Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER
Copyright Date: 2007
Published by: Fordham University Press
Pages: 436
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x031j
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Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
Book Description:

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literatureand international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality. Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-4726-4
Subjects: Political Science
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. vii-xii)
  4. PREAMBLE The Legibility of Human Rights
    PREAMBLE The Legibility of Human Rights (pp. 1-44)

    “Everyone knows, or should know, why human rights are important,” writes John Humphrey, Canadian legal scholar and first director of the United Nations Human Rights Division, in a commemorative essay on the fortieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948.¹ Almost unfailingly, books about international human rights open with one of two seemingly contradictory grandiloquent claims about their importance. The triumphalist version proclaims that human rights law and discourse have at last achieved some form of worldwide normativeness, and that we are now living in the...

  5. CHAPTER 1 Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law
    CHAPTER 1 Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law (pp. 45-85)

    Like mythical twins separated at birth by the geographical accidents of British imperialism, two Watts—Ian and Alan—found themselves grappling with the battered legacy of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory promise in the aftermath of World War II, converging onRobinson Crusoeas a signal literary marker of the historical emergence of rationalized individualism. The apprentice literary critic Ian Watt, studying the “relation between the growth of the reading public and the emergence of the novel,” was writing at St. John’s College, Cambridge, what was to become his seminal work,The Rise of the Novel, in whichCrusoefeatures as both...

  6. CHAPTER 2 Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship
    CHAPTER 2 Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship (pp. 86-139)

    In her first major speech as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1997, Ireland’s former president Mary Robinson admonished the international body for having abandoned its historical mission of “realising human rights”: “Somewhere along the way many in the United Nations have lost the plot and allowed their work to answer to other imperatives.”¹ Recalling the purposes for which the UN incorporated itself in 1945, Robinson insisted that “almost by definition and certainly according to its Charter, the United Nations exists to promote human rights.” Indeed, the Charter’s preamble rehearses the organization’s statement of purpose, enumerating the common...

  7. CHAPTER 3 Normalizing Narrative Forms of Human Rights: The (Dys)Function of the Public Sphere
    CHAPTER 3 Normalizing Narrative Forms of Human Rights: The (Dys)Function of the Public Sphere (pp. 140-204)

    “When the police came to mamCatherine’s house in 1976, they said: … Let’s search the bedroom.”¹ The scene of this domestic invasion by the state is Catherine Mlangeni’s South African township home, to which apartheid police had come looking for her son Bheki, who was then a student but would later become a prominent human rights lawyer. That night, mamCatherine succeeded in saving her sons, but fifteen years later Bheki Mlangeni would be decapitated at home by a bomb the police had planted in a walkman. The scene of the account of these state visits to the Mlangeni home is...

  8. CHAPTER 4 Compulsory Development: Narrative Self-Sponsorship and the Right to Self-Determination
    CHAPTER 4 Compulsory Development: Narrative Self-Sponsorship and the Right to Self-Determination (pp. 205-269)

    “DEVELOPMENT IS A LIE” protests a placard carried by Manu, a recurring character in Epeli Hau’ofa’s satirical short stories,Tales of the Tikongs(1983), about the euphoria of developmentalism that washed over Tonga and other Pacific-island nations in the 1970s, during the heyday of internationally sponsored development projects.¹ As “the only teller of big truths in the realm,” Manu peddles his “lonely message against Development” throughout the island of Tiko, a fictionalized version of Tonga.² Recounting parables of the pitfalls and failures of progress, Manu broadcasts his warning that “Tiko can’t be developed … unless the ancient gods are killed”...

  9. CHAPTER 5 Clefs à Roman: Reading, Writing, and International Humanitarianism
    CHAPTER 5 Clefs à Roman: Reading, Writing, and International Humanitarianism (pp. 270-316)

    In a racially mixed school in a predominantly African-immigrant neighborhood of Paris, Mamadou Traoré, the young protagonist of Calixthe Beyala’s novelLoukoum: The ‘Little Prince’ of Belleville(1995), gets his first official lesson in international relations and French humanitarianism. “The world,” instructs his teacher with the kind of Caesarean confidence and precision that once trifurcated Gaul, “is divided into developed countries and developing countries. The industrialised nations must help the poorest ones.”¹ Appealing to the children’s “generosity,” “courage [gallantry],” and “sense of solidarity,” Mamadou’s teacher proceeds to recreate that world in microcosm within the classroom and to reenact the moment...

  10. CODICIL Intimations of a Human Rights International: “The Rights of Man; or, What Are We [Reading] For?”
    CODICIL Intimations of a Human Rights International: “The Rights of Man; or, What Are We [Reading] For?” (pp. 317-328)

    Eight days after the world’s most notorious Baathist, ex-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was pulled from a spider hole by U.S. forces outside of Tikrit in December 2003, National Public Radio aired a review of a recently translated Saudi ArabianBildungsromanentitledAdama. The short review by Alan Cheuse is worth reproducing, because it exemplifies a fairly typical metropolitan reception of non-Western literature as well as some of the discursive and historical linkages between theBildungsromanand human rights that I have examined throughout this book.

    Adama is the name of the neighborhood where the main character, a smart young Saudi...

  11. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 329-388)
  12. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 389-418)
  13. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 419-436)
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