The modes of human rights literature

This book contributes to the humanistic study of human rights by offering an account of two of the major modes of human rights literature—lament, the literature of mourning, and laughter

THE MODES OF HUMAN RIGHTS LITERATURE

Towards a Culture without

Borders Michael Galchinsky

The Modes of Human Rights Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-31850-9 ISBN 978-3-319-31851-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31851-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943524

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information

in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland

Michael   Galchinsky

Georgia State University

Atlanta , Georgia , USA

For Gideon and Rafi

In September 2004, I traveled to Russia with a delegation of academics

to build connections with the emerging Jewish studies departments there, and also to interview human rights activists We could get a pretty clear sense of the state of human rights at the time just by looking at the pub-lic monuments As a marker of one Russian impulse, Tsereteli’s massive and hideous new monument of Peter the Great, sitting in the middle of the Moscow River, seemed like a portent of Putin’s imperial ambitions But the imperial impulse was countered by what we found in a sculpture park outside the Tretyakov Gallery in central Moscow This was where, after 1989, city offi cials brought the marble and bronze Lenins and Stalins and Dzerzhinskys, which had stood in front of government buildings and bestrewn public squares, but which now no longer had a state purpose At

fi rst, the offi cials brought the sculptures to the park and left them as they were, leaning on their sides The area came to be called (colloquially, not offi cially) the Park of Fallen Idols

Eventually the collection contained over 700 Soviet-era monuments

In the heady days of the new Russia, the City of Moscow commissioned artist Evgeny Chubarov to surround some of the examples of triumphant socialist realism with more contemporary sculptures When we entered the park we came upon Stalin, twenty feet high, striding purposefully into history Chubarov had surrounded the dictator with sculptures of his vic-tims, including a massive cement cage with iron bars, fi lled with over 300 individualized ceramic heads In this way the Park of Fallen Idols offered

a layered reading of Russian history

PREFACE

viii PREFACE

Not many states preserve the monuments of their discredited pasts

Writing a decade after the Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, in The

Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera described the more

typi-cal fate of monuments: “Wandering the streets that do not know their names are the ghosts of monuments torn down Torn down by the Czech Reformation, torn down by the Austrian Counter-Reformation, torn down by the Czechoslovak Republic, torn down by the Communists;

even the statues of Stalin have been torn down” (Kundera, Laughter and

Forgetting 1994, 217) It is just because successive governments

under-take strenuous programs of public forgetting that citizens in every country should demand their own parks of fallen idols Every government should

be required to maintain its own standing rebuke Its citizens should have access to symbols that assert, “However things are today, they were other-wise yesterday, and might be otherwise tomorrow.”

Human rights symbols, like the fallen idols, arouse strong public ings, which do not always fi nd a channel in the offi cial exchanges of actors

feel-in the feel-international human rights system The various monitorfeel-ing bodies

at the United Nations (UN) tend to marginalize affect, in an effort to make human rights justiciable Non-governmental organization (NGO) reports also relegate the strong emotions of victims of rights violations

to sidebars, focusing their attention on testimony that has evidentiary value In the academic realm, too, there has been too little discussion of the emotional aspects of human rights discourse This is in part because the study of human rights has usually been undertaken by legal scholars and political scientists, whose interests lie elsewhere Trauma studies have explored the consequences of human rights abuse for individual victims’ psyches, but how societies, collectively, deal with their traumas is a ques-tion only beginning to be investigated in the scholarly literature on transi-tional justice There is still much work to be done

Compared to human rights law, human rights culture is generally not as concerned about the juncture between facts and norms (Habermas 1998) as

it is about the juncture between feelings and forms It is less about establishing

an agreed code, and more about sharing individual experiences Emotionally resonant human rights art typically doesn’t change laws or regimes; rather, it seeks to change the prevailing ethos, by depicting what human rights mean for the individuals who are deprived of them, who witness the abuse, who perpetrate it, who mourn the victims, who intervene, who provide aid, or who transmit the stories By relating such experiences, human rights culture tries to shape a durable recollection for the wounded community

PREFACE ix

In the past decade, there has been a surge in the number of humanities scholars studying human rights literature and art Cultural sociologists have begun to look at the symbolic, meaning-making processes associated with human rights practices (e.g., Alexander 2007) Communications theorists have considered the effect on viewers of the framing of human rights issues

in the media (e.g., Borer 2012) This book contributes to the humanistic study of human rights by offering an account of two of the major modes of human rights literature—lament, the literature of mourning, and laughter, the literature of resilience These literary modes exemplify art that refl ects, and refl ects on, a developing culture of universal civility

Thanks to everyone at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, who helped me develop my ideas on global civil culture by inviting me to pres-ent a workshop in 2008 The Center’s journal and conferences have been a source of continuing inspiration and learning for me Thanks to Tristan Borer for encouraging me to develop my ideas and including an early version of Chap 1 in her collection as “Framing a Rights Ethos: Artistic Media and the Dream of a Culture without Borders,” in Borer, ed., Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights: Mediating Suffering (New York: Zed, 2012), 67–95 Thanks, too, to the editors of Human Rights Review, for publishing an early version of Chap 2—originally as “Lament as Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Review 15.3 (2014): 259–281—and permitting me to revise and reprint it here Colleagues at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Studies Association have offered wonderful support and advice—in particular Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Greg Mullins, and Zoe Norridge I am also grateful to the colleagues in my international law track, whose work has often overlapped in interesting and unforeseeable ways with my culture track: Kurt Mills, Melissa Labonte, and David Jason Karp

I am grateful to Georgia State University for the Provost’s Faculty Fellowship and professional leave that enabled me to complete this work Many of my colleagues have offered their good counsel and encour-agement on various aspects of the project, especially Randy Malamud, LeeAnne Richardson, Sarah Higinbotham, and my fellow affi liates of GSU’s Center for Human Rights and Democracy My editor at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, and the anonymous reviewers offered useful counsel

My boys, Gideon and Rafael, are dedicated to soccer and to tikkun olam (the Jewish concept of repair of the world) They’re wise enough

to know they don’t have to choose As Emma Goldman once put it, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.”

