Vulnerability and security in human rights literature and visual culture

279 Pages·2016·2.465 MB·English

by  Moore, Alexandra Schultheis

Vulnerability and Security in Human
Rights Literature and Visual Culture
This book responds to the failures of human rights—the way its institu-
tions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions—
through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible
human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore inves-
tigates the intersection of vulnerability studies and human rights through
an analysis of the relationship between vulnerability theory, normative
human rights genres—such as the legal covenant, the human rights report,
and reportage—and literary and visual culture in five human rights con-
texts over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child sol-
diers in Nigerian literature; human rights reporting and novels that address
state-sponsored ethno-cide in Zimbabwe; the international humanitarian
campaigns and disaster capitalism in fiction of Bhopal, India; the work of
Médecins Sans Frontières in the Sahel, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic
of Congo, and Burma as represented in various media campaigns and in
photo/graphic narratives; and, finally, human rights campaigns, fiction, and
film that bring Indonesia’s history of anti-leftist violence into contempo-
rary public debate. These case studies underscore how human rights norms
are always subject to conditions of imaginative representation, and how
literature and visual culture can generate new forms of human rights dis-
course. Expanding feminist theories of embodied and imposed vulnerability,
Moore demonstrates how vulnerability theory can reveal the differential
distribution of both rights and precariousness in specific contexts and offer
an alternative to normative rights discourse organized around the liberal
subject and the nation-state. In place of conventional victims and agents, the
intersection of vulnerability and human rights opens up readings of human
rights claims and suffering that are, at once, embodied and shareable, and,
at the same time, demonstrates that these discourses are themselves vulner-
able to cooptation.
Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English and program
faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, USA.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
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49 Women Writers and the Occult
in Literature and Culture 56 Vulnerability and Security in
Female Lucifers, Priestesses, Human Rights Literature and
and Witches Visual Culture
Miriam Wallraven Alexandra Schultheis Moore
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Vulnerability and Security
in Human Rights Literature
and Visual Culture
Alexandra Schultheis Moore
First published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of Alexandra Schultheis Moore to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Alexandra Schultheis.
Vulnerability and security in human rights literature and visual culture / by Alexandra
Schultheis Moore.
pages cm. — (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature; 56)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Human rights in literature. 2. Vulnerability (Personality trait) in literature.
3. Violence in literature. 4. Law and literature. 5. Motion pictures and literature.
I. Title.
PN56.H79M66 2015
809'.933581—dc23 2015022667
ISBN: 978-1-138-86027-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71654-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For Chloë and Samantha
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Contents
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Human Rights in Precarious Times 1
1 Spectrally Human: African Child Soldier Narratives
at the Limits of Legal Personhood 30
2 Disturbing the Archive: Human Rights Storytelling
of Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi 69
3 Overexposed: Compounded Vulnerability and
Continuing Liability in Fiction of Bhopal 113
4 Re-purposing Témoignage: Humanitarian Spaces
and Subjects in Photo/Graphic Narratives of
Médecins Sans Frontières 156
5 In the Aftermath of Mass Murder: Visuality and
Vertigo in the Indonesia Films of Joshua Oppenheimer 198
References 240
Index 255