Conjuring Creative Citizenship Beyond Rights

Abstract

Conjuring Creative Citizenship Beyond Rights Elizabeth Swanson (bio) A Review of Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights by Lyndsey Stonebridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 176. $25 hardcover. Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) is one of several key texts through which Lyndsey Stonebridge crafts the elegant, satisfying chapters of her latest, Writing & Righting. Stonebridge's small book packs the same genre of punch for readers now as Sontag's did when it was published, just after the Abu Ghraib torture photos had been released, when Sontag's questions carried ethical urgency: What is the purpose of looking at images of atrocity? If the atrocity has already happened, and suffering cannot be alleviated because of the evidence the image provides, how does the act of looking do anything but consolidate the viewer's sense of safety by comparison? For Stonebridge, the question concerns literature, not photos or images, and its role in the project of human rights or, as she more eloquently puts it, its role in transforming human rights claims into "common sense." Her inquiry traces the trajectory of human rights as the twentieth century has given way to the twenty-first, while also exploring the development of human rights and literature as a critical method, largely in the decades since 9/11. In both cases, she is careful to alert readers to the gap between language and the real; the now; between what we claim and what we accept. The book deeply treats our current context, refreshingly facing the human rights horizons of racial struggle [End Page 217] and inequality, climate disaster, and mass subhumanization, and then poses the perennial question of "How we might get from imagining other people to agreeing to share resources and power with them?" (24). In other words, how do we translate the empathic feelings that arise from reading about human rights violations into actions that diminish not only suffering, but the causes of suffering, in deep structures of inequity and violence? How do we mobilize our privilege in material ways that positively impact others' lives and move the world to greater justice? How do we leap from feeling to action through identification with a character or plot? And perhaps most of all, how do we find courage and clarity to acknowledge our role in the suffering of others and then to act differently? While I cannot report that Stonebridge delivers that formula (because, well, it doesn't exist, does it?), she does achieve something nearly as complex in the time she devotes in each chapter to exposing the nearly surreal level of denial and untruth, not to mention sheer interpretive cynicism, at the core of our current political systems and their discourses. In her insistence that the gap between words and reality in the current political arena has totalitarian ancestors and aims. In her recognition that living in the space between stated values and actual practices is the truly maddening condition of all our lives. In her idea that we turn to writers whose first-person perspectives emerge from within what I, following Suzanne Césaire, can only call "the great camouflage" of racist patriarchal imperialism, and who have experienced its unthinkable harms, to restore a culture where human rights—or better, human dignity—is a matter of common sense. I will go so far as to say that the act of reading Stonebridge's book felt like a meta-experience of how to build commitment to the solidarity of creative, universal citizenship beyond the cynical arena of the neoliberal nation-state, and I am grateful for it. Over the course of six tightly woven chapters, Stonebridge explores the harrowing edge we are all obliged to ride between ours as a moment of reckoning and ours as a moment of transformation, all within the context of (impending) climate disaster. Her emphasis remains rightly, refreshingly on context as she questions whether "the words 'human rights' any longer carry enough moral, political, cultural, social, or even semantic weight to adequately convey what it is that so many are currently determinedly, urgently, and sometimes desperately working to protect across the globe just now" (8). This throughline includes...