This book responds to the failures of human rights—the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions—through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore investigates the intersection of vulnerability studies and human rights through an analysis of the relationship between vulnerability theory, normative human rights genres—such as the legal covenant, the human rights report, and reportage—and literary and visual culture in five human rights contexts over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers in Nigerian literature; human rights reporting and novels that address state-sponsored ethno-cide in Zimbabwe; the international humanitarian campaigns and disaster capitalism in fiction of Bhopal, India; the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Sahel, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma as represented in various media campaigns and in photo/graphic narratives; and, finally, human rights campaigns, fiction, and film that bring Indonesia’s history of anti-leftist violence into contemporary public debate. These case studies underscore how human rights norms are always subject to conditions of imaginative representation, and how literature and visual culture can generate new forms of human rights discourse. Expanding feminist theories of embodied and imposed vulnerability, Moore demonstrates how vulnerability theory can reveal the differential distribution of both rights and precariousness in specific contexts and offer an alternative to normative rights discourse organized around the liberal subject and the nation-state. In place of conventional victims and agents, the intersection of vulnerability and human rights opens up readings of human rights claims and suffering that are, at once, embodied and shareable, and, at the same time, demonstrates that these discourses are themselves vulnerable to cooptation.
Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English and program faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.