Parts of Chap 1 are reprinted and/or revised, with kind permission from Zed Books, from Michael Galchinsky, “Framing a Rights Ethos: Artistic Media and the Dream of a Culture without Borders,” in Tristan Borer, ed., Mediating Atrocity: Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights (New York: Zed Books, 2012), 67–95

Parts of Chap 2 are reprinted and/or revised, with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: Human Rights Review, “Lament

as Transitional Justice,” 15 (2014), 259–281, Michael Galchinsky

1 The Dream of a Culture Without Borders 1

2 Lament as Transitional Justice 27

3 Laughter and the Subjected Subject 53

4 Towards a Global Civil Culture 83

Abstract Chapter 1, “The Dream of a Culture without Borders” argues

that the role of human rights literature is to refl ect the desire for sity civility to a global citizenry Writers begin to develop a culture with-out borders through their use of four literary modes: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter These modes are formal means of articulating the sociopolitical emotions triggered wherever human rights crises occur The book focuses on two of the modes: lament, the literature of mourning; and laughter, the literature of resilience Adopting an approach known as affective formalism, the chapter surveys key methodological, institutional, theoretical, and operational challenges for this approach

Keywords Human rights • Literary modes • Affect • Formalism

• Cosmopolitanism • Civil society

Human rights culture has many tasks to perform In literature, fi lm, and the visual and performing arts, works of human rights culture seek to

refl ect and refl ect on our fundamental dignity, equality, and freedom

Human rights culture draws on the theory of natural rights fi rst declared during the American and French revolutions, and later institutionalized

in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the complex array of treaties, monitoring bodies, and courts that followed At the same time, human rights artists draw on the universalistic strains within their own particular religious, cultural, and ethnic traditions

The Dream of a Culture Without Borders

Human rights culture shares civic and ethical functions with human rights law , but while the orientation of the law is vertical, reaching down from

government bodies to individuals, the orientation of rights culture tends to

be horizontal, with the artist appealing as a human being directly to his or her fellows In this way, works of human rights culture participate in the

public sphere, in Habermas ’s sense (Habermas Public Sphere 1991; Slaughter

2007) Along with the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), news media, and social media, culture helps construct the civil society in which human rights can be meaningful The human rights artist assumes that neither the United Nations (UN) nor a national government can simply

compel people to respect each other’s rights: people have to want to The

artist seeks to produce and refl ect that desire to a national or global citizenry, striving to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos Only rarely does a work of human rights culture produce a direct out-come—the change in a policy or law, the release of a prisoner, or the overthrow of a regime Its work is generally more subtle, indirect, and long-term: it helps to produce what cultural sociologists call a “ structure

of feeling ,” a socially constructed and sanctioned sympathy with others across identity differences (see, e.g., Williams 1997; Alexander 2007) In other words, human rights art seeks to cultivate rights-oriented “habits

of the heart” before abuses start, so that when they do, a rights discourse will already be in place to stand against the discourse of the violators (Durkheim 1972, 1992, 1995; Hunt 2007; Mill 1989; Sontag 2003; Tocqueville 1969)

In Inventing Human Rights , historian Lynn Hunt provides a

demon-stration of how literature produced a rights-oriented structure of feeling

in the rights revolution in eighteenth-century France Novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela modeled empathy across social lines As Hunt

(2007) tells us:

In the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview

of empathy … across traditional social boundaries … As a consequence, they came to see others—people they did not know personally—as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning, and in particular no politi- cal consequence (40)

By promoting identifi cation with the interior lives of people who had been considered unequal, novels prepared “the seedbed” of the French

Revolution’s declaration of human rights (Hunt 2007, 58) Critics have made similar arguments about the role of fi ction in helping build support for the American civil rights movement, among other cases

Human rights culture performs its many tasks by addressing multiple audiences Most rights works are directed to their national audiences and speak to national crises in a global dialect A small proportion of these—in addition to addressing their national audience—also reach out to a global public At the national level, we can split the audience into three parts: the abused, the witnesses and allies, and the perpetrators The artist’s fellow sufferers look to the work for voice, protest, satire, and commiseration The witnesses and allies look to it for information, history, inspiration, and a focal point for grief To the perpetrators, the work is directed as tes-timony and protest Addressing all three audiences simultaneously can be

a diffi cult task, so artists sometimes limit the work’s distribution to one of

the audiences: for example, protest songs and poems passed hand to hand among dissidents or distributed via selective Listservs create solidarity and build resistance

Those works of human rights culture that reach for the global lic aim to inspire international outrage and intervention Here special diffi culties arise because, for reasons to be explored in this chapter, it’s not clear that a global public exists But the fantasy of a global audience provides many artists—under conditions of censorship and threat of punishment at home—a lifeline beyond the national frame We could say that the dream of broadcasting rights works to the world is the dream of a “ culture without borders ”—a yearning to tap into a univer-sal structure of feeling

pub-1 PURPOSES

Human rights culture raises many questions: beyond the general aim

of establishing an ethos among their multiple audiences, to what more specifi c purposes do human rights artists set themselves? What aesthetic modes—or formal approaches—have they adopted to fulfi ll their pur-poses? And what problems have they, their distributors, critics, and audi-ences faced in creating a human rights culture?

Apart from the general task of engendering sympathy beyond tity, human rights artists set themselves a variety of more specifi c tasks They seek to clarify or dispute historical narratives, protest current prac-tices, foment resistance, promote reconciliation, express solidarity, inspire

others, and mourn With so many purposes, it’s no wonder that works

in this fi eld are so diffi cult to analyze as a class To begin to make some analytical headway, cultural critics have recognized the need to adjust their habits of reception

The readjustment has, in the past several years, been increasingly led by the new fi eld of human rights literary criticism Human rights literature

has had its own special-topic section in PMLA , the journal of the Modern

Language Association of America Important sole-authored works of criticism like Joseph Slaughter ’s Human Rights Inc (2007) emerged

Slaughter and Sophia McClennen (2007) edited a special-topic issue of

Comparative Literature Studies , and Routledge published a volume of

articles edited by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis,

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012), as well

as a volume on teaching human rights literature in the Modern Language Association (MLA) series on pedagogical approaches Monographs by Swanson Goldberg, James Dawes , Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith , Zoe Norridge , and others (see bibliography)—many of whom have attended the annual seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association for over a decade—have built up the fi eld

Slaughter’s book offers an ambitious argument about the parallelism between legal discourse on human rights and the narrative form of the coming-of-age novel: both value the individual’s development, socializa-tion, and incorporation into the larger community Both take for granted

a plot trajectory of progress—or document the obstructions to such progress—a plot that fi nds its source in Enlightenment thinking about the modern subject and has increasingly found a foothold in postcolonial thinking as well The coming-of-age novel, Slaughter says, is the “novel-istic wing of human rights” (25); indeed, for him it is the exemplary type

of such literature

Slaughter suggests that “other cultural forms … may make able alternative visions of human rights” (Slaughter 2007, 4), mention-ing other novel subgenres such as the picaresque, romance, epistolary, and sentimental Much of the critical discussion has followed Slaughter by focusing on narrative forms, and indeed I will add to this critical dialogue

imagin-in my discussion of novels that contribute to the literature of resilience However, taking up Slaughter’s invitation to expand the range of genres,

I will demonstrate that a range of non-narrative forms, including poems, plays, sermons, and pamphlets, have made signifi cant contributions to human rights literature, especially to the literature of mourning

