The Ends of Human Rights in US Literary Studies

Abstract

Abstract How has contemporary US literature responded to the rapid rise and subsequent decline of human rights in US political discourse? In this essay-review, I examine two recent works—James Dawes’s The Novel of Human Rights (2018) and Crystal Parikh’s Writing Human Rights (2017)—that each bring a critical human rights approach to the study of contemporary US literatures. The essay begins by describing the emergence of the subfield of literature and human rights and its original investment in methodologies of ideology critique. I then show how Dawes and Parikh each adopt a dialectical method to investigate the contradictory relationship between a subset of contemporary American novels and a US-centric, liberal conception of human rights, while also mapping the emergence of new generic forms. But can new kinds of stories transform human rights in practice? To address this question, the essay next examines the role of literature in recent historiographic debates about the origins of human rights in order to argue for a literary-historical turn in the subfield of literature and human rights. Calling for new work that grounds the subfield’s ongoing critique of human rights representations in specific historical practices of the human rights, I conclude by briefly considering Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) alongside her involvement with the human rights movement. Can a search for literary precursors help us imagine a different future for human rights?