Fictions of Dignity

Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

Elizabeth S. Anker

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801465192
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights.

Each of the novels Anker examines approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie's Midnight's Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women's freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.

Chapter One

Bodily Integrity and Its Exclusions

For why is the postwar social body so bloodless, so emptied of desire, so abstract?

—Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body

Theorists have long invoked the notion of paradox to explain human rights, and many of the most entrenched of these paradoxes ensue from the exclusionary anatomy of human rights discourses and norms. While inherent in the basic philosophical architecture of human rights, exclusions arise on each of the intersecting levels of law, political practice, and discourse. It goes without saying that, as a legal-philosophical construct, human rights carry significant normative force, their standards and rhetoric implicitly defining the parameters of the human. And although human rights enshrine certain qualities as constitutive of humanity, they simultaneously ostracize others—along with those lives seen to exemplify them—from the purview of full personhood. Human rights discourses and norms, as such, have denied sociopolitical membership to countless populations over history, largely along the predictable lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, and species. No doubt many of these stigmatized categories disproportionately mark formerly colonized and now postcolonial lives, a reality only exacerbated as the commerce between human rights enforcement and programs of development covers over the global South’s coerced consent to its own exploitation. Whether because of the racialized undercurrents of human rights talk, the dynamics of humanitarian policing, or patterns of economic disenfranchisement, the postcolonial world bears the brunt of many contemporary human rights paradoxes.

Theorists have long attributed these structures of exclusion to the basic institution of citizenship. As Hannah Arendt famously noted in the aftermath of World War II, the denial of rights to a given population almost automatically incurs their “expulsion from humanity altogether.”1 Indeed, refugees and stateless persons still today are widely deprived of viable channels through which to effectuate their human rights. Yet the contemporary geopolitical landscape has entailed that the inequitable disbursement of human rights protections increasingly mirrors the imbalances of globalization—which is to say that the growing economic stratification of the world renders the human rights of peoples of certain nations virtually nonexistent. The global South here again inordinately endures those disparities, which both create conditions of social and political atrophy and incite hostilities that frequently turn militant and predatory.2

Many different factors contributing to the foreclosures of human rights are, as such, epidemic and unavoidable. Yet in this book I am especially interested in how those failures of human rights can be explained in terms of the profound ambivalence toward embodiment that pervades liberal human rights discourses and norms. This ambivalence broadly informs liberal articulations of human rights, along with their underlying assumptions about human flourishing. In general, liberal topographies of the human acquire legibility by obscuring both the enabling and constraining aspects of corporeal existence, as embodiment is imagined to be eclipsed entirely, vanquished through reason, or normalized through calculations of symmetry and likeness. This anxiety about the body finds its central expression in the dual myths of human dignity and bodily integrity. While those twinned ideals act as important baselines that lend force to many invaluable human rights protections, as enabling fictions they nevertheless marshal a highly abstract, disembodied, and anemic vision of human selfhood. In effect, the liberal subject entitled to rights is understood to possess an always already inviolable body, one fully integrated and thereby dignified through reasoned self-determination. This idealized human body, moreover, finds an important corollary in the construct of the unified, nuclear, impermeable body politic. However, both the myth of the integrity of the natural human body and the symbolic economy of the national body politic are paradoxically consolidated by the specter of abused, broken, and profaned bodies, which in popular human rights discourses are often complexly raced and gendered.

This chapter concludes by examining one popular instantiation of human rights discourse—a genre I call the “human rights bestseller”—in order to track and probe such tensions. In doing so, I explore how liberalism’s aversion toward the body historically and presently masks and condones concrete discrimination against raced, gendered, and otherwise disadvantaged populations. Those discriminations find official sanction within politics and law—which is to say that liberalism’s reluctance about embodiment lurks silently though prominently behind many of the missed opportunities of human rights. Let me now proceed to reckon with the various manifestations and repercussions of this animus toward embodiment, paying particular attention to the ways it comes to be reproduced within theoretical models for plotting the traffic between narrative literature and human rights.

Liberalism and the Ambivalences of Embodiment

The body has long inspired anxiety within the liberal philosophical tradition. In post-Enlightenment metaphysical thought, embodiment is generally conflated with those aspects of the self that must be mastered or abjured. This reluctance about bodily existence is deep seated, persistent, and controlling. While Elizabeth Grosz traces such an aversion to Plato, theorists have ascribed a related antipathy toward embodiment to Immanuel Kant.3 By elevating pure practical reason over sensory perception, Kant is seen to erect a binary between thoughts and feelings that casts embodiment as an automatic affront to moral judgment. Yet perhaps most influential has been Rene Descartes’s privileging of the intellect, which both naturalizes the priority of reason and presumes the body’s inferiority. In part resulting from the intellectual legacy of Cartesian dualism, corporeality has come to be negatively associated with everything unreliable, transitory, and base—namely, the emotions (rather than the intellect and will), the private (versus the public), nature (rather than civilization), exteriority (as opposed to interiority), the animal (versus the human), and so forth. Overall, such bias has installed within moral and political thought a continuum of oppositions that remain foundational to liberal frameworks for evaluating social justice.

