THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY: A LITERARY HISTORY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY HADJI BAKARA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures iii Introduction: A Century in Four Figures 1 Chapter One: The Legislator 29 Chapter Two: The Refugee 77 Chapter Three: The Prisoner 131 Chapter Four: The Witness 182 Bibliography 240 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 | Vladimir Nabokov, American Identification Card (1940) | 1 Figure 2 | Vladimir Nabokov, Index Card Drafts Lolita (undated) | 2 Figure 3 | Archibald MacLeish, Preamble to the United Nations Charter (undated) | 30 Figure 4 | Archibald MacLeish’s “Declaration Draft” detail (undated) | 34 Figure 5 | Archibald MacLeish’s “Declaration Draft” (undated) | 51 Figure 6 | Archibald MacLeish’s draft of the preamble to the UN Charter (1945) | 52 Figure 7 | Archibald MacLeish First Fragment of “Actfive” (1945) | 63 Figure 8 | United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Lake Success, New York (1947) | 65 Figure 9 | Peter Benenson, “The Forgotten Prisoners,” May 28th, 1961 | 133 Figure 10 | “Freedom Writers.” Amnesty Campaign (1988) | 136 Figure 11 | PEN International Campaign Poster Jen Saro Wiwa (1994) | 137 Figure 13 | Heinemann edition of Ngugi’s Detained (1981) | 143 Figure 14 | Paul Tabori, Book Cover for The Pen in Exile (1954) | 145 Figure 15 | Paul Tabori, List of imprisoned writers (1960) | 147 Figure 16 | Agostinho Neto (1968) | 148 Figure 17 | Spanish Edition of Henri Alleg’s La Question (1957) | 157 Figure 18 | Ernesto Sabato delivers first drafts of Nunca Mas (1984) | 163 Figure 19 | Gabriel Garcia Marquez at the Russell War Crimes Tribunals II (1974) | 164 Note: Actual images not included in this version of the dissertation due to copyright issues. iii I want not poetry, but a new diction, Because only it might allow us to express A new tenderness and save us from a law That is not our law, from necessity Which is not ours, even if we take its name. Czeslaw Milosz, “Natura” (1948) Human dignity needs a new guarantee, which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) INTRODUCTION A CENTURY IN FOUR FIGURES Imagine that you find an old suitcase with two envelopes, each filled with a bundle of cards. One set of cards provides straightforward information about a person. It tells you what the person is: they are born in Russia but have no citizenship; they are thirty-four years old, they are married. Their name is Vladimir Nabokov. The documents themselves –– exit and entry visas, refugee aid forms, medical examinations, personal interviews –– tell a distinctly twentieth- century story of statelessness and the quest for asylum. The second set of cards –– greater in number –– tells a different story. A middle-aged European man falls in love with his stepdaughter who is barely a teenager. Eventually, he kidnaps and repeatedly rapes her. The story, above all, is about the loss of the girl’s rights and dignity. Figure. 1. Vladimir Nabokov. American Immigration Identification Card 1940. 1 Figure 2. Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita Index Cards. Undated These two sets of cards, Vladimir Nabokov’s American immigration documents and the cards on which he devised and wrote his novel Lolita (1958), provide two very different stories about the ways in which human rights are lost and gained. They also serve as contrasting points of entry into the contemporary study of human rights. On the one hand, beginning with the path- breaking work of Hannah Arendt, many historians, philosophers, and political scientists have argued that human rights must begin with granting rights to the rightless, which over the last hundred years has principally meant the stateless, refugees, and migrants.1 To recognize Nabokov as a legal claimant to asylum would begin to restore his rights and security. On this view, the acquisition of legal asylum and eventually citizenship and community is the path to 1Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1953); Giorgio Agamben “We Refugee” in Means Without Ends (Mineappolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ayten Gundogdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 2 human rights. To really know how a human acquires human rights we need only look at one set of cards and abandon the rest. On the other hand, a growing number of historians, literary critics, philosophers, and educators argue that only by reading, recognizing, and learning from the complex set of human and social relations unfolded in a novel like Lolita can we fully understand how human rights develop, operate, and are maintained.2 This school traces human rights back to the novel, and not just any novel, but the germ of Lolita: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). Like Lolita, Richardson’s Clarissa is a novel about a captive innocent and her wretched rake captor, which plays with the opacity of guilt and confession, consent and domination, and the nature of evil. In turn, these same questions are taken up in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), one of the most canonical of contemporary human right novels, also inspired by Lolita. Indeed, literary texts today are regularly held up as laboratories for exploring right moral judgment and deliberation, delivering “others” across borders and boundaries, and with them, the depths of social intelligence necessary to think and practice human rights.3 Moreover, so important is the moral substance of a novel like Lolita that to read it might count as an act of human rights activism in itself, as Azar Nafisi suggests in her international bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). When we take these views into consideration, immigration documents and refugee cards provide only a fraction of the story of how a human comes to attain and uphold their human rights. 2 For the argument that human rights have their origins in the eighteenth-century novel, see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2007); Leeland De La Durantaye, Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladamir Nabokov (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2007). 3 Shameem Black, Fiction Across Borders (New York: Columba University Press, 2010), David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverence of Others: Reading Fiction in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), Martha Nussbaum Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1997). 3 What would a history of human rights look like if we took all of the cards in the suitcase at equal value? Such a history would need to read with equal care, the tattoo-like markings and stamps on Nabokov’s immigration card, and the playful sentences of his deceptively sensual novel. It would have to consider the political circumstances that render a human being stateless and rightess, studying how it is that a person might come to possess a little paper card that reads: “Nationality: Without.” At the same time, such a history would be required to attend to how the novels of a once stateless Russian circulated the globe decades later, moving sometimes seamlessly, at other times clandestinely, across borders that its author might be barred from crossing; or how the same state that recognized Nabokov as an asylum seeker and granted him rights would later rescind his right to write and publish freely. It would need, in other words, to distribute attention in such a way as to compass the full historical breadth of a life such as Nabokov’s, which included violent expulsions, statelessness, and censorship, while at the same time narrowing in on the meaning, circulations, and global afterlives of a literary text. This dissertation is an effort to write such a history. It is not a global history of Lolita or Nabokov’s oeuvre; and in fact, Nabokov will now be left behind. What follows is a study of global literatures, writers, and institutions in the age of human rights. As I define and interpret it here, this is an age that began roughly around World War II and extends into the present, defined by the contrapuntal events of unprecedented mass violence, genocide, displacement, and incarceration, on the one hand, and declarations of universal rights and the rise of an international human rights movement on the other. Together, these oscillating tides of brutality and hope transformed the dynamics of international politics and society in the twentieth-century. They also transformed its literature, which has left behind a singular record of the vicissitudes of human value in crisis. No doubt, to claim the importance of human rights for literature over the 4 half-century or more will appear a simplistic claim, the kind we take for granted, say, when Barack Obama asks the Chinese government to release imprisoned Hong Kong booksellers and uphold international standards of human rights, or when over 1000 international writers sign a declaration in support of the “equal rights and protection” of Europe’s refugee population. But precisely because the entanglement between literature and human rights became so widespread and diffuse in the twentieth-century, the history of this entanglement has remained largely out of view. To bring it into view is to see the century anew, not just its literature, but also its politics. This is the goal of my dissertation. § While the last decade has seen the emergence of a burgeoning field of scholarship on literature and human rights, the story I tell in the following pages has remained greatly hidden for two reasons.