Abstract
This article investigates an emerging genre in contemporary literature – the global anglophone novel of human rights. These are novels with a largely realistic aesthetic portraying rights abuses within living memory, circulating in English, often functioning as an intervention in public memory. They engage discourses with trans-national implications – migration and statelessness, terrorism, labor abuse by multinationals, foreign intervention in domestic conflict or gross violations of humanitarian norms. Falke begins by accepting James Dawes’s 2018 description of American human rights novels, but argues for the genre as a distinctly global form.
The article analyzes two novels – Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) and Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (2018) – as emblematic of the genre as they employ intergenerational plots, migration stories, and multi-perspective narration to highlight the interrelatedness of violence, poverty and displacement.
This article investigates an emerging genre in contemporary literature – the global novel of human rights. These are novels with a largely realistic aesthetic portraying rights abuses since World War Two, circulating in English, often functioning as an intervention in public memory. They engage discourses with trans-national implications – migration and statelessness, terrorism, labor abuse by multinational corporations, foreign intervention in domestic conflict and gross violations of humanitarian norms. James Dawes authored the first argument for seeing human rights novels as a genre in his 2018 book, The Novel of Human Rights. Although he has worked with rights violations on an international scale before, in The Novel of Human Rights Dawes adopts an American Studies perspective.1 He nevertheless concludes the book with the hope that his “nation-reifying argument will be dismantled” (200). This article (respectfully) begins that dismantling by combining Dawes’s insights about the American genre’s defining plot forms with the growing recognition of what Adam Kirsch has called “the global novel.” “The global novel exists,” Kirsch writes, “not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived – not through the abolition of place, but as a theme by which place is mediated” (12). Global relations mediate experiences of reading and writing human rights novels in complex ways – via readers’ and authors’ simultaneous embeddedness in networks of political, institutional and economic power, and via systems of communication that elevate the visibility of some human rights narratives while neglecting others. National belonging (or its absence) operates indelibly as an interpretive horizon, but in the case of human rights novels, choosing to interpretively privilege global interconnectedness aligns with the human rights goal of seeing others primarily as fellow beings worth seeing, protecting and advocating for, prior to and beyond national distinctions.
To begin, the article describes some characteristics of what I am calling the global human rights novel, citing several examples within this category. I open this section with a consideration of the contentious terms “global novel” and “human rights.” The second section considers the insights afforded by a global, as opposed to a national, perspective and points out some corollaries between the universalist ambitions of the human rights project itself and a global perspective on literature. As part of this consideration, I look closely at plot forms and themes Dawes finds exemplary of the emerging genre of human rights novels in order to see what changes when shifting to a transnational interpretive framework. Although I cite other novels, I return throughout to Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) and Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (2018) as exemplary works. Both use intergenerational plots, stories of migration, and multi-perspective narration to explore the ways that individual lives map connections among nations and between historical events, thereby foregrounding lived experiences that discourses of state-based rights protection often ignore. I selected them because of their representation of multiple forms of rights crises as interrelated. Both novels portray characters seeking refuge from persecution and do so in reference to the violence and poverty that drive people to flee home. They also describe the challenges and false accusations refugees frequently face upon arrival. The number of the world’s displaced people topped 123 million in 2024, which means we can say that, numerically, the world is facing the worst crisis of displacement on record (Norwegian Refugee Council). This vast scale of displacement motivated my selection of novels that narrate refugee experiences.
Burnt Shadows is hugely ambitious in terms of the histories it touches on, which makes it difficult to summarize, but even a brief sketch testifies to the novel’s approach to history as integrated through the contingencies of individual lives as well as through geopolitical power struggles. The novel follows its main character, Hiroko Ashraf (née Tanaka) from her childhood home in Nagasaki, where she is displaced by America’s bombing of the city, to Delhi, where she and her new husband Sajad are again displaced by Partition. After traveling to Istanbul for their honeymoon, they are forbidden to return to India and move to Karachi, Pakistan, where they have a son called Raza. As an adult, Raza becomes involved in CIA operations in Afghanistan and eventually must escape to Canada where, in a case of mistaken identity, he is arrested by US authorities. The novel opens twice. Immediately after the table of contents, readers find a ten-line prologue focalized through Raza, who is being forced to undress before prison guards in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in 2002. Camp and character both remain unidentified, and the prologue ends with Raza wondering “How did it come to this” (italics in original, 1). The next page opens the first of four longer sections that together respond to this question. The first of these features Hiroko on August 9th 1945 in Nagasaki. Her fiancé and father are about to be killed by the bomb. Intertwined with the lives of the Hiroko and Sajad are the lives of the Burton/Weiss family, an English husband (James Burton) and German/English wife (Elsa Weiss Burton) living in Delhi, whose son becomes a mentor and friend to Raza. Elsa is Konrad’s sister.
