PIRATING HUMAN RIGHTS by Sarah Mcauley Passino Dissertation
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PIRATING HUMAN RIGHTS By Sarah McAuley Passino Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Dana Nelson Colin Dayan Cecelia Tichi Jaya Kasibhatla Preguntando, caminamos. —Zapatistas ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the two years of writing this dissertation, I have often only half‐ jokingly thought that I would like to teach a class on the genre of the acknowledgements page. Not because I know anything about writing these—this is my first attempt—but because these pages are the institutional space where both the collaborative process of scholarship and the apprenticeship model of academic training take their most powerful textual form. It is in this radical space that gratitude and thanksgiving are powerfully ritualized by the academy. This collective spirit was not only central to the arguments I have tried to work through in this project, but it is also what got me through the days when it looked impossible to get to where I was trying to go. My advisors—Dana Nelson, Jaya Kasibhalta, Colin Dayan, Cecelia Tichi, and Joseph Slaughter—modeled a generous scholarship for which I can only hope they know how deep my gratitude is. Each has also, with such strength and force and clarity, shown me what it looks like to engage with the world through writing and teaching about literature. For this, I am honored and thankful to have had the opportunity to learn from them and I am humbled by their fierce engagement with my work. And even though they were not on my committee, I am so grateful to Deak Nabers and Wendy Brown who—in wildly different ways—taught me the same lessons about kindness and community in academia. iii I am extremely grateful for the community of graduate students that has helped me to think more carefully, and more deeply about literature and politics. Christian Long, Forrest Perry, and Shirleen Robinson went ahead, paving the road, and offered thoughtful and inspiring advice and examples about how to engage the two in the academy. The newer graduate students, also, brought our department even more collegiality and more fun; in particular I want to thank Jane Wanninger, Donika Ross, Nicky Spigner, and Megan Minarich for good conversations and, Megan, for her wonderful dissertation talk series that I am so thankful to have been a part of. The Robert Penn Warren group, Reclaiming Citizenship, was a constant source of support and friendship for me as we all tried to move beyond the space of critique and toward the space of creation; in particular I am thankful for the rich and inspiring conversations and projects with Derrick Spires, John Morrell, and Matt Duques. I am grateful also for friendships throughout this work with Sarah Vanhooser, Kate Lassiter, and Justin Haynes. It was also an honor to be in my cohort and get to start and finish this project with such a smart group of people: Elizabeth Meadows, Emily Hines, Beau Baca, and the rest. A special thanks, too, to the short‐ lived but long‐reaching legal theory reading group in Berkeley: Jackson, Poppy, and Sarah you made me feel welcome, made me think hard, and were the best oceanside company anyone could ask for. Finally, I could not have finished without the love and good thinking of the LL’s—Sarah Kersh, Amanda Hagood, and Elizabeth Covington—who have not only made my graduate experience much more delightful, but who have made some of the world’s best meals out of the humble chickpea. There is a cookbook idea there, I know it. iv I am thankful also for all of my teachers in the public schools of Nashville who worked each day so we could think about the world together: Mrs. Clegget, Mrs. Williams, Mr. Hudson, Mr. Zachary, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Carter, Mary Catherine Bradshaw. And for all the parents who so tirelessly worked after work to make sure we could have books without having to sell Super‐Tuff. I am also thankful for the inspiring and thoughtful teachers and mentors I have had since setting off for the world: Jonathan Michaels, James Murdock, Cyrena Pondrom, Raymond Pultinas, Maxine Greene, Bill Stroud, Lonice Eversley, James Cook, and Hank and Cindy Delvin. I am deeply grateful for all my students: especially Dean McClean, Youmie Francois, and Lil Bit; for Willie and Troy and all who hold on to their kindness; for the articulate anger, too, of students beginning to recognize patterns. And I am thankful for all my students willing to look at things anew: especially our Human Rights and the Arts class who, every one, built important questions out of new relationships and who dove in