Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature by Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (review)

Since 9/11, scholarship on human rights issues in the humanities has exploded for a variety of reasons and with mixed results. The reasons are by now mostly obvious: in the wake of the attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001, and the resulting surge in militarization accompanied by a culture of fear and an obsession with security, intellectuals have recognized that we are entering a new era in which rights are extremely fragile. The US response took the immediate form of invading nation-states that had not carried out the attacks and of a host of human rights violations that were—for the first time since World War II—staged in a highly public way and to much public approval. Politicians, intellectuals, and media pundits have made impassioned arguments for why torture made sense, and highly successful television shows like 24 have romanticized torture. This has all happened while the global economy has increasingly succumbed to neoliberal market agendas that substitute the citizen with the consumer, creating an even more precarious context for rights. Both of these realities would be sufficient to ensure scholarly attention to the changing human rights landscape, but they have been accompanied by the impact that these shifts have had on the humanities in institutions of higher learning. Humanists find themselves facing administrations that are downsizing their programs, censoring their courses, and scrutinizing the ‘value’ of their work.

This context suggests why humanist human rights scholarship in the humanities has yielded mixed results. The urge to find in the humanities—and especially in literature—the antidote to cruelty, atrocity, and rights violations has led in some cases to untheorized idealizations of the promise and potential of art in the face of human suffering. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s new volume of essays, Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, seeks to remedy this tendency by offering readers a series of essays that tackle the intersections between theory, literature, and rights. The purpose of the collection is to explore the ways in which human rights are material, theoretical, and aesthetic. As Joseph Slaughter argues in the foreword to the volume, the very idea of rights is inseparable from stories that envision them, meaning that any understanding of rights requires attention to the “necessary and incessant pressure of culture and the worldwide activities of literature on human rights thinking and practice” (xiv).

The editors begin with an introduction that sidesteps presenting the volume and instead introduces what they refer to as the “interdiscipline” of human rights and literature. Eschewing engagement with the essays that follow, the editors offer readers a concise yet insightful overview of the scholarship of the field. While potentially frustrating for readers hoping to identify which of the volume’s fourteen essays to bookmark and read, the introduction serves as an excellent survey of a complex array of scholarly interventions into the field. The introduction offers those of us who work in the field and those new to it a way to synthesize a large, unwieldy interdiscipline with numerous angles of critical inquiry. This piece could be assigned as a first week’s reading for any graduate or advanced undergraduate class on human rights. In the last paragraph of the introduction the editors “map the volume” by explaining that they have not tried to cover the globe or the vast array of human rights violations and literary responses. Rather, they have shaped their contributions into three main categories of theoretical scholarship in the field: “the shared histories, philosophies, structures, and paradoxes of rights and literary imagination; the potential and limitations of literary language in writing rights; and the problematics of defining the core bearer of rights, the subject” (15). One might distill these categories into 1) the ideas of rights, 2) the representation of rights, and 3) the subject of rights. Each of these sections offers a number of essays that...