Like Burnt Shadows, The Boat People details singular histories with reference to globally interconnected patterns of rights abuses. The novel opens with Mahindan, a widowed Tamil father escaping the Sri Lankan Civil War with his six-year-old son, Sellian, on a boat outside of Vancouver, Canada. They arrive with hundreds of other refugees on the shores of British Columbia full of hope for their new lives. Bala’s reimagination of their journey draws heavily on the actual arrival and resettlement of around 600 Sri Lankans in two cargo ships, The Ocean Lady in 2009 and MV Sun in 2010. On arrival, men and women are separated from one another and sent to different prisons. Mahindan is separated from the son he has clung to through the war, the camps, and the days at sea, because there are no facilities for children in the men’s prison. Mahindan and Sellian both remain imprisoned during most of the months it takes for their case to be decided, with Sellian eventually moving in with a white foster family. Throughout the novel, Bala switches between Mahindan’s perspective and that of two other focalizers, both of whom are affiliated with Canada’s legal system. Pia, the second focalizer, also Tamil, has been yanked from her internship in corporate law and placed in immigration law primarily because of her ethnicity. Grace, the third focalizer, is a third-generation Japanese-Canadian and has been given her post as an adjudicator by a Conservative cabinet minister as a political favor. Like Burnt Shadows, the novel works across the period between World War Two and the present. Bala draws parallels between race-based oppression of the WWII era and twenty-first century bias through the figure of Grace’s mother, Kumi, whose family was evicted from their home in Vancouver and whose parents were sent to a Japanese internment camp. The novel ends with Mahindan walking into his final admissibility hearing with Grace presiding. He crosses the threshold into the courtroom, and Bala implicitly leaves his resettlement decision up to the reader by not narrating the hearing’s outcome. Both novels resist resolution anad conclude with references to ongoing human rights crises.
The loss of legal human rights protection forms a central concern for the characters I focus on in The Boat People and Burnt Shadows. In Burnt Shadows, Hiroko and Sajad lose their right to India’s protection following partition. Their son Raza, arriving without ID in Canada, can claim no country’s protection. In The Boat People, the central plot derives its suspense from uncertainty about whether Canada will extend the protection of rightful residence to Mahindan, Sellian, and the other refugees. These novels also foreground how often the legal guarantee of human rights falls short of real protection, especially in the context of civil war or political instability.
1 Global Human Rights Novels
The works I am calling “global human rights novels” narrate rights abuses within the post-World War Two “age of human rights” through a perspective that implies internationally shared responsibilities for rights protection (Baxi 1–32). Dozens have been published in the twenty-first century across every region of the world with more published every year. The phenomenon is widespread enough to constitute a significant literary innovation and a significant intervention in human rights discourse. One can, of course, use a human rights lens to analyze texts addressing rights abuses committed prior to the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR). However, it is with the UDHR that the worldwide effort to define and protect human rights became “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” (UDHR “Preamble”) and therefore a legally established global concern. Authors representing rights abuses following the UDHR’s passage can treat these abuses as a failure of internationally agreed upon standards of rights protection. They can address readers as inheritors of the UDHR’s goals, but also its failures.
Both the terms “global” and “human rights” spark skepticism in some academic quarters. As opposed to the rich lived reality suggested by “world” or “lifeworld,” “global” connotes a view from beyond the confines of lived experience – a system or field of circulation available for more empirical analysis. Scholars worry that discussing the globalization of literature conflates “cultural and economic forms” of circulation (Jay 34); or worse, that it inescapably subjugates aesthetic singularity to market demands. “World Literature” becomes “World Bank Literature” (Gonzalez § 3); cultural singularity morphs into “a pathology of cultural representation under late capitalism” (Huggan 33). Within the broader field of concern about global novels, Elizabeth Anker warns readers against “human rights bestsellers” specifically because she worries they recycle suspect political ideologies or exoticize violence and suffering in order to flourish in a global market.
Valid as these concerns are, they hint at a desire for an unobtainable separation of literature from economics and economics from politics. Additionally, it is not just global literatures that face market pressures; all literature does (Damrosch How to Read 159). Worse, as Karolina Watroba elucidates, some arguments framed as contesting commodification “turn out to be motivated by a much older concern to preserve a literary elite” (53). She marshals together a disturbing number of class-inflected slurs directed at popular global novels. They are derided as:
“new globally directed works all too easy to understand;” “works produced primarily for foreign consumption;” airport novels or “romans de gare,” that is, mass-market paperbacks sold to travelers at airport or train station newsstands; “global babble;” testaments to the “Disneyfication” or “McDonaldization of the globe;” “market realism;” and “contemporary world literature [that] isn’t worth the effort it doesn’t require.”2
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Watroba is clearly right to detect an association between novels being labeled “global” and “lowbrow” (54). “On this account, the new global novel is a depressing testimony to the crushing power of US-American cultural hegemony” (54), and the biggest American export is low standards.
