The Novel of Human Rights by James Dawes (review)

On the day that I began writing this review, the mercurial president of the United States announced, by way of social media, two abrupt shifts on policy decisions that held grave implications for thousands of people: a temporary delay on the mass raids of undocumented immigrant families by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in the United States and a hold on retaliatory airstrikes against the nation of Iran for its attack on a US military drone.¹ It would seem the American public, and possibly the rest of the world, has acclimated itself to the "new normal" of such dramatic swings, awaiting the next Twitter storm of abuse and outrage as the executive branch of the US government continues to rule with impunity garnered by way of its centralization of power, a process begun decades before the current administration came into office. Against such madefor-television spectacles created by the commercial news-entertainment complex and fed by the vast machinery of social media and other digital networks, the idea of human rights has never seemed more like a fiction. To even the most casual of observers, the proposition that every human being everywhere has an inherent claim to certain freedoms and protections seems to be countermanded at every turn.

Perhaps it is precisely under such dire conditions that we should take fiction itself as a serious object of study, as James Dawes does in his recently published monograph, The Novel of Human Rights.² Opening with the proposition that "we are, for the first time, living in a popular culture of human rights"—one whose success has in turn "helped trigger a frightened, revanchist ethnonationalism"—Dawes illuminates the way in which prose fiction in the United States has shaped our common-sense understandings of human rights while rights norms have embedded themselves as formal features and thematic concerns in the contemporary American novel.³ Throughout The Novel of Human Rights, Dawes identifies and elaborates "centers of aesthetic gravity" across a range of late twentieth and current twenty-first century novels not only to argue that such a genre might be said to exist, but also to provide "aesthetic and conceptual depth to our readings" of these texts.⁴ The conclusions at which Dawes arrives by the end of his study—that "the novel of human rights is defined by aesthetic contradictions and wrenching moral paradoxes"⁵—speak directly to the significance of studying the intersection of human rights and literary fiction in the current moment.

This is not so much a project of defending the viability of human rights politics and practice on the ground or of prescribing the proper forms for the representation of violence and suffering in literature. Rather, it is one that examines how the material conditions and political realities of our current conjuncture set the terms for both representation and response in our cultural politics, and it also examines how the contradictions and unruliness of those structures offer up the possibility for moving forms of dissensus and transformation. Thus, by the end of the book, Dawes describes himself as "untroubled by the problem of compossibility, the mess of language, and the sometimes bewildering and conflictual plenitude of our imagination and ideals," seeing the "contradictions and anxieties" in the texts he has surveyed instead as "a sign of human rights' vitality of thought rather than its philosophical or political implausibility."⁶

Dawes arrives at his ultimate embrace of dissensus and irresolution by charting in his first three chapters those recurring features whose appearances define the genre of the human rights novel. These include (in Chapter One)⁷ the distinction between the "justice plot" and the "escape plot";⁸ (in Chapter Two)⁹ the crucial tropes, motifs, and themes of privacy, homes, secrecy, movement, and family (particularly lost children and orphans) that correspond to the relations that human rights mediate between states and individual persons; and (in Chapter Three)¹⁰ the often problematic use of allegory and empathy as vehicles...