights “life narratives have become salable properties in today’s markets” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 23). So not only are these tales potentially the engines of global hegemony as Douzinas reminds us, but they are also a part of the capitalist culture market. This means that they may have more of an impact on the market than they have as rights advocates.
And yet, as a number of the chapters in this part demonstrate, there is another side to the story. That side shows us that literature does indeed hold the hope of helping to support the ideas of rights by fostering the imagination, helping us to understand the suffering of others, and drawing meaningful lines of connection across disparate communities. That this process is by no means perfect does not suggest that it is inevitably and tragically doomed. The flaws to literary depictions are but a part of the process of representing rights stories. In fact, as some of the pieces in this part show, without creative contributions to a culture of human rights, the struggle to defend rights would be greatly diminished, if not impossible. Thus, a number of the chapters in this part waver between calling out the negative and positive impacts of human rights representations.
Erik Doxtader’s chapter opens this part by turning the question of rights literature’s power on its head. He explores the idea that rhetoric has “no proper role” in the “advocacy and protection of human rights” (405, this volume). In “With Double-Binds to Spare – Assuming the Rhetorical Question of Human Rights Language as Such,” Doxtader suggests that rhetoric may be the overdetermined center of all that troubles rights. He points out that advocates of human rights argue for the necessary power of words, but critics of their inadequacy fuel a debate that sustains a larger discourse that is part of the problem. He argues that the discourse of human rights, as compared to the rights of the citizen, isolates and silences its subject, and refuses to ask itself how it participates in the violence that takes place in its name.
Sarah Winter’s chapter follows and takes a wholly different approach. Winter finds that literature plays a key role in supporting rights ideas by helping readers develop empathy. Her chapter, “‘Inverted Sympathy’: Empathy and Mediation in Literary Transactions of Human Rights,” studies the case of Maria Edgeworth’s 1817 novel Harrington. According to Winter, the novel offers a version of “inverted sympathy” as readers observe the protagonist overcoming his culturally learned anti-Semitism. This takes place as the protagonist empathizes with a Jewish woman as they both attend a performance of The Merchant of Venice. Delving into the thorny question of whether empathy sparks altruism, Winter argues that while empathy may not be necessary to respond to rights violations, it may nevertheless be important in assisting in rights struggles as a form of cognitive and affective mediation.
The third chapter in this part offers readers yet another angle on the impacts of human rights literature: one that is far more ambivalent. James Dawes argues in “Human Rights, Literature, and Empathy” that there are two competing versions of the role that literature can play in developing rights-related empathy. One is a continuous history, which claims that the history of human rights as a movement can be traced back to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; and the second is a discontinuous version, which claims that the present understanding of human rights only began after Jimmy Carter used the phrase in his presidential inaugural address. After describing the competing opinions of the effects that literary empathy may have on readers, Dawes ultimately leaves the question unresolved – the only thing that is clear is that feelings of empathy cannot leave readers unaffected.
Belinda Walzer begins her piece critical of the way that the field of rhetoric has approached rights discourse. As she explains, if the discourse of “rights has been heralded as exhausted, a discourse at its end, too western, too utopian, too normative, not normative enough, hypocritical, and an enablement necessary of critique” (433, this volume), then why has the field of rhetoric not returned to its discursive foundations to search for new avenues of inquiry? In “The Right Time for Rhetoric: Normativity, Kairos, and Human Rights,” she explores the ways in which the foundations of human rights discourse have been constructed normatively over time. She builds on the idea that there is a rhetorical paradox in rights discourse; namely, that human rights “elides its own impossibility of ‘express-ability’” (434, this volume). Thus, rather than an agreed-upon notion of what constitutes universal human rights, what is needed to promote the universality of rights is an agreement among participants to enter into a discursive relationship in the first place. Walzer considers the rhetorical concept of kairos, or the “right moment” combined with the “right measure,” and argues that rather than focusing on kairos in rights discourse, we should focus on akairos – “moments of dissonance, of poor timing, and of disorder and chaos in staking rights claims” (438, this volume) – for their potential to reorient rights discourses away from ostensibly fixed norms and toward situational applicability.
