Human Rights in Literature
Human
Rights in Literature
P.Asha,
Asst. Prof. of English,
Umayal Ramanathan College
for Women.
“Everyone has the right to freedom
of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without
interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any
media and regardless of frontiers.” In its efforts to defend these “rights that
exist on paper,” Amnesty developed literary methods for mobilizing public
opinion (the personal story) and focusing it on repressive regimes (the mass
letter-writing campaign) that they depended heavily on paper. Both of those
methods exercise precisely the rights of freedom of opinion and expression that
are being denied the Prisoner of Conscience; in other words, the techniques
entailed in defending freedom of expression are of the same kind as the modes
of expression for which the political prisoner is being punished. In a sense
then, at least some of the original Amnesty campaigns were defenses not just of
individual writers but of the literary universe and its conditions of
possibility more generally.
Literature
and human rights may have intersected only recently as common or overlapping
areas of scholarly inquiry, but the two have been bound Copyrighted Material-Taylor
& Francis Foreword xiii up with one another in the field (so to speak) for
a very long time. As a number of the chapters in this volume, and studies
elsewhere, demonstrate, literary works and literary modes of thinking have
played important parts in the emergence of modern human rights ideals and
sentiments, as well as in the elaboration of national and international human
rights laws. Such relationships are rarely quantify able, which I think is
probably a good thing for both literature and human rights—not only because it
leaves the dynamic terms of their entanglements undetermined in mutually
productive ways but also because it reminds us that we must resist the easy
temptation to instrumentalism one in the service of the other, to bend one to
the exigencies of the other.
In
other words, the terms of cooperation, coordination, and contradiction between
literature (or cultural production more generally) and human rights remain open
questions. That the influence of literature on human rights may be both immense
and immeasurable is not just a reflection of the indefinable epistemic effects
of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as “the Humanities . . .
without guarantees” it is the condition and wager of human rights work itself.
In the early years of its existence, for
example, Amnesty International properly refused to credit directly its
letter-writing campaigns with the release of political prisoners. In the
presentation speech awarding the Nobel Prize to Amnesty International, Aase Lionæs
flirted with some inexact statistics on the percentage of prisoners
freed to “provide some indication of the scope of the [organization’s] work”;
she concluded, following Amnesty’s own lead, that such figures were impossible
to calculate, arguing instead that it is “more important to consider Amnesty
International’s worldwide activities as an integral part in the incessant
pressure exerted by all good forces on governments and on the United Nations
organizations.
literature,
letter writing too is an activity without guarantees; and like letter writing,
literature (in its best moments) participates in mounting “incessant pressure”
through its own “worldwide activities.” By any account, the Appeal for Amnesty,
1961 campaign’s emphasis on personal stories predates the so-called narrative
turn in the social sciences and the ethical turn in literary studies when
narrative and ethics apparently turned into one another. Personal stories are
the contemporary currency of human rights projects, and it seems difficult now despite
Benenson’s insistence to imagine the genre as new in 1961 or to imagine a time
before personal stories and human rights campaigns. Indeed, from our
perspective, it seems almost as difficult as imagining the introduction of a
third character onto the stage of classical Greek drama as a revolutionary
literary technological innovation in a sense, Amnesty’s efforts were similar:
to introduce a third character (world opinion) into the two-person drama of
political imprisonment, to interpose public opinion between the state and the
individual.
Nonetheless,
looking back, it is possible to see that the rise of personal story politics
and memoir culture in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with mass movements for
decolonization, civil rights, Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis xiv
Foreword women’s rights, and sexual freedoms many of whose participants would
themselves become subjects of Amnesty’s letter-writing campaigns. In fact, one
of the primary tools of all those campaigns was the personal story although, in
contrast to Amnesty’s offi cial opinion, the personal was also (or always
already) political. The intellectual (and not just the emotional or political)
attraction of Amnesty International’s project for academics in particular might
suggest that we should look more closely at the relationship between the
development and popularity of human rights campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s and
the turns taken by literary studies and the social sciences at the same time.
What we call the World Republic of Letters in the second half of the twentieth
century was at least in part shaped by the human rights campaigns defending the
lives and rights of individual writers, but the campaign methods themselves seem
likely to have had an influence on the generic shape of late-twentieth-century
literature, and vice versa.
