After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 by Fernando J. Rosenberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 by Fernando J. Rosenberg Tara Daly Fernando J. Rosenberg, After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010. U of Pittsburgh P, 2016. 296 pp. Fernando Rosenberg's book is a theoretically sophisticated and timely inquiry into the way that human rights discourse is invoked and transformed in contemporary Latin American novels, installation art, photography, and films produced in post-dictatorial and global contexts between 1990 and 2010. Chapter 1 presents Rosenberg's main lines of argument and serves as the compelling introduction to the book. His thesis is that human rights and neoliberal common sense share common ground but neither one "exhausts the emancipatory possibilities of human rights nor exempts neoliberal politics of blatantly ignoring basic rights" (1). Rosenberg then makes the case that both discourses are relevant beyond the (post)political, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Taking the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as his starting point, Rosenberg proves that the After of his title not only signals a posterior time to the original activation of human rights discourse, but also refers to an ongoing "expression of desire, pointing to the presence of a post-and transnational imagination for social change that resists codification" (12). Through detailed analysis of artists from most of Latin America and [End Page 541] some of the Caribbean, Rosenberg graphs the interstices of global human rights discourse, market capitalism, and a neoliberal ethos as the matrix in which the constitution of the political and justice are continuously negotiated and transformed. Chapter 2, "Literature between Rights and the Possibility of Justice" and Chapter 3, "Global Fictions, Truth and Reconciliation, and the Judgment of History" will appeal to scholars of the Latin American novel, particularly as world literature. In Chapter 2, Rosenberg revisits Rulfo's canonical Pedro Páramo to underscore the paradoxical relationship between rights and patriarchal oligarchy as illuminated through a fictional juridical order that frames Páramo's right to land as the foundation of patriarchal personhood (35). In Rulfo, human rights hover on the horizon line as a sense of possibility amid state catastrophe. Rosenberg complements Rulfo with readings of two Colombian novels, Laura Restrepo's La multitud errante and Fernando Vallejo's La virgen de los sicarios. His analysis of Restrepo demonstrates that what is usually referred to as a weak or absent state proves to be a ghostly presence in her novel, defined not by its capacity to impose force but to relinquish the very force exerted on its behalf. Rosenberg's relentless ability to articulate complex contradictions through his readings attests to his deep appreciation of the manner in which literature reveals political nuance in ways that might otherwise remain insensible. Rosenberg takes up the post-dictatorial Latin American "novel of truth and reconciliation" as it invokes a global imaginary of the post-political—that is, the way that the novel mobilizes the imaginary of human rights toward a final overcoming of insurmountable political rifts—in Chapter 3. He analyzes En busca de Klingsor by Jorge Volpi (Mexico), El desierto by Carlos Franz (Chile), Abril rojo by Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru), La hora azul by Alonso Cueto (Peru) and Insensatez by Salvadorean Horacio Castellanos Moya. In all of the novels, in different ways, Rosenberg argues that in the absence of a sense of the common, human rights is the formation that mediates and domesticates the abyss between sovereignty and subjection (91). In Chapters 4 through 7, Rosenberg moves from literature to visual media. In Chapter 4, "The Disappeared: Visual Arts and Auratic Distance," he discusses a collective exhibit of various disappeared groups that was, before touring internationally, hosted by the North Dakota Museum of Art. The exhibit exemplifies two different trends in the aesthetic representation of political violence: first, a cosmopolitan human rights sensibility that fosters an ability to identify with "distant suffering"; second, the constant flux of visual media representing this suffering and accessed by remote audiences. Rosenberg argues that the exhibit's power lies in its Benjaminian "aura," that is, the manifestation of distant power brought near through the artistic experience. Scholars of memory...