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Humanitarian Narrative and Posthumanist Critique: Dave Eggers's What Is The What
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2012
- pp. 115-136
- 10.1353/bio.2012.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Dave Eggers's What Is the What is the fictionalized real-life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan's "Lost Boys." Critical of a rhetoric of rescue and promise, the novel questions humanitarianism and the prescriptive, colonial, and even racist undertones of its humanism, while at the same time sustaining the value of a humanist language of rights in humanitarian life writing.