Comparative Human Rights: Literature, Art, Politics

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Eleni Coundouriotis is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. She is currently completing a book on the war novel in Africa entitled The People's Right to the Novel. Her earlier work includes Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel and numerous articles on African fiction, European realism, and human rights.

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is associate professor of English and Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Johns Hopkins, 2003) as well as a new book project, tentatively entitled The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realist Fiction in an Age of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism, excerpts from which have appeared in journals such as PMLA, Literature Compass, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

Notes

1. The symposium, organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was cosponsored by several units including the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, and Society.

2. See Balfour and Cadava's “The Claims of Human Rights: An Introduction,” as well as “Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights,” cowritten by Bruce Robbins and Elsa Stamatopoulou for the same 2004 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly.

3. See Armitage's 2007 book, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.

4. For a comparable critique of the “armored cosmopolitanism” that has seen human rights discourse hijacked on behalf of neoimperial military and economic interests see Paul Gilroy (2005: 63). Gayatri Spivak writes more optimistically about the progressive potential of humanities education in “Righting Wrongs,” her contribution to the 2004 South Atlantic Quarterly special issue.

5. In this essay, Slaughter understands a human rights abuse as an action that “infring[es] upon the modern subject's ability to narrate her story” (413). He also argues that “positing the voice as an emblem of subjectivity, allows for a conception of human rights that does not rely upon some essential, inherent human quality. Reconceiving notions of human rights in terms of narratability offers some departure from the double bind of universalism and fundamentalism” (412).