“Come Almost Home”: Human Rights and the Return of Minor Subjects

Abstract

This article seeks to reconceptualize the conventional distinction between the moral responsibilities of humanitarianism and the juridical claims of human rights by describing a more radical understanding of ethical responsibility, what Emmanuel Levinas describes as a “being for the Other.” This ethical perspective can revitalize a human rights politics that prepares us for the arrival of the subject of human rights (in contrast to the administered object of victimhood) and the articulation of her demand for the right to rights. Distinguishing notions of charitable humanitarianism from the ethical responsibility that a human rights politics might entail, the article outlines the difficult relations and necessary risks involved in granting personhood to desiring others. Moreover, it demonstrates that minor literatures can offer a crucial staging of the form and meaning of such responsibility and protection within a transnational frame of vulnerability, violence, and justice, by serving as countersite to national memory.

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Cristina Beltrán, Kerry Bystrom, Glenn Mitoma, Naomi Schiller, Cathy Schlund-Vials, and Jini Kim Watson, as well as the members of the Narrative and Human Rights Study Group at the University of Connecticut, who provided me with many thoughtful suggestions and insights as I wrote this article.

Notes

1. As many scholars have noted, the euphemism “comfort woman” proves especially ironic given the brutality of the systematic violence enacted upon the women involved. I retain the term here both to indicate the historical specificity of the practice and to mark the overdetermined ideological conditions, which I describe below, by which such sexual violence was identified as “comfort.”

2. In this article, I use “transnational” to describe the mode of critique that focuses on the limits of the nation and nationalism, considers the ways in which race, gender, class, and other forms of social difference shape experiences of national belonging (and exclusion) and seeks to make visible alternative forms of social and political community. For a discussion of how Asian American feminist activism and scholarship about comfort women form a key site of transnational feminist practice, see Pamela Thoma (2000).

3. For an especially shrewd account of this nationalist logic at work in the case of Southeast Asian refugees, see Yen Le Espiritu (2006).

4. See also, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (1990).

5. In Immigrant Acts (1996), Lisa Lowe explains how Asian American cultural productions provide such a countersite to national memory and culture in the United States.

6. I am referring here to, for example, the tripartite international bill of rights—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights—as well as the Vienna Declaration, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Taken together, and even sometimes as individual documents, these instruments forward much fuller notions of human existence, good life, and well-being than does a more constrained set of negative freedoms that Americans often conceive of as natural rights. These instruments record vital claims to such rights as the right to work at fair wages, the right to family, and the right to education. As significant as such claims are, instead of exploring the implications of such positive liberties, here I am primarily concerned with the formal dimensions of political belonging that human rights politics makes available, that is, forms of recognition that in turn allow the subject to make claims to more specific rights.

7. Given the international hegemony of the Westphalian state system in Arendt's account, the vulnerability of human life tends to be equated with statelessness. However, it is important to emphasize that modern states hardly guarantee sustained and equitable protection of their citizenry. As scholars of neoliberalism have observed, global capitalism has not only increased the number of people displaced as refugees and migrants but it has diminished the capacity of citizens to participate in state processes. Globalized states “introduce new threats and provide declining opportunities to citizens, while increasing numbers of residents who lack citizenship claims” (Brysk 2002: 14). In this case, human rights address not only the rights and responsibilities of the stateless in relation to international actors and communities but the responsibilities of states to their own constituencies as well (Brysk 2002: 10–14).

8. See also Thomas Keenan (1997: 172).

9. Jacques Rancière (2004: 301) formulates the subject of human rights as “those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights they have not,” such that human rights politics actually form a “process of subjectivization.”

10. For examples, see Micheline R. Ishay (2004), Elizabeth Borgwardt (2005), and Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi (2007). All of these scholars use the exact phrase “life of their own” to describe the extralegal performativity that human rights manifest. Lynn Hunt (2007: 133) describes the discursive performativity of human rights as originating in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

11. See Hamilton Carroll (2005) for a discussion of how Hata's obfuscation of the rape enables his fantasy of K's chastity, around which his desire is organized.

