Writing Beyond the State

Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies

Alexandra S. Moore, Samantha Pinto, Alexandra S. Moore, Samantha Pinto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030344559
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030344566
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Literature

This book investigates the imaginative capacities of literature, art and culture as sites for reimagining human rights, addressing deep historical and structural forms of belonging and unbelonging; the rise of xenophobia, neoliberal governance, and securitization that result in the purposeful precaritization of marginalized populations; ecological damage that threatens us all, yet the burdens of which are distributed unequally; and the possibility of decolonial and posthuman approaches to rights discourses. The book starts from the premise that there are deep-seated limits to the political possibilities of state and individual sovereignty in terms of protecting human rights around the world. The essays explore how different forms, materials, perspectives, and aesthetics can help reveal the limits of normative human rights and contribute to the cultural production of new human rights imaginaries beyond the borders of state and self. 

© The Author(s) 2020

A. S. Moore, S. Pinto (eds.)Writing Beyond the StatePalgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rightshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34456-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Beyond Sovereignty: New Cultural Imaginaries of Human Rights

Alexandra S. Moore¹ and Samantha Pinto²

(1)

Binghamton University, New York, NY, USA

(2)

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Alexandra S. Moore

Email: [email protected]

Samantha Pinto (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Sovereignty serves as the crux of the human rights project: the source of its juridico-political structure and its deepest conceptual and political paradoxes, if not abuses. Much critical work has demonstrated, first, how human rights might secure the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence and, second, sovereignty’s twinned role as guarantor of human rights and perpetrator of their abuses. Another strand of critique has focused on the sovereign subject of human rights, and the efficacies and limitations of the figure of the liberal subject in responding to egregious human rights abuses and to the pernicious effects of incremental degradation. At the same time , human rights remain a discursive and juridico-political framework for the definition and pursuit of certain forms of human flourishing. That framework has proven to be, yes, imperfect or even detrimental in some circumstances, but also at times resilient, dynamic, and efficacious in responding to atrocity and harm.

Informed by trenchant analyses of the role of sovereignty in normative human rights, Writing Beyond the State moves into the space beyond those critiques, taking them as a point of departure and exploring how literature, the arts, and culture give us new aesthetics, methods, and modes of articulation for human rights imaginaries. In doing so, we collectively argue that literature and literary study can shift perspectives on the category of human rights, rather than continuing to beat the drum of sovereignty and its limits. These shifts are not intended to be salvific of normative human rights, but rather to open up new forums for imagination, representation, and critique. Our hope is that as readers and critics, we have written to push collectively the borders of human rights; we hope that from starting at the recognition of the impossible binds of our reading practices, so hemmed in by statist discourse and limits, we might acknowledge but also find new ground beyond the either/or of celebrating or abandoning the human rights project. This collection thus seeks to reorient critical and aesthetic attention to alternative cultural imaginaries of rights, to forms of representing human rights that do not depend upon sovereignty of the subject or nation as their sole currency.

As a point of departure, we might consider Theophilus Marboah’s representation (Fig. 1.1) of desperate human movement. Marboah’s pairing of the diagram of the “Brookes” slave ship (circa 1790) with Massimo Sestini’s 2014 photograph of asylum seekers traveling across the Mediterranean from North Africa toward Italy links not just the history of enslavement and the contemporary status of refugees in Fortress Europe, but visually renders the deep relationship between statelessness and rightlessness in modernity. While theorists such as Paul Gilroy have imagined the ship as a modern vehicle of ineffable pain but also of masculine freedom and mobility (Gilroy 1993), this piece from Marboah’s “Echoes and Agreements” series stages the ship as a floating, startling rebuke to ideals of mobility between states. It showcases displacement beyond sovereignty, giving a structural view of the asymmetrical relations between subject and subjected, between historical articulations of modernity’s limited notion of the subject of human rights, and of the human itself, and its present-day refusals and trite witnessing of a seemingly anachronistic echo. Although each image may signal human traffick between nation-states, the images more forcefully focus attention on the life- and death-worlds of the ship and of the journey that often refuses to resolve into the teleology of national belonging.