The US has an outsized impact on the global fiction market. The five biggest publishers of fiction globally (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) are all headquartered in New York. It is reasonable to worry that ideological dominance will follow economic power. However, as scholars we should not discredit the possibility that authors publishing with these houses find ways to succeed creatively as well as commercially. Furthermore, it is neither logical nor desirable to assume that bestselling novels have jettisoned aesthetic quality because to do so discredits tout court regular, non-institutionalized readers’ ability to appreciate a well-crafted novel. Although literary critics have done important work re-valuing non-elite writers and although non-elite ways of living have long been the object of literary interest, outlooks on readers have remained oddly elitist. Jacques Ranciere suggests that “Critiques hoping to discredit democracy persistently reduce … the political people to the surfeit (trop-plein) of the greedy masses and the ignorant populace” (42). The materialist critique that Watroba identifies edges dangerously close to this kind of anti-democratic thinking. Any argument for literature related to human rights must presume equality among persons, including readers, if it is to be consistent with the equality upon which human rights themselves are premised. Additionally, any argument for human rights novels’ capacity to intervene meaningfully in human rights practice hinges on the recognition that regular, non-professional readers, readers who desire beauty with their truth and entertainment with their education are the only medium through which these novels can obtain real-world power. Rather than worry about novels in the hands of the masses, we could celebrate the broad diffusion of complex narratives about human rights abuses of the past because these are also implicitly reflections on the challenges of the present, challenges shared by the more and less privileged.
Along with “global novel,” “human rights” is also a term to which some will object. Since the mid 1990s, human rights discourse has operated as “common language of humanity.”3 However, for many thinkers, the hopes of the UDHR have been “overturned by a period of violent transition marked by the imperatives of national and global security on the one hand, and on the other, by the ongoing consolidation of neoliberal developmental capitalism” (Goodale 161). The “international human rights system” has increasingly become a means of “passive colonialism” exercised by the world’s most powerful countries (147), and twenty-first century “interventions, instead of reinforcing human rights, are slowly consuming their legitimacy as a universalistic basis for foreign policy” (Ignatieff 47). In human rights novels, this twenty-first century awareness of obstacles to human rights protection and legitimacy combines with the narration of political violence in living memory to emphasize both the importance of the human rights regime and the glaring gaps in its implementation. Analyzed previously as torture novels (Nayer), refugee novels (Goyal), war novels (Coundouriotis), or in some cases some post-migratory novels (Gamal 598, Boehmer 250) that address trans-national or new-national home making after forced displacement, this body of works can be fruitfully analyzed under the more general heading of “human rights fiction” in order to trace the interconnections among these phenomena and to connect further rights abuses that are difficult to plot, such as ecocide, gender-based oppression, systematized inequality and labor exploitation.
More than the language of rights, authors use the assumption that all people are entitled to the freedoms and protections defined by the UDHR as the basis for narrating historical rights abuses, especially those related to major instances of political violence. Between 1946 and 2019, there were 334 major conflict events that killed 500 or more people (Marshall). Since many of these receive little representation in media or education, novels play a significant role in raising the visibility of events narrated. With 185 conflicts ongoing (Uppsala), the highest number since the in at least the last half century, the need for the citizened and stateless to hold states accountable for rights protection has never been higher. Global human rights fictions reach huge numbers of readers, achieving bestseller status and garnering awards, which means hundreds of thousands of readers are being led to contemplate these events at length, perhaps for the first time, through fiction. Critics of human rights have argued that it is the “inertia and powerlessness to do anything about mass killings and devastating wars and conflicts that have taken the luster out of human rights” (Matua 455). And yet, no discourse has ever done more than human rights to grant “citizens and the international community the legal and moral fiat to put the state in a strait-jacket and demand accountability, transparency, and limits on its power” (Matua 454). By empowering citizens with historical knowledge and narrative resources for thinking through the lived experiences of conflict and displacement, human rights novels can energize demands for accountability and transparency and perhaps work to counter the inertia the human rights movement has recently suffered.
Recent scholarship reveals an emerging consensus that the novel has, throughout its history, not only represented rights infractions, but helped shape the norms out of which human rights law and practices emerge. Lynn Hunt suggests in her 2007 Inventing Human Rights: A History that novels in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “reinforced the notion of a community based on autonomous, empathetic individuals who could relate beyond their individual families, religious affiliations, or even nations to greater universal values” (32). Focusing on work written since the end of the Cold War, Debjani Ganguly (2016) finds that, especially in recent works, “the globalization of human rights culture” has been crucial in shaping “the contemporary novel as a global form” (6). I would add to this that the converse is also true: human rights novels can shape human rights discourse – moving it beyond from policy circles and an academic coterie and into everyday conversations. Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law offers the most developed examination of the intertwined histories of the novel and human rights norms. He contends that novels not only prepare for human rights legislation but also contribute to its implementation. Securing the “recognition and observance” of rights mandated by the UDHR requires, he argues, “literary and cultural forms to make the common sense of human rights norms both legible and legislatable, imaginable and articulable” (6). He points out that the legal framework for human rights and the development of the novel “are more than merely homologous; they are mutually reinforcing” (52). For better and for worse, “it has been sociocultural forms and relations more than administrative institutions and legal appliances that have given international human rights law whatever force of custom it enjoys” (82). Slaughter argues convincingly that the classical Bildungsroman and human rights law both treat as ordinary a process of smooth incorporation into society that is only really available to a privledged few. This is true. But he also cite examples of novels that act “as a formal indigntment of the antidomcratic state and a rejection of its authoritative claims” (150). Increasingly, global human rights novels offer this kind of indigntment.
