Interdisciplinary stuff: JoHR 7: 388-96, 2008 – The Novel and Human Rights – Kerry Bystrom – Article looks at the link between fiction and non-fiction narrative and Human Rights…
Power of individual testimony – the ‘life narrative’ – Henri Dunant – A memory of Solferino (1862) – led to ICRC creation. – ‘…The protection of the ability to tell such stories lies at the heart of international human rights law…’
Fiction? – ‘…It can create bonds of empathy and connection, draw national and international attention to HR abuses and denounce the exclusion of certain individuals and groups from protection of HR law…’ – refs to Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden by Archbishop Tutu in his foreword to the 1998 Final Report of the SA TRC to help justify the TRC amnesty procedure. (www.doj.gov.sa/trc) (or za).
Bystrom also reviews – Joseph Slaughter’s book – Human Rights Inc – The World Novel, Narrative form and International Law – NY Fordham Uni Press 2007 – key quote – particularly like the ‘reading acts’…and the subclauses – hold tight…
‘….The implication of our reading practices in the imagination of an international order based on HRs means acknowledging the ways we collude to naturalise the generic forms in which human variation is felt to be socially acceptable. Recognising the sociohistorical alliance between the bildungsroman and Human Rights as mutually enabling fictions that institutionalise and naturalise the terms of incorporation in (and exclusion from an imagined community of readers and rights holders means also recognising that our reading acts have implications not only for the imagination but the legislation of an International Human Rights community; they partly determine the discursive parameters within which , and imaginative patterns with which, a human rights international might be realised…’ p328
James Dawes’ book ‘That the world may know’ divides into four chapters – 1 – Genocide, focussing on ICTRwanda and considering Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi – the book of bones, Courtemanche’s ‘Sunday at the Pool in Kigali’, Romeo Dallaire’s ‘Shake Hands with the Devil’, and Cleo Koff’s ‘The Bone Woman’. Sounds like a perfect reading list for a transdisciplinary subject!
Chapter 4 – deals with storytelling with lots of problematic questions about the role of outsiders (HR activists, writers and storytellers) – ‘…Narratives both promote and undermine the project of fully integrating HRs…’ Don’t really understand this point other than to say that HR activism can hurt as well as help. Dawes refs to Antje Krogs – Country of my Skull, Slovo’s Red Dust, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.
