A novel idea, global human rights and U.S. American literature after 1945 [electronic resource]

The fantasy of absolute justice has resulted in the marginalization of literature, the arts and the voice of poets in the development of a productive human rights culture. The separation is nowhere more apparent than in the United States marketplace of ideas despite a rich American tradition of novels, novellas and stories related to human rights. The increasing presence and development of global human rights culture, humanitarianism and international human rights law has created unprecedented protections and justice apparatuses for human beings and groups who previously had neither the power nor the legal, social or political capital to defend themselves against harm inflicted upon them by abusive governments, evil dictators or any factions benefitting from the use of harm. Despite these global advancements, billions of human beings remain vulnerable and some activists and scholars argue that the very cultures of human rights designed to offer protections have only resulted in more problems and increased exploitation. The Western origins of these discourses, they point out, lead to principles, paradigms and practices that do not respect cultural diversity and difference. This dissertation argues that literature that enables readers to re-imagine the centrality of human beings to human rights culture can help bridge this divide; it suggests that listening to the voices of imaginative writers alongside those with special knowledge in legal, political and philosophical spheres can help mediate between these competing views and help us to move beyond the impasse at which they leave us. While scholarship has begun to acknowledge the poetic traditions of human rights outside of the United States, mainly in post-colonial outposts, the literature from within is left out of the project. Yet, a tradition within nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. American literature comprising novels, novellas and short stories developed alongside and in light of the global debates about human rights, and later, international humanitarian law, the United Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). They were conceived, imagined, staged, published, and consumed by readers in those same geographic, discursive and theoretical spaces that gave birth to the legal, political and social rise of cultures of human rights. In the post-1945 era, for example, writers like James Baldwin, William Styron, Henrietta Buckmaster and Sarah Stone merged human rights and literature to produce novels that both problematize the field and practice, and extend its reach and relevance to forgotten quarters and populations. They anticipate those debates human rights practitioners and scholars consider timely and imagine nuanced cultural answers that benefit from the symbiotic relationship between the particular and the universal in literature. These novels, and the tradition they are part of reveal unique ways in which human rights is dealt with as a subject in literature; demonstrate how the human rights of literature differs from, relates to and/or interrogates political, social and legal notions of rights; contrast the rights of human beings in literature with the rights of human beings in the public sphere; differentiate the rights, recognition and dignity of minor characters in literature from the subjectivity of disenfranchised citizens in the nation-state system; provide literary critiques of the professionalization of human rights; add nuance to philosophical concepts central the human rights narrative; explore gap between the literary trial/tribunal and the law; and display the connectedness of ethics, aesthetics and equality in fiction. We can still hope for Plato's absolute justice, but we need to revoke the banishment of the poets.

Advisor: Fishkin Shelley Fisher primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Elam Michele advisor. Thesis advisor
Nightingale Andrea Wilson advisor. Thesis advisor