Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms; or, The Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights (original) (raw)

2008, Comparative Literature Studies

Human rights are everywhere. That is, the language of human rights is everywhere in play, from the Buddhist monasteries of Myanmar to the Security Council chamber at the United Nations, from the often-unheard entreaties of factory workers across the globe to the often-ignored treaties of international law, from the dialogue of popular TV programs to the testimony before criminal courts and truth commissions, from reports issued by NGOs to justifi cations of torture repeated by talking heads in the "war on terror." In the past two decades, human rights have provided a preferred language for statements about morality and immorality, claims about justice and injustice. This is so because, as Costas Douzinas has noted in Human Rights and Empire , the language of human rights "can be adopted by the right and the left, the north and the south, the state and the pulpit, the minister and the rebel." 1 Human rights discourse has proven infi nitely adaptable and amenable to the needs of both the powerless and the powerful to legitimize all sorts of grievances. If the idea and language of human rights fi rst emerged in efforts to resist abuses of power and to redress social inequities, if they emerged as a project to put the human being and its requirements at the center of democratic society and modern social formations, human rights have also often provided the moral vocabulary for rationalizing abuses of state power and the exclusion of some people from the human community. As a consequence, the language of human rights has become an object