12. Given the “unmaking” of Hata by the novel's end, which I discuss below, critics have actually referred to A Gesture Life as a “debildungsroman” or “deconstructive” bildrungrsoman (Carroll 2005: 593; Kong 2011: 2).

13. Although space does not for allow a fuller discussion, it is important to point out that this form of recognition for people of color in the United States is a deeply problematic and highly unstable one. In the case of Asian Americans, as the field of Asian American Studies has demonstrated exhaustively, the racial image of the “forever foreign” constantly threatens to undermine the claims to formal citizenship and cultural belonging that such recognition authorizes. For select discussions of historical exclusion and contemporary alienation of Asians in the United States, see Lowe (1996), David Palumbo-Liu (1999), and Leti Volpp (2001). Hamilton Carroll (2005) describes the intervention that A Gesture Life makes into the literature of immigration and assimilation by narrating the ultimate failure of incorporation that Hata's story makes evident.

14. As Slaughter (2007: 69–71) observes, in modern rights declarations (i.e., French and American Declarations), even while sovereignty was located in “the people,” the people's authority was itself “sponsored” by Nature and Nature's God. The contemporary, secularized UDHR (which tries to reconcile heterogeneous religious and political traditions), however, countenances no such superhuman authority and names no guarantor, such that this vacuum becomes itself a subject of contest.

15. One reason for the preponderance of Korean women conscripted as comfort women was, ironically, to circumvent international law regarding the treatment of enemy nationals during wartime. Because colonized Koreans were considered Japanese subjects, Japanese officials assumed that international conventions did not pertain to the treatment of Korean women by the Japanese government (Hein 1999: 339).

16. A corresponding, if socially distinct, patriarchal nationalism that draws on Confucian principles in Korea has further compounded the wounds of former comfort women, such that a focus on the “lost chastity” of these women stands as a mark of national shame and stymies recognition of individual women's bodily and psychological suffering (Fujitani et al. 2001: 8).

17. See Crystal Parikh (2009) for a fuller discussion of Jacques Derrida's contributions to Levinasian ethics with his conception of “every other is every other.”

18. The Asian Women's Peace Foundation, a privately administered fund, has paid reparations to surviving comfort women but has been denounced for taking a “charitable” approach to these women, in lieu of official recognition (Choi 2001: 396).

19. Anthropological attention to shamanic ritual has uncovered shamanism as a particularly rich, extrajuridical resource by which to “speak silence” for former Korean comfort women. As Choi (2001: 405) explains, such ritual can transform “the perception of reality” and “achieve … the transformation of their subjectivity, which contributes to the healing of their wounds.” In Asian American literature, Kellar's depiction in Comfort Woman (1997) of Akiko as just such a shaman draws on precisely this “culturally constructed map of social reality.”

20. Even more critically, as Zuckert (2000: 65) further clarifies, “government becomes the duty bearer corresponding not only to the primary natural rights but also to a derivative right to security in one's rights. This is more than a duty to forbear; it is the duty to supply the protection.”

21. In raising the specter of the fetus as that responsibility which haunts K's haunting personhood, I am aware that I also raise, in a seemingly problematic manner, the thorny question of reproductive rights and politics that concerns much feminist discourse. Although space constraints do not allow for a full discussion, I would like to clarify that I do not intend to attribute to the fetus a clear-cut “right to life” that has been the mainstay of conservative politics in the United States. As, Butler (2009: 18, emphasis in original) argues, “it is not possible to say in advance that there is a right to life, since no right can ward off all processes of degeneration and death.” Precisely because, as I have explained here, personhood—which entails the guarantee of protection from harm and destruction—is a social project and product, not a biological truth, the viability of any life (including, for example, animal life or lives lived at a distance) is the result of social and political decision. At the same time, and in accordance with the model of responsibility that I have elaborated here and elsewhere, I would contend that the ethical implications involved in the singular moments of decision around the fetus cannot be politically prescripted nor evaluated in standardized moral terms. If feminist subjectivity is to have any political and historical meaningfulness, it is precisely that reproductive agency involves the subject in a network of social relations that have made her a viable being, who in turn becomes responsible for other others.