In expanding the discussion beyond narrative, the temptation is to proceed with an expanded socio-historical investigation of genres But while that kind of study is necessary, this study undertakes a different kind

of analysis—not of genre, but of mode Genres are historically evolving forms of writing, their features contingent on the time and place in which they are put to use By contrast, modes are major forms of writing that persist in many times and places A genre contains a spectrum of possibili-ties activated contingently in relation to a specifi c historical context As Franco Moretti has shown, genres have a life cycle: they are born, mature, evolve, die off, and may be born again, perhaps amalgamated with fea-tures from another genre (Moretti 2007) By contrast, a mode remains the same no matter where or when it is produced Modes are transspa-tial and transhistorical, because they are logically derived rather than his-torically conceived Aristotle famously identifi ed three major modes: lyric (a single voice), drama (multiple voices), and narrative (multiple voices organized by an overarching teller) Later critics and historians, such as Northrop Frye and Hayden White (Frye 2007; White 1975), have elabo-rated the modal concept The idea of modes seems suited to human rights, which scholars characterize as similarly rationally derived, transspatial, and transhistorical

In the last thirty years the movement in the arts and criticism has been toward multiculturalism—the exploration and celebration of cultural diversity and difference There have been, of course, good reasons for this approach Yet a human rights art asks audiences to follow the pendulum

as it swings in the other direction It asks audiences to balance culturalism with a kind of humanism—and this time not an exclusively Western-oriented humanism While recognizing the uniqueness of a given community’s experience (as per the multicultural model), it asks audiences

multi-to recognize those aspects of the experience that can be communicated across social divides It challenges critics to adopt concepts that are inde-pendent of local or national context, of historical period or artistic genre

It asks them to imagine an aesthetic that transcends nationality, race, and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; religion and class

This book aims to offer a constructive response to these challenges I propose a model of literary forms and affects that emerge frequently—and transnationally—in writers’ responses to human rights crises Thus the book is intrinsically comparative I also argue that human rights culture

is a subset of a larger phenomenon, which I term global civil culture and describe at length in Chap 4 This book does not set out to complete

the work it undertakes, but I hope the model it proposes may be of use

to other critics as we continue to develop what Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore have termed the “interdiscipline” of human rights cul-tural criticism (Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore 2012)

2 MODES

Is there a tradition of human rights literature, and if so, what does such a tradition look like? I argue that critical analysis can identify a human rights literary tradition, but it is not necessarily a self-conscious tradition, from the writers’ standpoint Writers included in this study may or may not have intended to contribute to a tradition of human rights literature, and they may or may not have been aware of other writers in the tradition Samuel

Moyn makes a cogent argument in The Last Utopia that the human rights

movement—whether in its minimalist or maximalist forms—was not and will not be the only rhetorical game in town (Moyn 2010) The writers discussed here might, for example, think of themselves as rebels, as femi-nists, as postcolonial writers, or as child soldiers, but not as human rights writers Nonetheless, I consider their work as part of a tradition of human rights literature I use the term “tradition” to refer to a critical ascrip-tion of similarities among works produced under analogous experiences of human rights restrictions and violations, loss, and post-crisis rebuilding Here, identifying a tradition of human rights literature is a retrospective, critical practice

To be sure, there are cases in which writers are aware of others working

in the same genre, style, or mode, and are writing self-consciously to, for, against, or about each other Moreover, many of the writers in this book have the intention of seeking an audience outside their national frame who can hear their cry and be outraged and intervene While neither denying nor minimizing the signifi cance of such intentions, I identify a human rights literary tradition primarily on formal grounds—by pointing to a set

of common literary practices, or modes, which such literature explores These formal elements are, in my view, what make the literary aspects of human rights literature recognizable as such

This type of literature gives voice to certain core sociopolitical tions triggered by human rights situations A non-exhaustive list of these includes a communal sense of fear, outrage, and desire for solidarity

( protest ) ; the urge to witness, remember, and narrate ( testimony ) ; the need

to satirize, express the absurdity of life under violation, and fi nd relief

( laughter ) ; and the yearnings for mourning, renewal, and reconciliation ( lament ) I hypothesize that writers have associated such emotions with

particular types of symbolic structures and forms, and I seek to test whether such structures and forms are, in fact, unbound by territory or chronol-ogy, fi nding expression wherever rights violations occur Although each human rights crisis is exceptional, I claim that the literary texts produced

in response to them exhibit certain resemblances—in the types of human subjects they depict, in the modes of literary expression they embrace, and

in the affects to which they give voice That is, a modal criticism looks for large-scale formal patterns that cross temporal-spatial boundaries This is similar to what Franco Moretti refers to as “distant reading” (as opposed

to close reading), a meta- or macro-level kind of analysis which he claims

is “a specifi c form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense

of their overall interconnections Shapes, relations, structures Forms Models” (Moretti, 1)

Distant readings for large-scale formal patterns do not depend on an intentionalist argument Antjie Krog, the South African journalist and poet, may or may not have been aware of the writings of Primo Levi, the

Italian Jewish Holocaust writer, when she wrote Country of My Skull —but

the exigencies of the human rights situations she and he are addressing, the sociopolitical emotions triggered by those exigencies, and the shaping pressure those exigencies and emotions exert on literary technique, led Krog and Levi (despite their different national situations) to adopt certain formal practices, common to laments Whether the writers intended to contribute to that mode is, from the formal perspective, useful but not requisite information

To maintain that human rights literature is a formally coherent tion of modes is not to deny the importance of historical context in a full appreciation of a given work Like all works of literature, human rights works cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of the generic, social, biographical, political, discursive, and institutional forces that con-ditioned and shaped them Indeed, much of the excellent human rights literary criticism over the last decade has taken some kind of generic- historicist approach

To give one example, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, in Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (Schaffer and Smith

2004) give a historicist account of fi rst person human rights narratives, arguing that such narratives emerge in some cases but not others due

to particular sociopolitical conditions Certain “representational frames”

(134) make human rights narratives possible, while other frames exclude rights narratives Schaffer’s and Smith’s account lets us see that narratives

by women who served as sexual slaves in the Japanese military’s system of

“comfort stations” during World War II did not emerge for 50 years after World War II: such women were written off as war prostitutes rather than

as victims of sexual violence But then, starting in the late 1980s and into the 90s, narratives by and about comfort women that framed their stories within the language of human rights abuse began to emerge Schaffer’s and Smith’s account of the changing conditions that make new frames available helps us to gain an appreciation of the social forces affecting particular storytellers It also enables an analysis of the various reception histories of human rights narratives as they circulate globally, “beyond the local sites of telling” (146)—whether in other national markets, in UN forums, in NGO reports, or among members of their group’s diaspora The historicist approach reminds us that every human rights crisis

is unique for those who suffered under it, and the rhetoric, discourses, and tropes adopted by victims and perpetrators vary from place to place

When Hitler referred in Mein Kampf to Jews as “parasites,” he did not

invoke precisely the same kind of hate speech as that of the Radio Rwanda announcer who called Tutsis “cockroaches.” I am conscious of wanting

to guard against homogenizing differences into another form of Western- centrism, where the “universal” is just the West in disguise (Gutiérrez- Mouat 2013) This book recognizes important differences among human rights literary works: genres, for example, develop locally and contingently Laughter seems to be (generally speaking) a mode to which male writers have been drawn, whereas (generally speaking) lament has been identifi ed with the “feminine” and often practiced by women, for reasons examined below Certain types of laughter emerge more frequently in literatures of the Soviet and post-Soviet states, while others seem to bubble up in litera-tures written in response to Latin American dictatorships

