Human rights culture raises many questions: beyond the general aim of establishing an ethos among their multiple audiences, to what more specific purposes do human rights artists set themselves? What aesthetic modes—or formal approaches—have they adopted to fulfill their purposes? And what problems have they, their distributors, critics, and audiences faced in creating a human rights culture?

Apart from the general task of engendering sympathy beyond identity, human rights artists set themselves a variety of more specific tasks. They seek to clarify or dispute historical narratives, protest current practices, foment resistance, promote reconciliation, express solidarity, inspire others, and mourn . With so many purposes, it’s no wonder that works in this field are so difficult 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 field 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 field.

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, socialization, 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 finds 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 “novelistic wing of human rights” (25); indeed, for him it is the exemplary type of such literature.

Slaughter suggests that “other cultural forms … may make imaginable alternative visions of human rights” (Slaughter 2007, 4), mentioning 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 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 significant 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 possibilities activated contingently in relation to a specific 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 features from another genre (Moretti 2007). By contrast, a mode remains the same no matter where or when it is produced. Modes are transspatial and transhistorical, because they are logically derived rather than historically conceived. Aristotle famously identified 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 elaborated 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 multiculturalism 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 to recognize those aspects of the experience that can be communicated across social divides. It challenges critics to adopt concepts that are independent 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 cultural criticism (Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore 2012).

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 feminists, 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 ascription 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 significance 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 emotions 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 find 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 chronology, finding 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 specific 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 tradition 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 conditioned 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 first 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 apprec...