Flat affect? Revisiting emotion in the historiography of human rights

ABSTRACT

Across the preceding 15 years, the study of the post-1945 human rights project has emerged as one of most rapidly developing fields of transnational and international history. This article surveys the current state of the art of emotionalist historiography in the sphere of human rights and humanitarianism. It identifies the value of histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social movements, which have successfully begun to incorporate emotion into their analyses. The historiography of the deeper humanitarian past may well serve as the road to more nuanced histories of contemporary human rights struggles and means for integrating grand-scale political and intellectual history with the interior sentiment of individuals. Through a brief survey of emotion at various moments of the postwar rights story, the article argues that the study of shifting sentiment can substantially enrich accounts of human rights history, as it already has done in other fields.

Notes on contributor

Roland Burke is a lecturer in history at La Trobe University and the author of Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania, 2010). His recent research has focused on shifts in the meaning of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Journal of Global History), the formulation of economic and social rights, and the New International Economic Order (Humanity, Journal of World History, Humanity, Human Rights Quarterly, History Australia). He has contributed chapters to edited collections on human rights, empire, and humanitarianism. At present, he is completing a monograph on competing visions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Human Rights in Eclipse).