Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (review)

Human rights are widely perceived to advance as part of a legal process—with rights codified into law, appeals made to courts in response to deprivation and abuse, and with obligations acquired by governments and citizens in law-abiding countries. Rights become legal rights for which there are both beneficiaries and duty holders. This legal approach has an important place—but it is only part of a much wider story. Human rights in fact develop over time in response to people's everyday demands that those around them understand their experiences of injustice.

This book looks at one of the frequently neglected dimensions of change and delivery: the mobilization of public concern through personal accounts and narrations. Could black South Africans have overturned apartheid without narrating personal stories of suffering? Could Aboriginal Australians or Korean "Comfort Women" have emerged as political subjects without readers, listeners, and cinema-goers, not to mention lawyers and politicians, witnessing their narrations? But public airing of human narratives of suffering and abuse is not all-powerful. The eloquent personal petitions from Chinese dissidents have done little to dislodge the Chinese government's position on local democracy. Nor have African-American prison memoirs and websites convinced many Americans that their prison system might involve abuse of rights. How effective are testimonies as tools for enhancing human rights?

This book does not set out to answer this directly. Its thesis is more diffuse, but surely more accurate: that the rise of human rights and the rise of life story telling are intertwined phenomena. They are symbiotic outgrowths of Enlightenment legacies beginning with a few poignant tales, such as that of the former slave Olaudah Equiano in the 1760s, growing with ever more personal accounts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and mushrooming in the human rights era of the 1990s. The advancement of human rights has leant upon personal story-telling, while increasingly, people frame their life stories, especially when they are painful ones, through a language of rights and humanity.

Smith and Schaffer trace this symbiosis through five dramatic political and legal arenas in impressive detail, beginning with South Africa, as the paradigmatic case where the narration of life-stories was explicitly encouraged as a process of national healing as well as arbitration. The stories generated out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission show that in many ways it stimulated hopes it could not always or entirely fulfill. At the same time, it undoubtedly formalized and legitimized the status of narration as part of the restoration of human relationships in extremely influential ways.

Aboriginal Australians' campaign for the Australian state to accept charges of genocide, galvanised by the South African experience, got worldwide attention in the 1990s, and is the second case Schaffer and Smith explore as a site of public storytelling. For example, early readers of Sally Morgan's 1987 autobiography My Place took it as a coming of age story, albeit one with terrible pain and suffering. After the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Inquiry into the Forced Separation of Indigenous Children from Their Families concluded with a devastating report, Bringing Them Home, in 1997, Morgan's book was reissued as a narrative of human rights violations. In this guise, it sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. In contrast to South Africa, Aboriginal Australians have not yet had any formal apology or redress from the Australian government. Yet, clearly there is a growing market for such stories in a way that plays a crucial role in the Aboriginals' political struggle.

Schaffer and Smith's third study deals with the "belated" story telling of Korean women who were forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military during the Second World War. Most of these stories were kept hidden for fifty years. The authors attribute the end of the long silence to a "confluence of forces at the intersections...