Global human rights fictions attend to historically decentered perspectives and events. Working with the benefit of hindsight, these twenty-first century novels interpret prior political and economic maneuvering by world powers in light of now known outcomes. They do this by bringing alternative interpretative lenses to historical events rather than through descriptive exposition of the interaction among states. For instance, by juxtaposing Nagasaki and Guantanamo Bay, Burnt Shadows highlights the US history of describing its own human rights abuses as instrumental in achieving larger human rights goals. Shamsie decouples the US bombing of Japan and from its wartime justifications and narrates it as a violent interruption in a young couple’s unfolding life together. She places the torture and unjust incarceration now associated with Guantanamo Bay at the end of a narrative of a young man overcoming his father’s murder, a young man who is in the moment of his arrest trying to protect a friend. The Boat People explicitly mocks the incompatibility of Canada’s rhetoric of openness and its recent treatment of arriving refugees. In one memorable scene, a Sri Lankan named Prasad who is applying for asylum is questioned in court about the illegal means he used to reach Canada, and he plays on the court’s perception of Canada as having historically been a safe human rights refuge: “I am reading a book right now,” he says, “about a very famous railroad under the ground. I believe there is a long history in this country of … irregular arrivals” (ellipses and emphasis in original, 228). Both novels organize readerly interest around characters who are victims of rights abuses and rights denial, not in order to highlight their victimhood. These characters still act with agency. Rather, their focus on victimized characters serves to unsettle dominant narratives justifying or normalizing rights abuses.
Contemporary human rights fiction also serves a key function in exposing readers to events that remain little rarely taught in schools and rarely discussed in global media in spite of their ongoing political significance and immeasurable human loss. For example, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s bestselling Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) unfolds during the Nigerian Civil War. With history having been removed as a school subject in Nigeria in 2009,4 the war is not part of formal education in the country where it occurred. In spite of Britain having ceded control of Nigeria only in 1960 and Britain and the US both lending support to the Nigerian side of the war, it is barely represented in UK or US education. And yet, the hundreds of thousands of people who read Adichie’s novel will have spent (based on average adult reading speeds) about fourteen hours imagining life before, during, and after the war. More than merely informing readers about under-narrated histories, these novels also seek an alternative form of justice in the court of public opinion. During the Cambodian Genocide, 1.7 million people were killed, but to date, “only three officials have been successfully tried and convicted for crimes against humanity” (Schlund-Vials 101). In the absence of legal justice, works of literature about the genocide such as Vaddey Ratner’s novel In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) “serve an essential role, seeking through memory a mode of redress which necessarily and evocatively falls outside limited legal and juridical mechanisms of international intervention (e.g., the tribunal) and the violating nation-state” (Schlund-Vials 102).
Global human rights novels typically include multiple focalizers and focalizers with different degrees of social power, complicating any sense of their being one true story of an event and exposing the complex mesh of factors that pressure people to harm or ignore others or to collude with violent regimes and organizations. In The Boat People, Grace faces conflicting pressures as an adjudicator. The powerful anti-immigrant politician who appointed her pushes her to “protect” Canadians from the risk of terrorism at all costs, and her mother, whose family was displaced by anti-Japanese Canadian policies during the second world war, encourages her to approach detainees as innocent unless proven guilty. Mahindan, whose case Grace must decide, worked as an auto mechanic in northern Sri Lanka and performed repair work for the Tamil Tigers rather than being carried away to fight. Through sections focalized through Mahindan, readers know this, but we also know that Grace has only his own retelling of story to go on. Readers, therefore, see the complexity of each character’s position and see how simplified the version they present to each other must be because of their roles as adjudicator and detainee. Multi-perspective narration does not operate within the genre as a law or border determining exclusions, but the tendency is common enough to see the use of perspective to thematize what one cannot perceive of another’s story as a central concern.
In keeping with the transnational goals of human rights protection, human rights novels are often, to use Rebecca Walkowitz’s terminology, “born translated;” they are written for export to other languages and cultures. Walkowitz characterizes “born translated” works as “world-shaped” in that they “feature travelling characters who speak different languages,” and “world-themed” because they “present collaborative projects and private undertakings that operate between or across sovereign states” (Walkowitz 122). Hiroko, in Burnt Shadows, is prodigiously gifted in languages, as is Raza. During his childhood, she makes him multi-lingual crossword puzzles for entertainment (129). Sajad, a native Urdu speaker, has mastered fewer languages, but Shamsie presents his ability to think multi-lingually as integral to his capacity to help Hiroko mourn the losses suffered in Nagasaki. When she describes the day of the bombing, he responds: “There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu … only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming ‘ghum-khaur’ – grief-eaters – who take in the mourner’s sorrow. Would you like me to be in English or Urdu right now?” (77) Shamsie presents the ability “to be” in English or Urdu as what allows Sajad to navigate the cultural and geographical distances between his past in India and Hiroko’s in Japan. Shamsie also, however, presents multilingualism as a power that can be used for domination. When Raza enters the employment of the fictional CIA contracted firm Arkwright and Glenn (260), his translation skills become a tool of the US occupying forces in Afghanistan.