Yet the uniqueness of the Tutsis’ and Jews’ experiences in the above example does not obscure the analogies between the rhetoric used to dele-gitimize them: both “parasites” and “cockroaches” were dehumanizing metaphors aimed at placing the target communities beyond the circle of national belonging, rights, and care In a similar way, this book strives to locate the shared, human dimensions of human rights literature The focus

is on the aspects of the literature that seem most widespread, even while other aspects of the same literary expressions remain local, particular, and distinct If the desire to see human rights respected ever can be global,

I suggest, that desire will depend on the formation and maintenance of some kind of common structure of feeling, and some common symbolic forms of expression The common structure of feeling I have in mind

might be termed universal civility The symbolic forms that carry this feeling I identify as the modes of protest, testimony, lament, and laughter

I observe throughout the book that the affects intrinsic to a given mode can be expressed in works diverse in terms of their geographic origin; language(s); ethnic, religious, and national settings; gender and sexuality

of the author; and chronological period Modes cross such boundaries more readily than genres, because they are the more capacious forms, the macro- forms As Northrop Frye, the most prominent modern champion

of modal analysis, asserted, a mode is “contemporary with its own time and contemporary with ours” (Frye 1957, 51)—as well as with the time of the other writers in the same mode, whenever they wrote In a similar way,

my claim is that literary reactions to human rights situations share certain stable structures no matter where or when they were produced, and they share a common cast of characters—such as the victim, the violator, the witness, and the judge In these respects, the modes of human rights lit-erature are non-contingent and widespread

Both Frye and the modal historiographer, Hayden White, agree that there are fi ve fundamental modes of prose narrative, but while they agree

on two of them—romance and irony—they name the other three modes differently Frye names the remaining modes myth, the high mimetic, and the low mimetic White prefers tragedy, comedy, and epic (or chronicle)

In my treatment of the modes, I use both of the agreed modes: romance and irony I identify protest as a form of romance (the romance of the higher ideal), and argue that human rights laughter dwells in the ironic mode The mode I call testimony is closest to White’s fi fth mode, the epic or chronicle Lament combines aspects of White’s tragic and comic modes, specifi cally, tragedy’s sense of a world unmade with comedy’s desire for renewal and reconciliation

Each text analyzed under a given mode has been chosen because it exemplifi es certain elements of that mode Thus, for example, each novel discussed in Chap 3 on laughter reveals a different aspect of human rights laughter: laughter from below, laughter from above, pathetic laughter, paranoid laughter, and so on In Chap 2 on lament, each text displays one or more of the elements of lament, such as the fi gure of the weeping mother or the speaking ghost, or the tropes of parataxis or synecdoche This inclusionary principle—inclusion by formal element—attempts to

illuminate the internal coherence, complexity, logic, and beauty of each mode, as it seeks to give voice to a range of affects Texts categorized by human rights modes have the virtue of being thematically, emotionally, and formally connected I try to test whether comparative readings among texts in the same mode bring to light larger, transnational patterns Following the method adopted by Frye and White, I begin by offer-ing a descriptive catalog of each mode in turn At this point, I describe them, heuristically, as distinct ideal types, but as we will see throughout the book, the modes are not as separate and distinct as they appear in the catalog

Protest

From revolutionary political pamphlets to slave narratives to prison oirs to blogs, polemics have participated in horizontal protests among citizens (For examples of the literature of protest, see the bibliography.) Protest encourages the public to shame abusive governments and appeals

mem-to what Emile Durkheim called “collective ideals” (Durkheim 1972, 425) and what the Preamble of the UDHR calls “the conscience of mankind” (Universal Declaration) It represents the romance of an ideal—the “last utopia” of human rights, in Samuel Moyn’s terms (Moyn 2010) It wears its cause on its sleeve, reading as a manifesto or prophetic indictment

Works like Richard Attenborough’s fi lm Cry Freedom (1987), which

dra-matizes the South African government’s killing of Steven Biko, a leader

in the anti-apartheid movement, represent collective indignity through

the eyes of one Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s brief and moving novel, A Day

in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (2000), tells the story of the Siberian gulag

through a single prisoner’s experience The narrator’s freedom to travel inside the protagonist’s head shows us the world of violations through the experience of the one who suffers them Narrative interiority—the view from the inside—evokes the reader’s sympathetic identifi cation in a

way that no exterior reportage can do Simply by allowing readers in and

permitting them to see that a character in an oppressive regime can still think for himself, a protest novel effectively represents a zone of freedom that eludes a regime’s best efforts at social control

Because its purpose is to provoke public outrage, protest is drawn to represent the most extreme forms of suffering—mass graves, summary executions, starvation, medical experiments, and so on This tendency

to gravitate toward extreme violence can prevent it from depicting more

ordinary, banal forms of evil, like the bureaucratic terror found in less

direct, more ironic works such as Kafka’s The Trial or Orwell’s 1984 One of protest’s most pervasive fi ctional genres is the Bildungsroman ,

the novel of development Joseph Slaughter has shown that this form is congruent with the UDHR’s assertion that everyone has the right to “the full development of the human personality” (see UDHR Art 22, 26(2),

29) Bildungsromane from the nineteenth century, but especially those

written after the UDHR was proclaimed, perfectly capture the changing emphasis in international law from an arena restricted to relations between states to an arena in which the individual human person is a subject of increasing concern By immersing readers in the protagonist’s struggles, such novels represent protests against the efforts of violator states to restrict human potential

Ironically, however, in making the protagonist undergo abuses typical

of the crisis, protest runs the risk of abstracting the individual into a type—the type of the human being in extremis, the one who represents many, the survivor who silences his own voice in order to give voice to the dead

In the process of abstraction the unique personhood that human rights are meant to protect may sometimes be lost Protest’s romance may produce unintended ethical and aesthetic consequences

Testimony

Like protest literature, the literature of testimony focuses a reader’s tion on a single case rather than on general reportage In this way it appeals

atten-to the reader’s narrative greed Even if, as in The Diary of Anne Frank

(Frank 2002), we already know the ending in advance, the individualized

focus enables the reader to feel what she already knows In Hotel Rwanda

(George 2004), as we follow the plight of Paul Rusesabagina, we witness the genocide next to him: we are there on the ground, sharing what he knows and what he doesn’t

While protest calls for present action against continuing injustices, mony seeks to establish what happened in the past for future generations

testi-It is a form of chronicle Because its central theme is bearing witness, testimony often takes the form of memoir, oral history, or fi ctionalized versions of these (For examples, see the bibliography.) Poets have also witnessed to the brutality they suffered Anyone who has watched or read the fascinating proceedings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission will recognize that testimony raises the question of how we

can know the truth about the past: the reliability of the testifi er is always

at issue because of the possible distortions of memory, the desire to touch

up or omit details, the urge for exoneration or expiation, or the use of the past to justify a present course of action Hence while protest tends to be political and prospective, testimony tends to be psychological and retro-spective It focuses on the uncertainty of our knowledge and causes us to meditate on the relation between history and memory

