Locating the Human: World-Literature and the Concept of Rights

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This project explores how literature intervenes in, and reconsiders dominant human rights discourses. Myresearch context is the recent proliferation of critiques of human rights discourse, especially applied toso-called 'developing countries' impacted by humanitarian crises and intervention. Critiques haveincluded: the (in)applicability of Euro-American laws to non-western countries (Kapoor, 2008), the'othering' of those prevented from accessing human rights (Frick, 2019; Klein, 2016), and rightsdiscourses as 'an aspect of governmentality' (Brown, 2004). These come alongside increasing calls for'universal human rights', not least due to the climate crisis, which the UN Rights Chief recently called'the greatest challenge to human rights' (Bachelet, 2021). If 'the discursive victory of human rightsmeans that ours is at once the Age of Human Rights and the Age of Human Rights Abuse' (Slaughter,2007), then bringing a literary-critical eye to this discursive framework and 'reading' human rightsbecomes vital.My research builds upon the WReC's concept of 'world-literature' (2015), reading textual registrations ofthe capitalist world-system through the prism of bodily experience, contributing a new understanding ofworld-literary 'registration'. I also contribute to the environmental humanities, building on workaddressing the impact of environmental degradation on human rights (Nixon, 2011). Reading bodilyregistrations of human rights in novels from across the world reveals how peripheralized writers critique'universal human rights' as a function of the capitalist world-system, and suggest alternatives. Thus, myresearch is animated by three questions:1. How does the (semi-)peripheral novel register the impact of rights discourses and practices?2. How does it interrogate the concept of 'inalienable rights' at a bodily level?3. How do understandings of human rights discourses and practices change when confronted with aspatialised textual embodiment questioning the very notion of humanity?