By narrating the power that comes with multilingual fluency, especially fluency in English, human rights novels like Burnt Shadows and The Boat People allude to the fact that people possessing a single language, especially an unfavored language, are more prone to become victims of systemic inequality. Conversely, multilingualism is presented as a power that moves under and beyond institutions that allot residency or degrees. Raza succeeds as an internationally-mobile professional in spite of not having a university education. In “Model Migrant,” the chapter in The Boat People portraying Prasad’s reference to the Underground Railroad, readers see that it is his facility with English that allows him to speak for himself without a translator in his hearing. It also allows him to place a letter in the newspaper publicizing the refugee’s unjust treatment. Having published criticisms of the Tamil Tigers’ methods back in Sri Lanka, he has a clearer case than his shipmates for non-refoulement on the basis of the likelihood that he would be killed. However, the main thing that makes him a model migrant is his language. Whereas Mahindan, Sellian and most of the others begin learning the English alphabet when they arrive, Prasad arrives fluent in Sri Lankan English and aware of the need to adapt his accent and idiom to Canadian English (223). Prasad’s “model migrant” status relies on the contrast with all the other refugees. In Burnt Shadows, Raza’s linguistic capacity affords him paycheck that dwarfs those of his fellow “Third Country Nationals” (257).
Being “born translated,” global human rights novels often describe transnational border crossings and the interrelated histories of multiple nations. Border crossing narratives allow authors to concretize experiences of cultural loss and chart dynamics of hope when immigrants or refugees arrive in a new land. In Burnt Shadows, after Hiroko has moved to Delhi, she longs for doors the slide rather than swing open and “tea that tastes the way tea should taste in [her] understanding of tea” (99). In The Boat People, Mahindan watches Sellian, one year after they have arrived, and thinks of “this boy who was his son but looked and spoke like someone else’s” (329). Sellian has become fairly fluent in English and wears clothes provide by his white Canadian foster parents. The novels imply that wherever Hiroko and Sellian live, they will always occupy two or more worlds and experience some alienation from both.
Global human rights novels often elucidate bordering processes within a single state or a fracturing state, exposing dangers that unfold at the scale of the crossroads and daily commute and that may be occluded by political discourse at the national and international scale. Because they are written for trans-national circulation, these narratives of intrastate bordering remain “world-shaped.” Although specificities of culture, landscape and political environment help determine these characters’ circumstances, their experiences are transferable enough to facilitate readerly contemplation of similar situations elsewhere. For example, checkpoints in the divided city of Freetown, Sierra Leone make it difficult for a character to find his lover in Aminata Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010), which is set during the Sierra Leonian Civil War (1991–2002). Similar descriptions of restricted movement recur in every human rights novel set during a war, exposing a daily reality that civilians in embattled contexts continue to live. Forna has discussed the similarities between the war in Sierra Leone and those in Sri Lanka (Tegal) or Croatia (Forna, “Don’t Judge”). She argues that the tendency to emphasize contrasts between these wars arises from assumptions about racial and geographical difference more often than a commitment to singularity. In Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work (2016, trans. 2019), siblings taking their father’s corpse from Damascus to Anabiya for burial suffer its stench and decomposition as they are detained by one militant group after another. As Khalifa says, the war in Syria is an international matter – “a war of settling scores on Syrian land.” Like most modern wars, this one takes a mostly local human toll but has global causes and effects. Khalifa, like Forna, emphasizes the transferability of his characters’ experiences. His main character, Bolbol, he says, is a person we could find “walking on the streets of New York, an urban person, modern” (Van der Vliet Oloomi). Being world-shaped, whether the scale of movement is national or international, these novels emphasize that the predominance of military power is connected to international politics (decolonization in Sierra Leone, Syrian Civil War as proxy war).
To summarize, then, global human rights fictions represent post-World War Two episodes of political violence, especially those that are underrepresented in education and media, most often using multiple focalizers with different degrees of power in the public sphere. These focalizers are often multi-lingual characters or characters whose monolingualism limits their power of self-representation. Via depictions of these translational dynamics, via portrayals of cultural loss and hybridization, and via intra- and international border crossings tied to global politics, they evoke the connectedness and networks of implication in which readers also find ourselves.
2 Why a Global Perspective
Human rights fiction, like the global novel or world literature itself, is a capacious and growing category. Having sketched some characteristics that contemporary human rights novels share, especially in relation to the linguistic dynamics of transcultural lives and the preservation of neglected histories and perspectives, I want, in this section, to suggest how these works benefit from being read as global novels. Dawes is the first scholar to specify that human rights novels constitute a contemporary genre “just like the mystery novel or novel of manners, exists as a form that affects both reader and writer expectations” (5). Although he focuses on American works, the plot forms he identifies as characterizing human rights novels provide a useful basis for analyzing human rights novels beyond a national framework. More specifically, contrasting his basic plots as read through a global versus a national lens illuminates what we might miss as readers if we restrict our view to the concerns of a single state.