Lament

Closely allied with testimony is lament, the literature of mourning As

in testimony, lament focuses on memory, but here the effort is less on establishing the truth than on memorializing the victims Lament has a ritualistic quality and indeed plays a part in rituals of remembrance such

as memorials, museums, monuments, and prayers (For examples, see the bibliography.) While testimony focuses on establishing what happened, lament’s focus is on helping people in the present exorcize their pain, anger, and loss While protest and testimony often address themselves to the experience of one, lament tends to tell its story through the experi-ences of many In lament, massive numbers of victims can take on a talis-manic quality: the number six million in relation to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust has been given artistic signifi cance in many cases, as when a group of schoolchildren from the town of Whitwell, Tennessee collected six million paper clips and housed them in a cattle car Toni Morrison’s

great novel Beloved (2006) is dedicated to “Sixty Million and More”—an

estimate of the number of people subjected to slavery Her novel makes clear that lament is always a ghost story, a means of apprehending past violations that still haunt the present, and a way to perform and assuage grief As literature that performs a public ritual function, lament’s natural forms are poetry and oratory rather than prose fi ction

As a mode, lament raises the question of whether grief is ible: are all mourning songs alike? That is, can writers in one national context learn from the collective grieving strategies developed in other national contexts? South African writer Antjie Krog, in her poetic account

convert-of her country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country convert-of My

Skull , cites Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman about the Chilean Truth and

Reconciliation Commission, and she quotes from Jewish Holocaust poet Paul Celan The Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda took many lessons from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum But while elements of lament

can be shared, laments also insist on the specifi city and uniqueness of the catastrophes they address Laments are powerful both because of their generalizable lessons regarding the social dimensions of grief, and because they stand as markers of incomparable loss

Laughter

The fi nal mode—laughter—might seem out of place in a discussion so sobering and wrenching as human rights abuse In fact, however, laugh-ter has been a signifi cant and indispensable thread in the human rights canon I am thinking, to begin with, of the kind of laughter described by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book on Rabelais (Bakhtin 1984) For the Bakhtin of

Rabelais and His World , laughter is a kind of novelistic language that arises

from folk tales, from common speech, from Carnival This sort of language laughs from below at the pretensions of the mighty, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of authority Laughter-from-below imagines raucous rever-sals, reminding its readers that totalitarian leaders have bodies that are sub-ject to the same misfortunes and humiliations as anyone else’s This is the case, for instance, in the short stories of Soviet writer Mikhail Zoschenko (For other examples, see the bibliography.) Laughter insists that no order is

fi nal, or fi nalizable: existing forms of authority are open- ended and mutable Laughter’s forms—parody, satire, absurdist art—are gestures toward free-dom—if not of action then of thought, conscience, belief, and speech This kind of laughter raises its middle fi nger and bares its ass

Such laughter arises under conditions of acute instability, such as during

a war, a civil war, a genocide, or a state of emergency Its purpose is to guard and promote the subjected subject’s coping and resilience However, even the later Bakhtin did not believe laughter always works as he described

safe-in Rabelais , and I demonstrate that under chronic conditions of repression,

laughter manifests itself in more ambivalent ways While it can still help preserve the subjected subject’s internal freedom, chronic laughter can also make a mockery of the subject, undermine her legal standing, and create

a negative, self-reinforcing relation between her body and her personality

(as is the case in Kafka’s The Trial ) A third kind of human rights

laugh-ter, posthumous laughlaugh-ter, appears in literature written after the end of the violator regime In the posthumous case, too, laughter is bifurcated: either

it is used in the service of a larger pathos , which lends it a surprising blance to lament; or, it expresses the subjected subject’s paranoia under

resem-the continuing threat of violence and censorship Examples of posthumous

laughter include Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness , a novel about

the aftermath of the Guatemalan civil war, and Nathan Englander’s novel

of the Argentinian Dirty War, The Ministry of Special Cases

The above catalog sets out ideal-typical characteristics for each of the four modes An ideal type functions as a set of heuristic coordinates, enabling readers to see large-scale formal and thematic patterns The readings offered

in the rest of the book demonstrate that when the ideal- typical modes meet real rhetorical situations, the modes bend and combine and mingle qualities There’s no logical or theoretical reason why a writer can’t combine modes

in a single text, and many do The same mode may be articulated through many different genres For example, the lament mode can appear in a poem, novel, or play The modes are intended as launching points, not the end-points of analysis They can help scholars and students recognize some of the unique features of the human rights works in front of them

The modes do not have closed, sacrosanct, or impermeable borders

A closed system of typological classifi cation would be impractical, for as Franco Moretti explains, literary forms, as they evolve, often return to a previous state, or amalgamate with one another (Moretti) In the course

of the nineteenth century in Britain, for instance, realism took on gothic characteristics and became more and more like romance (and this even

in the career of a single writer, George Eliot) Dickens approved of bining various subgenres together in a single novel The crime novel, the social satire, and the melodrama could be accommodated together—and

com-were in Oliver Twist Dickens referred to this combinatory process as the production of “streaky bacon” ( OT 17)—the red meat and the white

fat being different substances that, intermingled, create something new Frye and White both recognize that modes have permeable borders, and that they often stray into each other’s territory White readily imagines the possibility of hybrid forms, such as satirical romance or tragic satire (White 9) Frye remarks:

Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must then learn

to recombine them For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality

of a work of fi ction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously ent Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counterpoint … (Frye 1957, 51)

In a similar way, the human rights modes of laughter and lament often cross paths, and in a manner of speaking, transform into one another The

desires for renewal and freedom at the heart of laughter are frequently found in lament, and the pathetic type of laughter is soaked in tears of grief Rather than sealing borders between different types of writing, the point of distinguishing among the modes is to help readers become sensi-tive to the spectrum of ways by which writers can negotiate the juncture between feelings and forms I am interested in how writers (repeatedly, in various places and periods) adopt specifi c rhetorical and literary strategies

to express particular sociopolitical emotions

3 AFFECTIVE FORMALISM: NOTES ON  METHOD

Readings of the human rights modes in literary texts interpret what happens

at the juncture between feelings and forms Accordingly, the interpretive

methodology adopted in this study might be termed affective formalism

The structural and rhetorical features of works of human rights ture—the combination of visual and verbal cues in a graphic novel, the

litera-use of specifi c tropes and fi gures in a poem, the heteroglossia in a novel—

are reminders that these texts are not merely transparent windows into

a time or a political issue or a subject’s state of mind They are, instead, artistically-composed works Paying attention to their modes (along with their settings, characterizations, rhythms, stanza structures, etc.) reveals the strategies writers adopt to address a human rights theme and create a feeling These formal features lend specifi c contours to the ethos that the writings express