We
might discover, for instance, that human rights campaigns and methods like
those popularized by Amnesty International and other organizations had more to
do with steering the narrative and ethical turns than we suspect that the
dramatic turn to personal stories in the context of human rights struggles
(broadly understood) helped to create and consolidate many of the literary
tastes and methods as well as the memoir culture that remain with us today. I
have considered here only one very narrow but highly and historically influential
way of thinking about the links between literature and human rights the
admirable chapters in this collection strike out in other important directions.
Indeed, as a group, these chapters explore what we might call the necessary and
incessant pressure of culture and the worldwide activities of literature on
human rights thinking and practice.
Generalizing from the scene of
torture to preventable human suffering of both acute and chronic kinds, we must
understand the role to be played by human rights, with its instrumentalization
in international law and politics, in ending suffering and striving for human
dignity and justice—even as we recognize its imperialist origins and
complicities with global power and corruption. Our questions about the
theoretical implications of interdisciplinary work in human rights and
literature are posed within this aura of contestation, critique, and deep
desire for social justice. While the imbrications of the humanities and human
rights is evident on the most basic etymological level, overt attention to
interdisciplinary work in these two fields is relatively recent. Human rights
academics and activists have for some time considered the significance of
cultural texts in the Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra
Schultheis Moore struggle against human rights violations, and scholars in
literary studies have always devoted critical energy to interpreting
representations of suffering, yet their pairing as an interdisciplinary is
emergent. It is clearly rooted in questions and approaches developed over
several decades in trauma, postcolonial, holocaust and genocide, and feminist
studies, questions and approaches which also fueled and were fueled by the rise
of the “personal story” in responding to social suffering, as Joseph
Slaughter’s Foreword to this volume explains, as well as the foothold human
rights discourse and ideals gained in political and activist rhetoric in the
late 1970s.
In his important new history of
how human rights achieved its current ideological dominance, Samuel Moyn
underscores the importance of 1977 as its “breakthrough year”: the year Amnesty
International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. President Jimmy Carter
made human rights a centerpiece of his governing moral framework in his
Inaugural Address, and Charter 77 was published in Czechoslovakia. As an
interdisciplinary scholarly field in the U.S., human rights and literature
gained formal momentum after September 11, 2001. The shift in political,
social, cultural, and intellectual landscapes at that point seemed suddenly
both to obviate and to render imperative the connection in relation to changing
understandings and practices of war, imprisonment, torture, and immigration. As
human rights continues as the dominant war, imprisonment, torture, and
immigration. As human rights continues as the dominant discourse for addressing
issues of social justice more broadly, scholars working at the intersection of
human rights and literature, each galvanized perhaps by his or her own
political moment and geographic location, are developing new and more effective
tools for understanding the ethical, literary, and political implications of
their shared intellectual foundations.
Interdisciplinary scholarship in human
rights and literature, finally, undertakes two mutually invested intellectual
projects: reading literary texts for the ways in which they represent and
render intelligible the philosophies, laws, and practices of human rights from
multiple, shifting cultural perspectives and considering how stories,
testimonies, cultural texts, and literary theories contribute to the evolution
of such philosophies, laws, and practices. Significantly, both intellectual
projects are profoundly implicated in—and have profound implications for—the
realm of the political as located within the flows and jumps of global
capitalism. As Domna C. Stanton notes in her “Foreword” to the special issue of
the PMLA, “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,” human
rights and the humanities have a long, shared history. The proliferation of
literary and cultural texts telling the stories of past and current human
rights violations clearly necessitates an understanding of human rights
philosophies and frameworks; less obvious, perhaps, is the extent to which the
critical insights gained through literary readings in the past fifty years
might be brought to bear in human rights contexts in the field and in legal,
activist, and scholarly sites to open the foundations of shared rights norms to
new interpretations. The essays in this collection Copyrighted Material Taylor & Francis Introduction 3 explore
this intersection from both perspectives.
