Congo Cases: The Stories of Human Rights History

Abstract

Congo Cases:The Stories of Human Rights History Eleni Coundouriotis (bio) That human rights history constitutes an identifiable genre becomes apparent when we consider the growing body of work that either tries to tell the history of the human rights movement or examines particular historical events through a human rights lens.1 The human rights lens frames the historiographical project as an exposition of crimes against humanity.2 Human rights history uses the frame of crimes against humanity to analyze contemporary history where it might be instrumental in making the case for legal prosecution, or, alternatively, to revisit events from the deeper past and renarrativize them through its criteria.3 The two centers of gravity (histories of the human rights movement and histories of crimes against humanity) reveal divergent ideas of what human rights history is, but they also work in synergy to highlight an emphasis on narrative, which characterizes both. My focus is on the latter type of human rights history (histories of crimes against humanity), with texts about the Congo as my particular example. I contend that human rights history is shaped by a story of reading in which the author takes evidence previously ignored or misconstrued but pertaining to well-known events and uses the evidence to renarrativize the events, providing a new story with a human rights-inflected moral center. This process of identifying crimes against humanity by narrating a discovery made through reading ultimately serves the larger enterprise of legitimating the history of the human rights movement by arguing for its capacity to create a broad constituency of people who can see past wrongs in a new light and who are empowered by this recognition to participate in the effort to prevent the repetition of such wrongs. Stories of reading, instances in which the author refers to his or her own act of reading, illuminate the ways in which reading is a form of experience. Jonathan Culler defines "stories of reading" as our coming to awareness of an agency that lies in the text itself. We experience reading as if the text has the power to act on us, to transform us, yet it proves no easier to say what is in the reader's or a reader's experience than what is in the text: "experience" is divided and deferred—already behind us as something to be recovered, yet still before us as something to be produced. The result is not a new foundation but stories of reading, and these stories reinstate the text as an agent with definite qualities or properties, since this yields more precise and dramatic narratives as well as creating a possibility of learning that lets one celebrate great works.4 [End Page 133] The boundaries between text and reader are blurred, since it is only in reading that both come to life; and, as reading is an experience over time, it can never be fixed. Instead, the story of reading is incorporated in the form of the text. The human rights history refers to reading, asking us to imagine someone else's reading while we ourselves are reading. In this imaginative act, we see ("constitute" is Culler's word) the text as an agent acting upon the reader. Thus our access to the text's agency is highly mediated. Furthermore, it is this kind of layering that takes up much of the energy of human rights history and where its potential to bring the reader to awareness (its "possibility of learning") lies. Culler's terminology gives us a fresh approach with which to examine the instrumental uses of narrative in human rights discourse. In our stories of reading, we constitute the text as an agent that has wrought change upon us and given us experience. Moreover, Culler deliberately calls this a "reinstatement" of agency, hinting at the infinitely renewable passage to new stories of reading at each occasion of reading. Stories of reading have an empowering effect, giving the reader of human rights history a sense of expansiveness, which comes from the recognition these texts ask us to give. This recognition is often duplicated by the actors in these histories, who themselves undergo a recognition/conversion experience for us...