The affective formalism in this study synthesizes elements of fi ve recent intellectual movements:

• the new formalism in literary studies

• the ethical turn in the humanities

• affect theory

• cultural sociology

• and the theories of deliberative and cosmopolitan democracy

The New Formalism

After post-structuralism, and especially after new historicist and cultural studies, many critics thought that formal approaches to literature had died

off But since 2000, as Marjorie Levinson noted in a 2007 PMLA essay,

critics have increasingly returned to formal approaches (Levinson 2007) Sometimes, the new formalism evinces a concern with “surface reading” (Best and Marcus 2009)—that is, attention to the text’s seemingly obvious features rather than its elusive depths Surface reading is often contrasted with the “distant reading” proposed by the sociological school of Moretti (Moretti 2007) In a distant reading, the text’s surfaces and forms are of interest only insofar as they refl ect larger cultural patterns, which might be mapped or graphed in big data sets via the tools of the digital humanities That is, the new formalism announces both new procedures (e.g., forms of analysis developed in the digital humanities like linguistic prox-imity maps, metadata analysis, or word clouds), and a return toward earlier forms of structuralist criticism (e.g., New Criticism, Russian Formalism, archetypal criticism, semiotics) For a modal analysis, the latter move—the return—is crucial, because modern modal analysis still owes a debt to its structuralist champions, especially Northrop Frye and Hayden White (who himself professed a debt to Frye)

In this project, I reject the need to choose between surface and distant reading methods: both have their place I invoke surface formal categories in Chap 2 , for example, when I study the tropes and fi gures to which lament writers gravitate: tropes like the metaphors of renewal and resurrection, fi g-ures like parataxis and synecdoche These tropes and fi gures play an impor-tant role, I argue, in the specifi c affect produced by lament, which I describe

as a desire for post-traumatic innocence On the other hand, the concept

of modes as macro-forms presupposes a kind of distant reading—that is, the capacity of readers to identity durable patterns among large numbers

of texts, patterns that persist regardless of the evolution of literary genres

The Ethical Turn

As much as I am concerned with the aesthetics of human rights works, I am also concerned with the ethics I claim as their inspiration and product My

concern with a human rights ethos grows out of my research in the

his-tory of Jewish human rights activism (Galchinsky Jews and Human Rights

2008), where I showed that for many activists, human rights either served

as a modern instance of ancient principles in Judaism, or were conceived

as replacements for Jewish parochial principles in favor of a new, ist, “civic religion.” For many of the writers in this study, the noumena of sacredness attaches to the idea of rights A quasi-religious feeling can man-ifest in human rights literature as a conversion narrative, as a narrative of

secular sin and redemption, as a missionary gospel, or as a messianic vision

of social justice My project also refl ects the “ethical turn” in the ties, which began in the late 1990s and has been associated with fi gures like the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Judith Butler; critics Jil Larson and Martha Nussbaum; and legal ethicists Anna Grear and Martha Albertson Fineman (Levinas 1989; Ricoeur 2006; Butler 2004; Larson 2001; Nussbaum 1997; Grear 2007; Albertson Fineman 2008) I draw, especially on Butler’s work on mourning and violence in Chap 2 and on Grear’s legal ethics of vulnerability in Chap 3 The goal

humani-is to see how the aesthetics of form and the ethics of meaning intertwine Does the meaning overtake the form so that a novel is transformed into

a sermon and a poem into a petition or prayer? Does the reverse happen,

so that even the horrors of mass murder become aestheticized (as Sontag

worried in Regarding the Pain of Others 2003)? What kind of balance do

writers seek between medium and message?

Affect Theory/Cultural Sociology

Beyond form and meaning, human rights works express passion As I have already mentioned, the passions incited, inspired, or triggered by human rights crises are still understudied Those literary critics who have investi-gated the experiential or phenomenological dimensions of human rights have mainly read the literature through the lens of trauma theory, a subspe-cies of psychoanalysis Yet as I argue in Chap 2 , gauging the individual’s psychological trauma is only one way to approach the grieving process sketched out by lament Such feelings also have a collective signifi cance—they belong to the arena of the social—and are, in many cases, incom-prehensible without an understanding of the interpersonal, interethnic, interreligious, or international dynamics in which they were published For the purposes of my analysis, what I attend to at the juncture between feel-ings and forms are not the private emotions—which belong to the indi-

vidual alone—but the sociopolitical emotions , those expressed in the public

sphere with social intent Where sociopolitical emotions are concerned, I assume that political and cultural dynamics help give shape to their expres-sion, as do institutions like the mass media, literary distribution networks, and reviewing venues Because a work of human rights literature partici-pates in social dynamics, I treat it as a responsive utterance, as a link in a chain of utterances that preceded and succeeded it (see Bakhtin “From Notes” 1986, 136)

The literary manifestation of affects, both personal and social, has recently emerged as one of the growth areas in literary theory (see, e.g., Seigworth and Gregg eds 2010) But as I will explain in Chap 4 , the new affect theory adumbrates an older literature drawn from cultural sociology and applied to the development of civil societies in a national context The development of this earlier affect theory begins in the nineteenth cen-tury with Tocqueville’s idea of the “habits of the heart” and Mill’s notion

of “mental culture,” develops in the twentieth century into Mannheim’s theory of “the social structure of feeling,” and is then further elaborated

by Williams and Alexander, among others (Toqueville 1969; Mill 1989; Williams 1977; Alexander 2007) In Chap 4 , I consider how the theory of affects developed in response to the national case, and how it might need

to be revised to fi t an aspirational model of universal civility

I have found inspiration in this effort from the Strong Program of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology Whether in Jeffrey Alexander’s groundbreak-

ing work The Civil Sphere (2007) or in the essays published in the American

Journal of Cultural Sociology , investigators have laid bare the symbolic codes

and meaning-making efforts that surround social experiences, from the phors used in public policy to address prostitution and civil rights to racial codes

meta-in video games Cultural sociology suggests that human rights norms should not be understood as the decontextualized and static norms of black-letter law; rather, they should be interpreted as dynamic triggers of sociocultural processes, including contests and dialogues over the norms’ proper naming, extent, framing, interpretation, and institutionalization My contention is that because human rights literature is intrinsically bound up with wide-scale suf-fering, it is, perhaps more than other literatures, a socially embedded corpus I take it that this is part of what Bakhtin meant when he famously remarked that

“Consciousness is much more terrifying than any unconscious complexes”

(Bakhtin Dostoevsky’s Poetics 1984, 288) Malignant consciousness is more

terrifying than the unconscious because of its social consequences Even benefi cent consciousness can have unintended social consequences However, this book is founded on the hope that human rights-oriented consciousness—a mental culture, a set of habits of the heart, a sentimental education directed toward universal civility—may also, at times, result in profound social good

