Over the last couple decades the emergent field of world literature has inspired new, vibrant debates around cultural exchange and supported a heightened sensitivity to the struggles of cultural translatability and untranslatability, as well as the production of new representational and narrative practice regarding the tropes and structures of otherness. However, as questions about cosmopolitanism and compassion, belonging and otherness, have become a well-trodden path of inquiry in world literary scholarship, the centrality of humanitarian ethics and impulses behind the production and circulation of contemporary world cultural production has been largely overlooked in literary studies. When discussed, literature and humanitarianism are often viewed as closely linked, whereby reading is viewed as a means of “cultivating humanity” (Nussbaum 1997). As Joseph Slaughter observes, for scholars like Nussbaum, Rorty, Appiah, and others, “stories of suffering…become primers for the ‘exercise’ of our ‘citizenship of the world,’ for the sentimental cultivation of ‘our moral community,’ and for the training of our sympathetic, moral imaginations” (“Humanitarian Reading”). Meanwhile, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers have over the last decade become increasingly critical of the centrality of certain representational and narrative techniques in their employment of ‘distant otherness,’ paternalistic ‘saviors,’ helpless victims, and ‘proper life.’ Scholars such as Michael Barnett, Miriam Ticktin, Samuel Moyn, Giorgio Agamben and others have questioned the overwhelming investment these narratives have with the production of specific forms of humanity, often addressing the ways in which certain artists, writers, and filmmakers can and do critically and aesthetically resist the forms of humanitarian production that underwrite the spaces of ‘inhumanity’ and exception, and zones of bare life “set apart from the ordinary spaces of life” (Agamben). This panel seeks to bring these productive critiques of humanitarianism into the conversation around literature and humanitarianism, examining closely the impact language, narrative, and representation have had on the production of subjectivities, spaces, and nations in the Global South. The panel has been organized to build historically and thematically, starting from anti-colonial origins and moving toward our global neoliberal moment. Each paper will be given twelve minutes in order to leave ample time for discussion.

Alaina Kaus will begin the panel, considering the ways in which Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist intervenes in the humanitarian ethic that has authorized U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. She juxtaposes George W. Bush’s vision of the United States as the harbinger of human civilization against Hamid’s literary critique of U.S. violence before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. She proposes that the novel not only denounces an “us/them” binary present alongside the U.S. state’s purported humanism, but also maps a convergence of ideas in the U.S. national imaginary around neoliberal doctrine and neoconservative doctrine. Through its form and content, she argues that the novel indicates that whereas neoliberal theory attempts to hide its racist implications, neoconservative theory appears to be more upfront with its aversion to difference and diversity.

Next, Bryant Scott will look at the importance of visualization to humanitarian discourse and the depoliticization of suffering by examining the use of graphic narrative as a means of working against representative discourses of atrocity in Joe Sacco’s remarkable graphic novels Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. Discussing the rise of graphic novels of war and human rights crises as a means of deconstructing some of the ways in which stories are told about the people who suffer the worst abuses and why, he looks at the traveler, revising Pratt’s concept of contact zones in order to think about how we might think about humanitarian contact. He argues that Sacco relies on the popular circulation of visual representations of the other in order to challenge those representational expectations and to critically engage with and question the processes and ethics involved in their production.

In the third paper, Isaac Blacksin will draw on his own fieldwork conducted during the siege of Mosul, Iraq, demonstrating how American war reportage reproduced the ideology of human rights discourse and thereby neutralized interrogation of civilian suffering in the US airwar. In war reportage as in human rights discourse, biological life maintains the highest value, violation of that life remains the gravest transgression, and military intervention becomes a moral and rational response to human suffering. Here the political content of suffering is erased, and the structures that cause or perpetuate violence occluded. It is the ethics of witnessing, Blacksin argues, that prompts war reportage and human rights discourse to converge; violence can be encountered and thereby known, and it is what separates victims from perpetrators, what adjudicates innocence and guilt. Violence is thereby abstracted from political context (Fassin 2012, Guilhot 2012), and the historical intent of US airwar—punishment of hostile populations—is left unconsidered. By reexamining this imbrication, the ways we understand war and its representation can transform.

And finally the next panelist, Alla Ivanchikova, will discuss a specific instance of humanitarian violence (one that she calls “humanitarian jihad”) through a reading of the graphic novel The Photographer (2008) based on photographer Didier Lefevre’s journey into Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders at the height of the Cold War. This talk will challenge the text’s reception (in both scholarship and media) as valuable “human rights reportage” and will provide a framework for reading it against the grain—as an account of humanitarian violence. She will show how the text’s humanitarian claims rely on the fiction of socialist barbarity (“bad Soviets”) while obfuscating the violence in which the humanitarian team is directly implicated. She will argue that close attention to historical details is necessary to unpack this text and thus ground her reading in new research by Cold-War era historians. Unearthing the specific contours of the humanitarian-military assemblage in Cold-War-era Afghanistan is paramount to understanding humanitarian violence today—from Syria to Venezuela—as it reveals replicable and effective technologies of humanitarian violence.