They examine ways in which human
rights norms and concerns change the way we read familiar literature even as
they shape new directions in the “world republic of letters”; and they bring
the interpretative methodologies of literary criticism to bear on human rights
to uncover the stories that normative rights discourses implicitly include and
exclude. If, as Thomas Keenan suggests, “[e]thics and politics as well as
literatureare evaded when we fall back on the conceptual priority of the
subject, agency, or identity as the grounds of our action,” theoretical
approaches to reading literarily can help return us to the necessary work of
negotiating shared foundations of rights, suffering, and representation. One of
the difficulties indefi ning the interdisciplinary field of human rights and
literature is the nature of the “field” of human rights: it comprises law,
politics, philosophy/ethics, sociology, anthropology, history, cultural and
media studies, and journalism, yet is bound by structural and institutional
components of the human rights regime. And of course, approaches to literature
have been informed by multiple disciplines and cross-disciplinary approaches
including, most relevantly in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst
centuries, history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, economics (especially
Marxist theory), political science, film and media studies, feminism, critical
race studies, and queer theory. Requiring rigorous scholarship, nuanced
interdisciplinary work contributes to efforts to move beyond the structuring of
disciplines and departments which has produced both the rise of specialization
as well as the compartmentalization of knowledge. Such compartmentalization of
knowledge (and the teaching and learning practices that accompany it) must
especially be disrupted if we are to tackle the complexly interwoven problems
accelerating in our new millennium.
The contributors to this volume share
attention to the ways in which literary readings of human rights discourses (fi
ctional, poetic, testimonial, legal, political, economic, journalistic,
cinematic) may illuminate both the limitations of those discourses and the
imaginative possibilities of alternative frameworks. We conceptualize such
possibilities as substantive, in terms of the alternative potentialities
occasioned by progressive work in human rights and in literary production, and
as a kind of meta-narrative refl ection on the forms that such
interdisciplinary work has taken or may yet take. With this dual focus upon
form and content in mind, then, we posit a human rights oriented literary
criticism that engages in several unique activities.
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
one of the central paradoxes of human rights as outlined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is that they are available foremost to
citizens, such that statelessness or marginalization within state formations
challenges individual and collective claims to rights precisely at the moment
that persons and groups are most vulnerable to the kinds of harms that such
rights mitigate against. Similarly, expanding Arendt’s question about the role
of the nation-state in maintaining the human rights regime to include the role
of global capitalism, Talal Asad asks whether normative human rights discourse
is in fact “part of a great work of conversion” which promises that when
“redemption is complete, rights and capital will be equally universalized.”
But,he notes, “whether universal capital or universal human rights will bring
with it practical equality and an end to all suffering is quite another
question.”
Considering Asad’s focus upon the
affi liations between global capital(ism) and human rights, we might consider
one of the UDHR’s framers, René Cassin’s, elegant diagram of the structure of
the Declaration as a classical temple in “Cassin’s Portico” as emblematic of
these limitations identifi ed in the modern human rights regime, inasmuch as
his image resonates culturally with notions of rights as a secular morality based
upon individualism and democracy. Cassin imagined rights resting on the
cornerstones of dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood and grouped into
four stately columns relating to the individual; to individuals in relation to
one another and social groups; to public and to public and political rights;
and to economic, social, and cultural rights.
Nevertheless, Human rights
literature is not propaganda, it does not anticipate that the author actually
will call for a specific action, rather it sees the authors role end as soon as
writer complete the process of literary action. The question whether their
creation will inspire for social changes or motivate readers to take action
will be answered by the readers. Human rights literature gives the readers direct
opportunities for real action. However it will never obligate then to be
committed to it. Commitment is in fact an unwritten contract that is signed
between the readers to the creation in the process of reading and holds the
reader’s freedom to act.
What we should be doing is taking
the responsibility ourselves to play our part in protecting human rights of
others. Michael Murpurgo states that:
I long for the day when Amnesty
is needed no more, mat be sometimes, but not enough. If we did, if all people of goodwill did this, then the
tsunami of protest would roll on into
the corridors of power and sooner rather than later the bastions of tyranny,
the walls of division and oppression and prejudice would come tumbling
down.
According to Murpurgo .
Not simply literacy, that we
learn to understand and empathis. As reader we learn about the lives of
others. other places cultures. Other ways of seeing world. We find about the past , understand better
how it made our today and how our tomorrow. We are not alone our feelings, that
joy and pain universal, that humanity is to be celebrated for its diversity but
is ultimately one humanity. Through
literature, we can find our place in the world, feel we belong and discover our
sense of responsibility.
Human rights are vital role in our society.
Everyone have our own rights and responsibility. We must respect our own rights and also we
must follow that. Through literary thoughts authors presented in literary way. My
paper presented through it about Human Rights in Literature .
Work cited
Sartre, Jean Paul. What
is Literature.Gallimard.1948.
Morpurgo,
michaelPrivate peaceful.2003.
http://www.human rights.com
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