Deliberative and Cosmopolitan Democracy

Affect theory and cultural sociology were mainly developed to analyze cases within a national or local frame That does not necessarily make the theo-ries transferable to the global stage The same can be said for the theories of

deliberative and cosmopolitan democracy The former has been spearheaded

by Jurgen Habermas, whose model of rational deliberation in the

pub-lic sphere has been widely infl uential (see Habermas Pubpub-lic Sphere , 1991;

Chappell 2012) While I do not necessarily agree with Habermas that municators in the public sphere operate on a rational basis—those pesky pas-sions again—the notion of a sphere in which citizens can communicate with one another horizontally is central to my conception of the purpose of human rights literature During human rights crises, the local or national public sphere is typically reduced or compromised or even shut down, making the dream of a culture without borders all the more of a lifeline for the writers But whether a public sphere currently exists beyond the nation-state, on the regional or global levels, is open to question The possibility of hori-zontal communication and alliances among citizens of the world, whose conversations traverse national borders, is bound up with the prospects for cosmopolitan democracy, or what Daniele Archibugi has called “a global commonwealth of citizens” (see Archibugi 2015) Certainly, at this point, the global governance system is set up to give voice and vote primarily to states, secondarily to corporations, and only tertiarily (through non-gov-ernmental organizations) to citizens Even then, as I will suggest in Chap

4 , NGOs are not necessarily set up to act as representatives of the interests

of global citizens In the absence of formal/legal institutions of politan democracy, citizens can still form cultural/emotional linkages across national borders through the development of human rights literature, or more broadly, the set of social-symbolic practices I name global civil culture

cosmo-4 OBSTACLES TO A GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS CULTURE

Having surveyed the purposes and modes of human rights culture, and the elements of my critical method, I now turn to problems of production, distribution, and reception

Institutional Obstacles

To start with the institutional obstacles, at the national level, artists’ efforts

to communicate with their audiences can encounter a host of restrictions, from state censorship to social ostracism to imprisonment As a general rule, these obstacles will increase at the same rate as the increase in violations

At the global level, artists’ publication efforts are severely hampered by the absence of any global public to which they could appeal It’s true that human rights culture has its own international organization, the United

Nations Educational, Scientifi c, and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO) Certain human rights NGOs run their own cultural promotion and edu-cation arms, like Human Rights Watch, which mounts its own ongoing mobile fi lm festival But these efforts generally lack resources because most of NGOs’ budgets go to monitoring and advocacy While UNESCO tries to exercise authority over governments, protect world heritage, pro-mote cultural education, and fund new global art, the question is, for whom? There really aren’t any citizens of the world There is no universal suffrage The absence of global media—CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera not-withstanding—means that arts reviews carry a national or regional, not global, stamp While states pursue their national confl icts, they have little incentive to support the formation of a horizontally oriented, global pub-lic sphere, without which works of human rights art at the global level have no one to address

Some globalization theorists have contended that the Internet is a powerful distribution network for human rights artists, particularly those under the constraints of censorship It would be hard to argue other-wise However, the web’s diffuseness fragments the potential global public into niche publics, limiting the artist’s reach Authoritarian governments have shown themselves quite capable of censoring the Internet, and the unequal access to it enjoyed by individuals in democratic and authoritarian countries—the so-called “digital divide”—may limit its promise

Theoretical Obstacles

The question of whether a global public exists goes beyond a weak tutional infrastructure, however, to the way we conceptualize it The sym-bolic, emotional, and ideational links that make people everywhere feel they share a common destiny are thinner than the thinnest nationalism

insti-To understand why, it may be helpful to rehearse some aspects of Benedict

Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities Anderson argues that

nations are “imagined communities” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them,

or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 2006, 6) The image of their communion is imprinted on their minds through various horizontal ties, such as their common territory, ethnicity, language, ideology, history, myths, and sym-bols Ironically, such ties are available to these national citizens because of the nation’s limited reach, its circumscribed sovereign power The nation’s

boundaries constitute a major source of its durability in the imaginations

of its members In Anderson’s words, “No nation imagines itself nous with mankind” (Anderson 2006, 7) What forms the “image of their communion” in the minds of national citizens is their imagined distinct-ness from other nations They are, so to speak, bound together by their boundaries

A global public would differ from Anderson’s imagined community

by being unlimited in scope or territory A community of citizens of the

world would imagine itself as coterminous with humanity Such citizens

would subscribe to a cosmopolitan worldview instead of—or alongside of—a nationalist one (see Sznaider 2011 on how a “rooted cosmopolitan-ism” can simultaneously embrace both national and global perspectives) Precisely because of their cosmopolitan vision, however, those who desire

to be citizens of the world must lack many of the horizontal ties common

to members of a nation (such as a delimited common territory, history, and language) This book’s hypothesis is that, in the absence of such ties, works of human rights culture might still construct a system of shared symbols that could serve to form some cosmopolitan bonds of common passion and understanding To function in this way, however, such works would have to be taken out of their national habitat To be globalized, they would have to become nomads, bound not to territory or local lore, but to shared values (Tomlinson 2007)

But are such nomadic works possible? Globalization theorists like Diana Crane and Jurgen Habermas are skeptical, and they question whether the dissemination of such works can be fair and effective In the most common model, that of cultural imperialism, theorists like Frederic Jameson have tended to focus on the asymmetrical relationship between hegemonic culture producers (primarily the USA) and the global recipients of their products (Jameson 1998; Crane 2002 “Introduction”) This theory maintains that culture is largely disseminated globally by media conglomerates based in the West, whose aim is to effect homogenization and American cultural control

On this model, the universalism expressed in human rights works is itself an attempt to spread Western values to non-Western nations While there is some truth to this view, the theory of cultural imperialism can overstate its claims Many human rights artists ground their work not in the West’s secular liberal humanism but in the universalism they fi nd in

a particular cultural tradition—in the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels, the

Vedas Each of these traditions has within it its own universalistic impulses

For example, artists in Sudan and the Netherlands might both resist the

violation of free speech rights, but the former is likely to locate free speech not in the secular Western tradition associated with John Locke but in the progressive Islamic tradition associated with Sudanese theologian Mahmoud Mohamed Taha These distinctions are examples of what Jack Donnelly calls “relative universality”—the artists appeal to internationally- recognized norms using a local language (Donnelly 2003; Appiah 2000) The idea of a culture without borders can sound overly optimistic, but the cultural imperialism model sometimes has the opposite problem Art

as an expression of historical and spatial hegemony needs to be balanced against art as an expression of transhistorical, transspatial ethics

The latter notion of ethics is a fundamental departure from the structuralist strains of humanities criticism of the past 40 years, which emphasize contingency and epistemological uncertainty Human rights theory cannot depend on a situational ethics because rights are conceived

post-as natural, essential, and “self-evident.” Moreover, a right hpost-as to be

codi-fi ed as a law or constitutional provision in order to be meaningful, and the law requires certainty More congenial to human rights is the school of criticism that grows out of the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, because here ethics is based in the universal fact of death Similarly, the ethics founded

on human beings’ intrinsic vulnerability—especially by feminist thinkers

like Judith Butler in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

(Butler 2004)—have been widely infl uential Human rights theory does make some provision for cultural and national difference through its prin-ciple of the “margin of negotiation,” a small window on either side of the absolute right that enables states to administer it in accordance with their local traditions and circumstances