He identifies two recurring plot forms, which he calls justice plots and escape plots. “In US novels of human rights,” Dawes finds, “justice plot protagonists are agents of restitution.” They are generally “estranged from the land they once inhabited” and return “home to investigate a single crime that stands in for systematic abuses.” Functioning as “transitional figures for the reader,” because they move between the cultures to which the novels are marketed and those being represented, these protagonists work as a means of imparting historical and experiential knowledge and also a way of thinking through the moral complexities of witnessing (or reading about) others’ victimization (23). If the justice plot protagonist is American, then their American-ness can be read as symbolically celebrating or implicating US norms and policies. Working along these lines, Dawes offers a multi-layered reading Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) that treats the protagonist’s “fantasies of moral self-affirmation” in relation to his treatment of his Guatemalan housemaid as instructive. The Guatemalan-American (US-raised) protagonist, Roger Graetz realizes belatedly that he has expected his family’s maid Flor de Mayo, an orphan who was sent to them from Guatemala at the age of thirteen, to relate to him, not as an equal, but always primarily as the grateful “rescued orphan” (Dawes 37). His restrictive expectations for her self-presentation not only imply a critique of US-based norms about “good” immigrants, but also countermand a reader’s potential self-congratulations for reading morally challenging literature with the implication that readers, like Graetz, bring restrictive assumptions about orphans, Guatemalans and maids into our reading (Dawes 36–38). Justice plots, Dawes finds, resemble detective plots in driving toward a single revelation or resolution – in the case of Goldman’s novel, the truth about Flor’s murder after she returns to Guatemala (23).
The second plot form Dawes analyzes are escape plots. In contrast to detective plots, escape plots take the form of a picaresque, in which a single character moves into “ever wider space” (23). The protagonist is “often a first-person narrator who comes from a socially marginal position” and who “moves laterally from disaster to disaster through a world of moral chaos, rather than vertically through the organizing, socializing structure of the bildungsroman” (48). In the context of US novels, escape plots engage a tradition of presenting immigration to America as “redemption,” but Dawes rightly points out that human rights novelist do not generally “endorse a form that represents US resettlement as an adequate answer to atrocities traceable to the United States” (44, 48).
Dawes’s discernment of justice and escape plots makes a major contribution to American Studies, but pushing against his single nation focus enables an equally generative process of discernment about works as global novels. The justice plots of the novels Dawes focuses on are uniquely US plots in so far as they invite critiques of US policies and norms, but their exposure of problems of rightlessness can be read as global issues as readily as US issues. In The Long Night of White Chickens, the textured cultural descriptions that ground the characters’ development depict Guatemala at least as much as the US. As Guatemalan-American reviewer Victor Perera sees it, the Guatemalan cultural and physical landscape “becomes the protagonist” in the novel, and “the story of Flor de Mayo … is the story of Guatemala” (n.p.). As illuminating as Dawes’s reading is, elevating the interpretation of one nation’s foibles over another’s has the effect of reintroducing a center/periphery dynamic that the novel itself works to overcome.
With escape plots, too, an interpretive focus on the US as a protagonist’s destination risks de-emphasizing a character’s original culture, which is often enough also an author’s home culture. In the case of an author with multiple homelands, reading human rights novels engaged with international issues through a singular national lens may ignore the author’s plural national positionings or appeal for status as an international artist, and in the case of a marginally positioned author (however many homelands they claim) national categorization may overshadow a novel’s address to women, workers, or people of color internationally. In global novels in which shifting focalization is a key technique, justice plots multiply and are shown to conflict with one another, emphasizing the conflicts arising from human rights enforcement more generally. It is also often the case that large scale restitution is presented as impossible or its pursuit presented as harmful. Escape, where possible, may be portrayed as temporary, like Hiroko’s initial settlement in Dehli, or conditional, like Mahindan’s residence in Vancouver.
In Burnt Shadows, Harry Burton could be read as a justice plot protagonist. He was raised in India by English and Anglo-German parents but moves to the US at eleven and grows up to work for the CIA and then a military contractor. In returning to South Asia to a site on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in 1982–3, he fits Dawes’s description of a character capable of mediating between cultures to which the book will mainly be marketed and the cultures being represented. He combines US/Western European credentials and familiarity with a besieged or comparatively impoverished region in the global south or East. Because he works in international intelligence, he carries the authority of a potential agent of restitution. However, suspicion of his CIA connection gets one of his oldest friends, Sajad (Hiroko’s husband), killed, a plot point that undermines any claim he might have to be bringing justice to the region (242). Harry kills his friend’s murderer (283), but the act is not narrated, only mentioned in passing to Sajad and Hiroko’s son, Raza, who “knew his father would have been appalled and his mother furious” (283). Although Harry may regard the killing as restitution, Shamsie undermines such eye-for-an-eye logic through reference to the imagined disapproval of those supposedly avenged.
Later, following 9/11, Harry returns to the area and is himself killed. Shamsie goes to some length to prevent his death from seeming heroic or in any way purposeful. Harry both feels profound grief over the attack on New York and sees 9/11 losses as relativized by political violence elsewhere. He wished “for all the world to stop and weep with him for the city which had adopted him” (271), but he is stationed in the Congo when he hears the news. The civil war there is ongoing, and more than two and a half million have been killed. “He sat down with a calculator on 12 September, and worked it out to more than two thousand deaths a day, each day, for over three years” (271). Shamsie criticizes his comparative calculation by tying it to his lack of empathy for Congolese losses: “he couldn’t find any way to connect these numbers to his emotions” (271). Even so, Shamsie uses Harry’s calculation to de-center 9/11 as a focus for justice plotting. When Harry is shot as an operative in the War on Terror, he is playing cricket with three Pakistanis, a Sri Lankan, and two Bangladeshis, who are also shot although “the gunman seemed most intent” on killing the American contractors (302). Here again Harry’s presence, and metonymically America’s presence, rather than being connected to any restitution, gets less privileged locals and immigrant workers killed.
