Writing Human Rights

Abstract

Human rights are usually understood to be that which Americans deliver unto others elsewhere, with little direct meaning for U.S. legal discourse, domestic political struggle, or American literary and cultural studies back at home. Writing Human Rights instead proposes human rights as a method for reading “minor literatures,” or fiction authored by contemporary U.S. writers of color from the closing years of the Cold War to the early years of the U.S. war on terror. It takes as its premise that—unlike a benevolent humanitarianism, which views its objects as pure victims—human rights provide deeply meaningful modes of ethical imagining for political subjects. By engaging the ethical deliberations that these minor literatures stage, Writing Human Rights explores the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political community emerge. Beginning with writers such as Toni Morrison and ending with Aimee Phan, each chapter pairs works of minor literature with one human rights text, considering the specific principles that have been articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties. It offers close readings of the transnational political subjects and communities conceived in minor literature as they bear upon the legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights, and vice-versa. Affiliating the “minor” subjects of American literary studies with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights, freedoms, and good life that have been made global by the twenty-first century.