and practiced listening. Thanks, so much, to all of my dear and wonderful friends: Carrie Wiltshire, Laura Gleaves, Chapel Drummond, Holly Browning, Amy Carpenter, Tricia Haggard, Rebekah Gleaves, Autumn Walters, Celena Cavala (forever weines); Jamey Marks, Pinkoo Chowdhury, Alex Gouldbeck; Oaxaca Women; Leah Fisch; Peter McGillicuddy and Dave Fitzgerald; Glenn Powers, Ed and Erin; Pam Beziat and Bonnie Favrot. And especially to Charlie Ives, who will always be the picture of fellowship and a life like a work of art: thank you. Each has changed the way I see the world and added so much love and adventure to my life. I also want to thank the communities I grew up v in and the lifelong family friends: the Friends Meeting, the Cox’s, and especially the Ives. Thank you, too, to Susan Wiltshire who fits in every category so far: as teacher, mentor, friend, and family. I am deeply grateful too to my husband’s family who has been so supportive, so nice to ask questions about my research, and so damn full of doctors that I almost had no choice in this matter. Thanks, especially, to Kathleen who has taught me more than I can say. My special thanks to such a great family who laughs more than anybody I’ve ever heard of: Ben, Grandma, Martha, Art, Rebecca, Will, Laura, Uncle Mac, Trey, Kreigh. Ben is a gift, not only to our family, but to all who know him. I am so thankful for all he has brought to my life. For my sister Anne, there are not thanks enough for these years of love and friendship. Her passion, her wit, and her support have not only gotten me through some hard questions, but have inspired me in all the work I have done. I am forever grateful, and forever in awe. And finally, this dissertation is for my parents, who taught me another world was possible. And for the Sweet Sixteen who invited me to work towards it here at home. And finally, for Brian, who brings me so much joy, each day, and shows me what that world might look like. There not words to express my gratitude, and so I hope I can show you it each of the rest of our days. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………….. iii Preamble: From Blue to Grey: The Flotsam and Jetsam of Rights…………………………………. 1 Part I: Archeologies of Political Rights Chapter One: Transitional Sensibilities: The Postcolonial Politics of Decay in Article 29……. 25 Chapter Two: It’s (Not) Manley’s Fault: Economic Formalism, Literary Deformations, and Outlaw Transformations……………………………………………………………………………. 76 Chapter Three: Rights as Labor, Rights of Way: The Generic Politics of Network Narratives…. 120 Part II: Architectures of Human Rights Chapter Four: Occupying, Resisting, Producing: The Architecture and Geography of Rights Discourse…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 184 Postscript: Frederick Douglass’ “Parody”: Toward a Politics and Pedagogy of Rights…….. 230 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………… 249 vii PREMABLE FROM BLUE TO GREY: THE FLOTSAM AND JETSAM OF RIGHTS The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. –Vico Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim‐Man, the good‐Man, the white‐Man? Since the barbarity of the situations is considered only in terms of “human rights”—whereas in fact we are always dealing with a political situation, one that calls for the political thought‐practice, one that is peopled by its own authentic actors—it is perceived, from the heights of our apparent civil peace, as the uncivilized that demands of the civilized a civilizing intervention…And this is why the rein of “ethics” coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today’s sordid self‐ satisfaction in the “West,” with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity—in short its subhumanity. –Badiou Ethics: An Essay on Understanding Evil The Flotsam and Jetsam of Rights Wendy Brown, in a searing response to Michael Ignatieff’s defense of human rights, seems to jettison the discourse for progressive politics for good. Rehearsing his claim that although the left‐critiques of human rights are sound—they are hollow, bent to the purposes of global capital and imperialism, and they revere and work to naturalize the vexed category of the human—she argues the greatest danger is the shrinking political horizon his defense offers: they may be flawed, but they are “the most we can hope for.” Can we not, she asks, imagine a politics that might do more than merely shield the subject from pain and suffering? To turn to human rights, she concludes, must always be understood as a dimming and damning fatalism “since international human rights are not designed as a form of collective 1 power or a vehicle for popular governance…” (461).