Operational Obstacles

Finally, along with institutional and theoretical problems, there are tional challenges that must be overcome to bring a work of human rights culture to a global public The dissemination of human rights art to a global public (or at least to multiple national publics) requires artists and their distributors to fi gure out how to translate their works from a particu-lar idiom into one that is more universally accessible

If the work is translated into a number of languages, the various tions will inevitably refl ect the biases and constraints—aesthetic, ideologi-cal, legal, and bureaucratic—of their production context For translators

transla-of human rights art such biases and constraints pose challenges that are

distinct from other translations, in that they carry potentially grave cal risks for everyone involved (cf Milani 2002) Public reception of these works is shaped by the audience’s awareness of how much it cost the art-ist to defy her government and bring the work to the global stage In fact, publishers and exhibitors often exploit these diffi culties as part of the work’s marketing campaign Writers like Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali will always be fi gures once marked for death, and in that sense their aura will always precede their work (Rushdie 2008; Hirsi Ali 2008) Even if the translation manages to survive the external pressures shap-

politi-ing it, it may still fail to convey the original work’s situation , its saturation

in local and national contexts; in indigenous genres, symbols, and styles;

in the insider’s perception of class, ethnic, and religious stratifi cation; in the jargons and regional dialects through which power has been abused The question is always, how much of this thick presence can travel beyond national borders? The most successful cases are when the human rights

work’s universality breathes through its particularity (Michelle B.  Slater

offers interesting refl ections on the challenges of translation in Slater 2010)

To craft a universal structure of feeling for a global audience, then, human rights culture must be supported by a dedicated infrastructure with the capacity to translate works into a common idiom It must preserve their dis-tinctiveness and at the same time promote their universality When success-ful, human rights works refl ect and help constitute an ethos, an atmosphere comprised of an intricate relation between public opinion and the human rights practices or abuses carried out by (or in the name of) the state Human rights works do not present rights as abstract ideas; instead, they embody ideas in concrete forms Such productions represent a system of shared val-ues, symbols, and sentiments The reproduction of this system is long-term work that looks beyond any present crisis to the need to prepare citizens to defend against perpetual threats to the welfare of their community These works may not result in immediate action on a given situation, but to the extent that they succeed in producing a sense of sympathetic identifi cation for the victims of abuse, they fend off the numbness, voyeurism, and distance that are all too often the psychological effects of other mediated relations

5 CHAPTER ORGANIZATION

Human rights literary criticism to date has focused, to a large extent, on works of protest and testimony Sometimes these are treated as indistin-guishable, though, as I have suggested above they are in some respects

antithetical, because one is prospective while the other is retrospective I have elsewhere discussed a central protest genre—the political pamphlet (Galchinsky “Pamphlet” 2012) A full, systematic investigation of these two modes, and their interrelations, is warranted but beyond the scope of the present project

Here I focus on lament, the literature of mourning, and laughter, the literature of resilience These modes make for an interesting comparison because, although seeming to occupy opposite emotional poles, they fre-quently cross into one another’s territory Laughter can be bound up with tears, and grief with the urge for renewal

Chapter 2 is titled, “Lament as Transitional Justice.” Through

inter-pretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché ’s anthology, Against Forgetting ,

and novels from Rwanda, the USA, and Bosnia, I argue that lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions Both laments and truth commis-sions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renew-ing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” to capture its true power

Chapter 3 , “Laughter and the Subjected Subject,” posits that laughter

is bound up with the subjected subject’s preservation of a sense of will and freedom I identify a variety of forms of human rights laughter, which I derive from the two forms proposed in late Bakhtinian writings Reading novels and satires from Eastern Europe (the former Soviet Union, the former Czechoslovakia, Bosnia) as well as Latin America (Guatemala, Argentina), I propose that there are three major forms of human rights laughter Acute laughter arises in states of emergency as a kind of life- affi rming gallows humor, which enables the victim of rights violations to maintain a sense of internal freedom When expressed by those caught

in the tyrant’s vise, acute laughter is a refl exive retort against terror—a gesture of coping and resilience Acute laughter often posits a connec-tion between freedom of thought, sexual liberation, and revolution When expressed by those with some geographical distance from the ongoing events—as in novels by writers in exile—acute laughter often transposes the objects of its satire from specifi c political authorities to authority in general Chronic laughter arises under conditions of more or less ongo-ing and longstanding repression Like acute laughter, the chronic variety traces a relation between the body and the mind, but the attitudes differ

depending on whether the laughter comes from below or from above Finally, posthumous laughter arises in novels written in a generation after the crisis There, the laughter is either pathetic or paranoid, depending

on whether the protagonist inhabits a world in which the abuses seem defi nitively over or one in which abuses are threatening to break out again

at any moment

In Chap 4 , “Toward a Global Civil Culture,” I step back to offer an account of the underpinnings of a culture without borders by tracing a genealogy of the theory of civil society, and the role that culture has played

in that theory from its origins in Locke, Rousseau, Kant, de Toqueville, and Mill to more recent developments in communications and cultural sociology On the one hand, to the extent that classical liberal theories of civil society considered culture at all, they did so in a national frame, as have most recent cultural sociologies The theories have tended to ignore the special challenges of a cosmopolitan culture, to the extent that such

a culture is emerging at the transnational and global levels On the other hand, theories of globalized culture have tended to rely on models of cultural dissemination that are based in a vision of inequality and cultural imperialism, and lack recognition of the existence of networks striving to disseminate works refl ecting on global civil solidarity Building on many

of these theories, I offer a model of global civil culture which tries to synthesize elements from the nation-based theories of civil society with recognition of the specifi c challenges of cosmopolitanism

The modes of protest, testimony, lament, and laughter offer human rights artists the basic tools they need to cry freedom, but the obstacles are great, and building a rights ethos is an endless process Fortunately, human rights artists tend to be persistent They know that, however many treaties there are, a rights-respecting world will not truly exist until people everywhere can imagine it So they write it, sing it, act it, dance it, play it, paint it, fi lm it, build it—dream it into being—and try to bring us closer

Abstract Chapter 2, Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn

Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the USA, and Bosnia, Chapter 2, “Lament as Transitional Justice,” argues that lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are con-gruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monu-ment while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” to capture its true power

Keywords Lament • Transitional justice • Grief narrative • Trauma theory

1 THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CREON

This chapter examines the mode of lament, the literature of mourning Human rights lament voices a community’s grief and rage for all that was lost when its people were laid waste Memorializing the victims, lament plays a part in rituals of remembrance such as museums, monuments, prayers, and funeral rites Lament’s focus is on helping people in the present

Lament as Transitional Justice