The Civil and the Human

Abstract

The Civil and the Human David L. Eng (bio) There will never be a stable definition of “the human”; the concept is grounded not in biology but in stories. Like organic life, stories change, but their evolution is considerably more rapid. In her dazzling presidential address, from which I draw the above epigraph, Priscilla Wald retells the story of Henrietta Lacks with great political passion. Wald reveals in the process the remarkable power of narrative to shape the ways in which we view the world and the human beings who inhabit it. How we choose to tell Lacks’s story in the world is, at once, how we might reimagine the world picture. It is also how we might work to repair and to transform it. As Wald narrates it, the invention of the immortal HeLa cell line in 1951 by the researchers George and Margaret Gey at Johns Hopkins University Hospital—unbeknownst to the African American patient whose genetic materials were exploited for its creation—is a story about the emergence of new biotechnological practices for the manipulation and commodification of human life. Simultaneously, it is a story of how enduring patterns of institutional racism and structural violence in U.S. society gave global shape to new life forms under the shadows of Cold War conflict, the threat of universal nuclear annihilation, and the concomitant rise of decolonization movements worldwide. As Wald puts it, these significant postwar transformations of the human being “dovetail with Foucault’s contemporaneous coinage of ‘biopower,’ but they focus on the differential effects of that power across stratified populations.” Wald’s retelling of the creation of the immortal HeLa cell line immediately implicates postwar U.S. civil rights battles for African American inclusion and enfranchisement in the liberal polity under the racial politics of “separate but equal.” At the same time, it calls attention to equally urgent problems concerning the figure of the human that cannot be easily ignored. It draws immediate awareness, that is, to the differential distribution of humanity, human life, and human suffering in a long history of colonial modernity, in the United States as elsewhere. The account of Cold War struggles for black civil rights and national belonging, along with their trenchant interrogation of citizenship and liberal inclusion, is a familiar one in the field of American studies. However, [End Page 205] the problem of the human being after genocide, one issuing from both radical geopolitical metamorphoses and scientific innovation in the postwar period, deserves greater consideration. Indeed, Wald’s retelling of the story of Lacks allows us to reexamine the problematic relationship between civil and human rights in American studies and, more specifically, to reconsider what is at stake in their shifting relationships. It is to this cleaving between the civil and the human that I devote the remainder of my brief comments. In April 2010 the human rights organization Amnesty International issued a report, “Un-natural Disaster: Human Rights in the Gulf Coast,” indicting the U.S. government across federal, state, and local levels for human rights violations. Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the report observes, victims of this “un-natural disaster” continued to suffer from inadequate housing, unequal access to health care, and disparate standing in the criminal justice system. Consequently, “rights violations in these three areas not only are mutually reinforcing, but also combine to have a disproportionate impact, severely affecting low income communities and communities of color while creating the circumstances which prevent their return. As a result, the demographics of the region are being permanently altered, in contravention of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.”1 The right of return, the report highlights from its cover page, is “a human right,” thus connecting Katrina and the right of return to other global struggles such as the question of Palestine. Amnesty International’s configuration of the U.S. state as a perpetrator of human rights abuses (in the context of not only Katrina but also the U.S. prison–industrial complex) might be interpreted as a bold rhetorical stand, resonating strongly with Wald’s assertion that “injustices made visible could be altered.” This audacious legal strategy, aligning...