The potential justice plot surrounding Harry is further minimized by the novel’s sprawling structure. The story of his return to the region arises late in the book and is subordinated and intertwined with other plots to such an extent that no space is left for elaborations of the justice-seeking ideas behind his presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Again decentering the American perspective, Shamsie spends more time narrating the story of Raza’s Pashtun friend Abdullah. Abdullah spent his childhood moving from camp to camp as his family’s home area was contested by Soviet, American and Taliban forces. He does not, like his brothers, become a fighter, but leaves at their behest for the US to “earn a real living” (313), subjecting himself to a human smuggling operation and leaving his wife and son behind. The idea that Harry’s presence in the region would be any sort of counter to injustices readers encounter in the book – Hiroko’s losses in Nagasaki, Sajad’s loss of his home in Delhi and subsequent murder, Abdullah’s loss of a childhood – would seem absurd. Abdullah’s facing human smuggling to get to New York implies, amidst all these other plots, that justice is not even entertained as a possibility for someone of his class and position, only survival. In his family, he was “the youngest, the most fit – had the best chance of making the journey across” (313). The justice plot remains important in global human rights fiction, but it often appears, as in Burnt Shadows, as a plot to be deconstructed.
The Boat People also evokes and innovates on the justice plot through two subplots. Grace’s mother, Kumi, whose parents’ home and business in Vancouver were taken over by the Canadian government during Japanese internment, goes from wondering “what the business was worth” (43) to organizing survivors and demanding public recognition of the government’s actions (324–325). She educates her granddaughters about their family history through cartoons and letters from the period (200). A public plaque is as close as Kumi will come to receiving restitution. Her mother had come to Canada by boat (202) before the war and gained citizenship (201), so the parallel between Kumi’s mother’s story and Mahindan’s is quite explicit. Because Grace, Kumi’s daughter, presides over the final hearing in which Mahindan and Sellian’s right to settle in Canada will be determined, this parallel effects readers’ perception of the case. Literary scholars may balk about the explicitness of Kumi’s statement that “People who forget the wrongs that were done to them perpetuate those same wrongs on others” (201), but the juxtaposition of anti-Japanese and anti-refugee paranoia effectively highlights the predictability of injustices rooted in us/them rhetoric.
Rather than portraying a single individual as an agent of justice, The Boat People positions Grace as a potential agent of injustice and ends without closure, the decision left implicitly to the reader. The novel opens with Mahindan and Sellian celebrating the sight of Canada’s shores from the overcrowded fishing boat on which they have traversed the Pacific Ocean and closes with Mahindan stepping into the courtroom of his (332) admissibility hearing. His wife is dead, his home destroyed; he has been incarcerated for a year waiting for their case to be processed. As with Abdullah in Burnt Shadows, there is no act of justice that would seem adequate, even symbolically, to achieving justice for him. If one looks for a narrative of injustice moving toward justice, one must look to Canadian policies of the forties and hope Grace opposes a system that would again use fear to justify inhumane decision making. The justice plot operates as a shadow structure, and the conclusion the plot leads readers to hope for is not a mystery solved or violence avenged, but the more moderate hope that individuals can work from positions within problematic systems to effect change.
Each novel also cites the escape plot, but in Raza’s case in Burnt Shadows and the case of all Sri Lankan refugee arrivals in The Boat People, escape to Canada results in immediate incarceration. Like the justice plot, the escape plot functions as a readerly expectation the novels can push against and ironize. Abdullah’s flight to the US is not portrayed as escape so much as a mournful necessity demanded his family’s abject circumstances. He sits in the New York Public Library and flips through photo books of Afghanistan before the war, longing for a home to which he cannot return.
In conclusion, I will clarify four key reasons to read human rights novels as global works. First and most obviously, human rights is a global discourse about the universal protection of people everywhere. To whatever extent this ambition succeeds or fails, the goal of human rights is to secure and protect “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” This quotation from the 1948 Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights might be dismissed as too idealistic, too old or too European, but encouraging findings from the 2021 World Values Survey signal that “In over 160 countries, an average of 60 % felt that human rights were somewhat respected and essential” (Mihr 64). Anja Mihr argues on the basis of this achievement of a global majority that human rights norms have surpassed a “threshold of societal consciousness and attitudes” to the extent that worldwide most “social movements or networks refer to international human rights standards, independent of their political agenda” (64). National leaders may manipulate human rights language to advance dominion through violent means, but recent case studies indicate that when human rights education reaches the populace of an area, violence and corruption decrease (Mihr 60). Global human rights novels are derided for being sold in aiports and train stations (Watroba 55), but their ability to travel – through marketing, informal reader networks and translation – makes them agents of human rights education now happening on an international scale.