Most immediately, such assumptions about mind-body dualism permeate the law.4 The rule of law itself gains legitimacy through the conceit that it offers a crucial route to abstract equality, although I will show how that conceit itself erases the disparities inherent to embodiment. For instance, Miguel Tamen argues that the construct of legal personhood historically evolved to render “the juridical…a sphere of bodies symbolical” rather than actual, which for Tamen in particular grounds and lends coherence to rights-bearing subjectivity.5 Indeed, Tamen’s claim that “the notion of a self-evident physical body is thus inadequate to describe the notion of a rightsholder” captures much about the exclusions that jeopardize human rights.6 A related Cartesianism inflects the law’s evidentiary requirements and other protocols governing legal procedure. In this respect, Moira Gatens argues that the legal standard mens rea reinforces such a wariness about embodiment; for Gatens, the expectation that perpetrators’ mental knowledge must be determined prior to establishing their guilt implicitly favors the intellect over alternate faculties of perception.7 To such ends, while much trauma scholarship, as I will discuss, betrays its own investment in the integrated liberal subject, studies of the affective texture of trauma have sought to expose the limits of juridical forms of testimony, complaining that they censor experiences that are not reason based.8 Whereas traumatic memory is understood to defy closure, coherence, and rational containment, the law mandates teleological, intelligible, and objective truth, which leads it to silence and distort certain subject positions and experiential realities.9 The affective fabric of trauma thus exposes the falsity of the law’s facade of abstract neutrality, revealing how that pretense not only provides an alibi for society’s many prejudices but also promulgates a constricted, unidimensional portrait of the subject. In sum, we can grasp how and why the legal emphasis on empirically verifiable truth can depreciate corporeal aspects of selfhood. Such evidentiary thresholds of authority are, no doubt, meritorious given that they safeguard “innocence until proven guilty”; nevertheless, as staples of legal procedure they also illustrate the pervasiveness of a particular species of mind-body dualism.

The broad imprint of dualism on liberal theories of the subject also manifests itself within the tendency within liberal thought to configure human progress in terms of the successful subordination of the body to the reasoning will. Such logic conspicuously emerges in the dual premiums on freedom and autonomy. Here, Nikolas Rose has explored how, in the nineteenth-century aftermath of the French and American declarations of rights, liberal values became “inextricably linked to a norm of civility,” rendering “modern individuals…not merely ‘free to choose’ but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice.”10 This onus to self-determine effectively licenses the intellect’s trump over the body’s capricious, ungovernable demands, which are seen to compete with and risk impinging on reason’s free exercise. On one level, rational choice thus becomes the avenue through which the individual surmounts their bodily captivity, transcending a state of sheer animality. Accordingly, dualistic thought provides a central equation that consigns embodiment to mere animal being, a connection that equally furnishes a key philosophical warrant for the denial of rights protections to animals. Human progress, as such, is charted as gradual independence from material want, a trajectory that again relegates embodiment to a condition of relative bondage, poverty, and privation; whereas on another level, the liberatory self-overcoming actuated by reasoned intellection is seen to integrate the self into a cohesive, internally reconciled whole, a process that likewise subdues and conciliates the body’s ostensibly anarchic, uncontrollable energies. While bodily integrity thereby becomes a predicate to human dignity, in order to be attributed with dignity the liberal subject must actively possess a highly particular kind of body—one that can abide by that mandate to be inviolable, autonomous, and self-enclosed.11 Within such a framework, then, clearly not all bodies are worthy of protection; rather, only bodies that have been successfully subjugated through the conquest of reason deserve rights-bearing subjectivity and its entitlements. And while this concentration on the body within liberal accounts of subject formation might seem to testify to its importance, the overarching ideals of dignity and corporeal integrity in fact marshal a highly specific vision of embodiment that ultimately confirms the intellect’s superiority.

Much as freedom becomes compulsory, theorists allege that liberal formulations of the “individual” sow human rights with exceptions. For instance, Joan Scott argues that the legal-philosophical construct of the individual serves antithetical purposes. On the one hand, the individual represents an abstraction that encodes the goal of equality, rendering it formally antecedent to the universal applicability of human rights. However, this myth that people exist in symmetrical positions before the law depends on the profoundly unequally disbursed ability to self-abstract from and thus surmount one’s idiosyncratic circumstances. As such, the juridical fiction of the individual paradoxically elides as well as sanctions the countless variations that ubiquitously compose human experience—variations that translate into material injuries and injustices.12 Yet on the other hand, for Scott this notion of the individual at once betokens the onus to individuate, or to autonomously self-fashion. That mandate, in contrast, venerates personal distinction and uniqueness—ideals that place the subject at potential odds with the collective, and by extension with the expectation of formal equality. As Scott explains, “Individuality require[s] the very difference that the idea of the prototypical individual was meant to deny,” capturing from one vantage why human rights norms might appear to supply incommensurable dictates.13 Indeed, my literary analyses that follow will wrestle with precisely such tensions.

