Moore - Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture

This book responds to the failures of human rightsthe way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusionsthrough an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore investigates the intersection of vulnerability studies and human rights through an analysis of the relationship between vulnerability theory, normative human rights genressuch as the legal covenant, the human rights report, and reportageand literary and visual culture in five human rights contexts over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers 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 Mdecins Sans Frontires 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 Indonesias history of anti-leftist violence into contemporary 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 discourse. 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 vulnerable to cooptation.

Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English and program faculty in womens and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

29 Literature and the Glocal City
Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary
Edited by Ana Mara Fraile-Marcos

30 Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture
Post-Millennial Perspectives of the End of the World
Edited by Monica German and Aris Mousoutzanis

31 Rethinking Empathy through Literature
Edited by Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim

32 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
Christin Hoene

33 Representations of War, Migration, and Refugeehood
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Daniel H. Rellstab and Christiane Schlote

34 Liminality and the Short Story
Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing
Edited by Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann

35 Asian American Literature and the Environment
Edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons, Youngsuk Chae, and Bella Adams

36 Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture
Basuli Deb

37 Childrens Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation
Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness
Layla AbdelRahim

38 Singularity and Transnational Poetics
Edited by Birgit Mara Kaiser

39 National Poetry, Empires and War
David Aberbach

40 Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture
Technogothics
Edited by Justin D. Edwards

41 Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities
Postcolonial Approaches
Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan

42 Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities
Literary Theory, History, Philosophy
Edited by Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere

43 Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction
Reflections on Fantastic Identities
Jason Haslam

44 Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature
The Architectural Void
Patricia Garca

45 New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic
The Gothic Compass
Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien

46 Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine
Edited by Patricia Novillo-Corvaln

47 Institutions of World Literature
Writing, Translation, Markets
Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen

48 Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media
Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds
Edited by Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvrinen, Maria Mkel, and Frans Myr

49 Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture
Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches
Miriam Wallraven

50 Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America
Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era
Edited by Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic

51 Race and Popular Fantasy Literature
Habits of Whiteness
Helen Young

52 Subjectivity and the Reproduction of Imperial Power
Empires Individuals
Daniel F. Silva

53 Ireland and Ecocriticism
Literature, History and Environmental Justice
Ein Flannery

54 Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture
Modern and Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge

55 New Perspectives on Detective Fiction
Mystery Magnified
Edited by Casey A. Cothran and Mercy Cannon

56 Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture
Alexandra Schultheis Moore

First published 2016
by Routledge
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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.

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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.