Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns by Katja Kurz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns by Katja Kurz James Dawes (bio) Katja Kurz. Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. ISBN 978-3825363499, $60.00. Narrating Contested Lives, which examines the role of activist autobiographies in human rights campaigns, is an important contribution to the burgeoning interdiscipline of literature and human rights. Published the same year as the Modern Language Association’s Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, Katja Kurz’s monograph is a valuable demonstration of the important ways this subfield seeks to import the methods and goals of the modern human rights movement into humanities research and, potentially, to export humanities expertise to the work of human rights. Narrating Contested Lives takes up one of the most important questions in human rights work that relies upon storytelling: What communication strategies—from the details of narrative technique to decisions around staffing and publishing networks—determine the relative success or failure of empathy-based human rights campaigns? The value of Kurz’s approach to this question is best understood as part of a much broader context. Human rights monitoring and evaluation is a field unto itself, complete with specialized positions within rights organizations and consulting agencies that offer external reviews. As a report from the Association of Women’s Rights in Development points out, however, a great deal needs to be done to expand the techniques we use for understanding impact in human rights work, lest we end up neglecting valuable, long-term strategies that do not fit neatly into our existing frameworks: Women’s empowerment and gender equality initiatives have been under increasing pressure to measure their impact over the past two decades. At the same time, donor support for certain kinds of women’s empowerment or rights work has decreased, at least partly, because it is considered too slow, amorphous, or intangible. There is growing evidence, in fact, that the lion’s share of investment in gender equality has shifted to a handful of “magic bullets” like microfinance and political representation, precisely because the results of these interventions are far easier to assess. (Batliwala and Pittmann 7) [End Page 228] Academic work in the humanities like Kurz’s can certainly play an important role in literary studies, connecting the work of literary classrooms to the promotion of human flourishing. It may also play a niche role in human rights campaigns by supplementing perspectives in existing monitoring and evaluation frameworks. The methods of literary history and theory can deepen our understanding of the ethical complexities of representing atrocity; they can also bring analytic rigor to evaluating the “amorphous” and “intangible” ways audiences receive—and act upon—political storytelling. Narrating Contested Lives is organized around a series of case studies. It begins by contrasting the autobiographies of the internationally famous model Waris Dirie and the lesser known Fadumo Korn, both of whom became globally important activists dedicated to ending the practice of FGM (female genital mutilation). Without resorting to easy judgments, Kurz discusses the potential strengths and limits of their respective strategies: Dirie embedded her work in “a discourse on beauty and focused on criminalization of the practice,” while Korn “construed FGM within the discourse of disability and focused on mediation and participation of communities” (244). In developing her argument, Kurz pays particular attention to the narrative tropes and subgeneric conventions used in each autobiography, going so far as to track how the backgrounds of different co-authors affected public perception of the activists and their goals. Kurz describes, for instance, the progression of Dirie’s serial memoirs as a movement from a survivor’s story and celebrity memoir to a “‘return-to-Africa’ tale as an ethnographic journey” (63) designed in part to “correct some of the mistakes” (52) in the first memoir’s simplifying portrayal of Somali culture—an aim tied into the decision to employ as coauthor an academic with experience in Africa. From this pairing, Kurz moves on to analyze the autobiographies of former child soldiers Ishmael Beah and Emmanuel Jal, exploring how commercial collaboration and sponsorship raise compelling questions about the way corporations can...