Secondly, contributing authors and receiving readers are globally diverse and often situated simultaneously in multiple home cultures. Kamila Shamsie (b. 1973) was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan and attended university in New York and New Hampshire before settling in London in 2007 and obtaining British (dual) Citizenship in 2013. Burnt Shadows begins in Nagasaki, moves through Delhi, Karachi, refugee camps and military outposts near the Pakistan/Afghani border, and the Canadian/US border near Montreal before ending with a character on his way to Guantanamo Bay. Bala (b. 1979) was born in Dubai, where her Sri Lankan parents had moved a few years earlier to escape rising tensions and anti-Tamil policies. When Bala was seven, the family immigrated to a suburb of Toronto, where she grew up. After university in Kingston and Toronto and a few years at Oxford with her husband, she settled in St. John’s on Canada’s Atlantic coast. The Boat People takes place mostly in Vancouver, but it also flashes back to the story of its main characters prior to leaving northern Sri Lanka. I read these novels as someone from the rural American South, who did a PhD in England and now works in Arctic Norway. Even before considering the multiple nations involved in the political situations shaping these novels’ historical backgrounds, ten countries are somehow involved in my reading them, including multiple cultural and biotic ecosystems and myriad forms of passage between countries. In addition to individual readers and authors tracing international paths, the online reading communities surrounding these books are often quite international. On
The third and fourth reasons are related. Thirdly, the solidification of national or ethnic categories through interpretive practice can obscure the fact that the capacity to perform or fall victim to violence and other rights abuses is a basic condition of being human. There are some ways in which genocides in Germany, Cambodia or Rwanda arose out of very specific loco-historical conditions, but the human capacity for genocidal violence is not restricted to any one group or period, which makes a de-nationalized interpretive lens most appropriate for narratives of displacement, perpetration, incarceration, and want. Fourthly, and related to this, the deployment of national or ethnic in-group/out-group dynamics has, historically, supported human rights abuses more than prevented them. The nations and ethnicities to which authors belong or which they represent are always enmeshed with materialist and symbolic inequalities, and a global perspective need not neglect that fact. In fact, a global perspective can foreground the scope of impact of the structures that maintain inequality and promote violence.
However many reasons might be enumerated for global-facing practices of reading and writing, the “global novel” is a divisive term. The fact that these novels circulate in English has raised concerns that translation renders familiar what should remain strange. In Against World Literature, Emily Apter argues that “incommensurability and what has been called the Untranslatable are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic” (9). We live our lives in language. To represent life in India, Turkey or Argentina in English necessarily alters the texture of what is portrayed and the sound implied as emerging from those places. Even if world literature “gains in translation” as David Damrosch has argued, it unquestionably also loses (288). The fact that the presumption of cultural equivalency underlies translational acts – whether that is from one language to another or one culture to another – seems undeniable. But the novels themselves allude to the untranslatable. The concept of “ghum-khaur,” discussed earlier, is portrayed as having no equivalent in English language or culture. It is a specific cultural understanding of grief that the novel makes available to English-language readers. As Rebecca Walkowitz has noted, English is “crucial to globalization’s machinery, both because of its role in digital media and commerce and because of its role as a mediator, within publishing, between other literary cultures” (21). With 2.5 billion speakers worldwide (EF EPI 29), English has more reach than any other language. Some elimination of linguistic and cultural nuance may have to be an acceptable exchange for the transmission of neglected histories and perspectives to be accomplished.
Human rights novels can be read, alternatively, in light of national or global concerns and preserve their generic distinctiveness. Dawes’s American Studies readings of novels like The Long Night of White Chickens, could be complemented by Guatamalen-focused readings and globally-focused readings. The Boat People makes an important contribution to Canadian literature, and Burnt Shadows to British Literature, but attending to the global dynamics at play in both novels emphasizes the relevance they have for readers worldwide – not as windows on another culture, but as reflections on shared problems in our shared world. David Damrosch concludes that world literature is “an elliptical refraction of national literatures;” readers may adopt “a mode of reading” that foregrounds either national or global elements (283). The same can be said of global human rights fiction, as a new form emerging within the broad field of contemporary world literature. In advocating for a global view on human rights novels, I do not wish to devalue national or regional work (existing or to come), but to clarify why appreciation of these works as a global phenomenon addressing global issues enhances our appreciation of them both as works of literature responding to our present interlocking international reality and as important contributions to human rights discussions that reach people not professionally engaged in human rights work or scholarship.
Evil Men (Harvard UP, 2013) builds on interviews with war criminals from the second Sino-Japanese war. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Harvard UP, 2007) is global in scope.
Watroba compiles these quotes from Culler’s “Whither Comparative Literature” 94, Damrosch’s What is World Literature? 5, 17–19, 25, Kadir’s “Comparative Literature in an Age of Terrorism” 75, Abu-Lughod’s “Going Beyond Global Babble” 136, and Ali’s “Literature and Market Realism” 140.
In his description of the “Age of Human Rights,” Upendra Baxi quotes this phrase from Boutros-Ghali’s speech upon the adoption of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Conference on Human Rights by 171 states in 1993 (1).
As of November 2022, the Nigerian government had begun training teachers to reintroduce history into the curriculum but the extent to which the war is discussed in the new curriculum remains to be seen.
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