Building on these questions of the role of rhetoric and rights, Mark Goodale studies the intersection of myth and sentiment in “Values without Qualities: Pathos and Mythos in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Goodale turns to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to study its use of mythos and pathos. He points out that the UDHR was based on a myth of universality of human rights – not necessarily in the sense of a false assertion, but rather in the sense that universality was a “preexisting and baseline cultural belief” (446, this volume). Pathos in the UDHR uses “aspirational, emotionally charged, and morally elevated language” (444, this volume) to construct ideals toward which humanity ought to strive while also suppressing the traumas induced by the historical memories of earlier mass tragedies. Goodale concludes that the power of the UDHR as a rhetorical device depends on a paradox, where rights norms are vernacularized within a larger myth of their universality.
Makau Mutua continues this part’s exploration of the limits of universality by wondering “Is the Age of Human Rights Over?” But rather than focus on the question from the perspective of rhetoric, he studies the matter from the angle of ideology. He describes human rights as an ideology because they entail a certain set of beliefs in moral, political, legal, and economic practices. He notes, however, that the universality of human rights claims has been damaged by instances of western hypocrisy. Moreover, he claims that western conceptions of human rights and the organizations promoting them have not come to terms with differences across cultures in ways that can adequately protect them. Nevertheless, Mutua ultimately concludes that human rights norms have become so embedded in the minds of people around the world that their existence is irreversible. He suggests that if human rights as a universal ideology has failed, it has “left the world a moral vacuum” (456, this volume).
The next chapter shifts focus to the question of censorship and privacy rights in the digital age. Rather than focus on the impacts of human rights texts, this chapter looks at the powerful ways that expression has been contained, controlled, and limited. In “Freedom of Expression and Cultural Production in the Age of Vanishing Privacy,” Jon Abel theorizes the relationship between censorship and human rights in the digital age where corporations and governments seem to have more control over individuals’ data than individuals do themselves. As corporate entities are increasingly given more of the legal rights of individuals, Abel argues that the freedom of expression is in need of protection more than ever. Citing Article 19 of the UDHR, Abel demonstrates that it is not enough to protect individuals from censorship, but that the cultural works they produce must also be protected as well. He shows that the question of the censorship and control of the flow of expression is far more complex in the digital age.
The next three chapters look at the power of literature to offer alternative views of human life, views which have the potential to strengthen, enhance, or develop our notions of human rights. The first one studies the poetry of those considered enemies of the United States and shows that these poems offer wholly different insights into rights. David Holloway in “Poetry and the Limits of Human Rights” examines poetry out of Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, especially the collection Poetry of the Taliban. He explores how this poetry revealed perspectives about the war from the side of the Other – e.g., that the war was an imperial war in a linear history of imperialism in Central Asia and the Middle East rather than one fought in the name of democracy, freedom, human rights, or liberation. One recurring observation in the poems is that they associate the discourse of human rights with imperialism in almost a matter-of-fact way, revealing to western readers the extent to which people of the region harbored no illusions about western interests. But while the poems eschew western notions of rights, they also offer new rights perspectives, especially through the humanization of the poets themselves. Holloway analyzes specific poems to show how they defamiliarize western claims that the War on Terror brought improved human rights, and to show how they link US imperialism to a longer history that includes the USSR’s imperial treatment of the region as well.
The next chapter is an interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on his films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which offer two complementary views of the mass murders in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966 when hundreds of thousands of people were killed in an anti-Communist purge. In the interview, Oppenheimer discusses the film aesthetics he uses to depict human rights atrocities. He explains in detail his unique approach to inviting perpetrators to demonstrate fictitiously their crimes in The Act of Killing. And he compares that method and the aesthetic it generates to the quite distinct approach he uses for The Look of Silence, which documents the life of a survivor who confronts perpetrators who still hold power. In a sign of the positive impacts human rights films can have, Oppenheimer closes the interview pointing to the various ways that his films have opened up space for a much-needed national conversation on truth and reconciliation.
Nigerian author Chris Abani’s “The Graceful Walk” closes this part with a sensitive, nuanced, and hopeful chapter on the ethics of storytelling. He explains the delicate balance between language, readers, and responsibilities. Never naïve, Abani holds firm that language is foundational to a compassionate imagination. Thus the graceful walk is a walk done in pain with composure and careful aesthetic composition. He suggests that ethical reading is also a key part of these stories since they require readers to both appreciate vulnerability and become vulnerable themselves. For art to have purpose, according to Abani, it must be challenging and it must address the ethics of a shared humanity.
Douzinas, C. (2007) Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Oxford and New York: Routledge-Cavendish.
Scarry, E. (1998) “The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons,” in E. Weiner (ed.), The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence, New York: Continuum Publishing, pp. 40–62.
Schaffer, K. and Smith, S. (2004) Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.