Fig. 1.1

Theophilus Marboah, selection from “Echoes and Agreements,” 2018. “Plan of the Slave Ship Brookes,” from Thomas Clarkson’s “The history of the rise, progress, and accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave trade by the British Parliament” (1808), appears courtesy of the British Library Board. Massimo Sestini, photograph of the migrant boat crossing, is reprinted by permission (©Massimo Sestini)

Upon first glance, this conclusion that the artwork foremost represents potential refusal would seem to confirm Hannah Arendt’s thesis that human rights require citizenship to become fully realized. Such a reading does little to shift our understanding of normative human rights, and instead underscores a familiar critique of their reliance on citizenship as an expression of sovereignty. Shifting the focus to the inbetweenness of the journey, however, opens up another line of inquiry, following Ayça Çubukçu’s (2017) recent work, about the role of potentiality in structuring normative human rights and, thus, regarding human rights as implicitly hierarchical. As Çubukçu demonstrates in a comparative reading of Malcolm X and Arendt, Arendt’s attention to citizenship, argued in the context of her deeply troubling and under-examined chapters in Origins of Totalitarianism on “Race-thinking before racism” and “Racism and bureaucracy,” is undercut by Malcolm X’s forceful and contemporaneous demand for human rights precisely because citizenship fails to protect the rights of African Americans.¹ He demands first the a priori “right to be a human being” in order “to be given the rights of a human being in this society” (Malcolm X 1970, 56, qted Çubukçu 2017, 253). In the work of both thinkers, human rights are at once aspirational and marked by the category of humanity as at once inclusive and discriminatory in categorizing some members according to their full or potential realization of its ideal attributes. In Çubukçu’s words,

the very inscription of particular qualities to human beings (be it agency, autonomy, rationality, or whichever other quality is thought to differentiate humans from non-humans) helps construct the human as potentially autonomous, developed, sane, rational, civilized and therefore potentially entitled to, and capable of enjoying, human rights. Human rights, in other words, are the potential rights of proper human beings … (256; see also 262)

Çubukçu’s reading of Malcolm X and Arendt concludes in deep skepticism of the category of humanity as foundational to liberal human rights for the ways in which “such conceptions of human rights attach particular qualities to the concept and the person of the human” (255). Rather than pursue “justice without borders” through the concept of a collective humanity, she argues for solidarity between and meaningful justice for “human and non-human alike” (266).

Marboah’s work takes up the problem of racial hierarchies within humanity and human rights and offers a different trajectory through the critiques of humanity’s exclusions, representing and responding to the historical violence in the deployment of humanity by troubling its terms. As a diptych, Marboah’s work raises the question of the relationship between the two parts. Although it runs the risk of intimating an equivalency between halves, the form need not imply a decontextualized narrative of centuries-long Afropessimism. Rather, Marboah’s work, with its close attention to the aesthetic dimensions of composition, framing, perspective, and what he calls the “rhyme” in form and content between images, unsettles interpretations of each half on its own (this effect is magnified by reading the work above in the context of Marboah’s larger body of images in this series in which he consistently pairs canonical images with lesser known photographs and film stills). Unsettling generates inquiry into the images of the Black diaspora he presents as well as alternative relationships he constructs between subjects. For Marboah, the “dialogue” within a pair of images can offer “reminders of the category of universality in which we all dwell, despite the time and space that separate us” (Marboah), both aspects of which are represented through the lens of the African diaspora. This artwork, then, does not seek the slave ship as metaphor or analogy but tries to align itself to failures of thought, our inability, despite decades of critique, to transcend appeals to the nation-state to repair and restore the category of the human.²

Our reading of Marboah’s work hews to Ida Danewid’s recent trenchant critique of the affectual modes of contemporary theory that focus on empathy or the work of mourning: “By privileging a focus on the ontological—as opposed to historical—links that bind humankind, these ethical perspectives contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects histories that are intimately connected, and that removes from view the many afterlives of historical and ongoing colonialism” (Danewid 2017). When affective identification replaces or elides historical understanding, the “result is a veil of ignorance which […] allows the white subject to re-constitute itself as ‘ethical’ and ‘good,’ innocent of imperialist histories and present complicities” (Danewid). Marboah’s work, with its insistence on critical distance and hence difference, confronts the viewer as potentially complicit in the historical confluence of human rights violations (including differential access to full humanity), denying the vicarious affectual bond of sentimental feeling for the refugee. The diptych sticks to the colonizer’s formal point of view as it deploys the medium of aerial photography—a capture technology of the security state—to make its aesthetic and political imaginary, as well as the ongoing crisis of human rights, visible. The structure of white feeling and the categories it produces (sovereignty, nationalism, property, and human cargo) become the subject of the piece, displacing the question of whether and how to incorporate the “non-citizen” into the nation-state (although Marike Jansen’s essay in this volume provides a compelling blueprint for that topic in the realm of theater). This powerful re-aestheticization of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Beyond Sovereignty: New Cultural Imaginaries of Human Rights
• Part I. Re-figuring Human Rights and Humanitarianism from 1960 to the Present
• Part II. Securitization, Toxicity, and the Future of Rights
• Back Matter