Such an account of the liberal individual has also provided a model for explaining statehood and the texture of nationalism, contributing to a larger metaphorics of the liberal social body. Transposing the natural body onto the institution of the state in order to posit the nation’s health, fortitude, and insularity has a long history that can be traced to the Middle Ages, wherein the king’s sovereignty was associated with the reasoning mind that unifies the unruly social body.14 Yet in the era of democracy and rights, this metaphor of the state as body politic has assumed more explicit parallels with distinctly liberal subjectivity. While for the individual reason’s dominion is seen to integrate the chaotic self, democratic process is believed to unite a national population into a balanced, self-authorizing whole. The self-determination of the liberal individual is thus mirrored in the constitution of the body politic, wherein the subject’s autonomous development becomes an analogue for the mechanisms that incorporate the nation-state, especially through democratic legal and political institutions. In both cases, political process is seen to discipline and quell the insurrectionary impulses of both the natural and liberal social bodies. As we will see, this figural correlation recurs throughout postcolonial literature, for instance, as chapter 3 examines with respect to Midnight’s Children. In Salman Rushdie’s novel, his protagonist Saleem Sinai’s feint of autobiographical self-inscription into a coherent, reasoned subject allegorically mirrors the consolidation of the disparate Indian populace into a democratic whole. Whereas Saleem must steal his own physical body (and narrative) against cracks through the imposition of rational purpose, those efforts parallel how civic reason is understood to harmonize internal discord and overcome political-ideological fissures that otherwise risk rupturing the unified body politic of the state.

As may be clear, however, such imagery of the state as body politic depends on an idealized vision of a particular kind of body—one that is undivided, impermeable, and successfully assimilated. The corollary of the body politic metaphor, then, is that defiled, decaying, or broken bodies become the insignia of atrophy, failure, and the breakdown of orderly, egalitarian legal and political process. Indeed, Saleem’s body is imagined to explode at the end of Midnight’s Children precisely to reify Indira Gandhi’s suspension and infringement of the rights codified in the Indian Constitution during the 1975–77 State of Emergency. To cite one other literary example, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (originally published as Ice Candy Man in England in 1988) similarly employs the figure of the violated, desecrated human body to analogically vivify the wounds exacted to the subcontinent during partition. Within Sidhwa’s narrative, the ravages of partition are inflicted on the body of a young female nanny through her rape and forced prostitution. While that device registers the actual fate of vast numbers of women, it nonetheless genders the nation and land in counterproductive and paternalistic ways. As we can see, the body politic metaphor is by no means value free; rather, it frequently promotes a particular conception of embodiment that not only polices certain corporeal energies but ultimately reinforces the notion of the liberal subject as abstract, integrated, and otherwise idealized. Insofar as national resilience and prosperity are aligned with corporeal purity and wholeness, discipline and suppression become warranted as means to equally save and subdue the threat of the nation/body that is porous, violable, and fragmenting. As such, this symbolism that imagines statehood in terms of embodiment does significantly more than perpetuate the aversion toward the body that is broadly endemic to liberal political thought. To the contrary, the specter of the ailing body penetrated by subversive or alien contaminants can offer symbolic license for programs of national expurgation and containment, xenophobic and otherwise. Within this metaphorics of the liberal social body, the prosperous, functioning state is accordingly figured as cleansed of discord, dissensus, and other hazards to its welfare, contributing to a political imaginary that can find ready recruitment to apologize for predatory nationalisms.

This deep-seated and persistent notion that the body’s appetites are fated to endanger the individual’s moral faculties (as well as, metaphorically, the livelihood of the state) has consequently provided a core philosophical justification for oppressing scores of populations over history. In one sense, the dual myths of the integrated individual body and the unified body politic conspire to authorize the exclusion and domination of those peoples deemed insubordinate, foreign, or otherwise infectious. The perception that a given group is hostage to embodiment, and hence less rational or developed, has legalized a wide range of discriminatory practices, whether resulting in full-fledged persecution or more subtle expulsions from political life. In the relatively distant past, the science of eugenics capitalized on such a view that moral, intellectual, and other depravities directly correlate with abnormal or deficient physical traits. While eugenics today is commonly taken to indicate scientific racism, Lennard Davis has shown that the eugenics movement in fact stigmatized a range of bodily and other disabilities for their alleged menace to the civic order, with the effect of condoning the policing and curtailment of those conditions.15 Notably, mere indigence was pathologized as one such condition of confinement to the body and its physical wants that was believed to erode a person’s moral sensibilities. Although the eugenics movement is admittedly an extreme case, the suppo...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Bodily Integrity and Its Exclusions
• 2. Embodying Human Rights
• 3. Constituting the Liberal Subject of Rights
• 4. Women’s Rights and the Lure of Self-Determination in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero
• 5. J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
• 6. Arundhati Roy’s “Return to the Things Themselves”
• Coda
• Notes
• Works Cited