This session investigates the relationship between war, literature, and human rights. As many literary works testify, wars are fought in close proximity to law, as all acts of war form a provocation to the operation of law, either because “normal life” and the rule of law have been disrupted, because martial law only covers certain forms of warfare, or because the laws on war crimes are considered, ironically, as “soft law.” At the same time it should be acknowledged that many forms of war are underpinned, or made possible by law—human rights law included.

In recent years, the relationship between war, literature, and human rights has received growing scholarly attention (see e.g. Coundouriotis 2014; Engberg-Pedersen & Ramsey 2023; Goldberg & Moore 2012; McClennen & Moore 2016; Parikh 2019). Building on this recent scholarly work, this panel interrogates the multiple relations between war, literature and human rights from a transcultural, postcolonial and decolonial perspective. In particular, we will look at ways in which literature from the Middle East responds to the blatant human rights violations taking place in the region, and sheds light on what is excluded or sidelined by Western-centered approaches to human rights.

The session features three presentations:

1) In the first paper, Peter DeGabriele argues that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) works as a commentary on the neocolonial practice of drone warfare and the particular regime of rights that is associated with it. DeGabriele shows that Swift’s novel anticipates two of the major features of drone warfare. In his flying island of Laputa, Swift imagines an airborne weapon which is able to control the territory below it; and in the relation between the rational Houyhnhms and the bestial Yahoos he describes the kind of asymmetrical and racialized political relationship that justifies assassination by drone. Furthermore, DeGabriele examines the radical asymmetry of Israel’s occupation of Palestine by taking the concept of vertical sovereignty, as theorized by Eyal Weizman and Achille Mbembe, as a pertinent tool for analyzing both Gulliver’s Travels and contemporary neo-colonialism.

2) In the second paper, Daniel O’Gorman focuses on the increasing number of literary texts by writers from Gaza and its diaspora that have appeared in English in recent years. These texts have borne witness to the encroachment of Israeli settler-colonial architectures not only on Gaza’s physical space, but also on its social space. Drawing on innovative home designs by Palestinian architect, Salem Al Qudwa (co-researcher on the project upon which the paper is based), O’Gorman analyzes Atef Abu Saif’s 2014 memoir, The Drone Eats with Me, as a case study for how Gazan literature–like homes rebuilt from rubble–weaves the fragments of Gazan urban life into the textures of its narrative. O’Gorman shows how Saif’s text highlights the impact of Israeli necropolitical violence not only upon Gaza’s built environment, but also on its social space and how the text contributes in a small and indirect but, nonetheless, significant way to the reinforcement of Gaza’s social space: a form of literary sumud, or "steadfastness," in the face of relentless violence.

3) In the third paper, Cassandra Falke further develops Odin Lysaker’s concept of “concrete universality” as a means of understanding the aesthetic challenges inherent in the representation of war, human rights and literature. Falke focuses on The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) by Iraqi-American author Sinan Antoon. Her analysis of this novel indicates that concrete universalism can be elaborated for literary theory in a way that reinvigorates tired debates about cultural particularity and universal rights claims. Moreover, it suggests that the manners in which authors meet the aesthetic challenge of using concrete representation to evoke universal vulnerability can ground and further specify a helpful philosophical concept of concreteness that, for now, remains unhelpfully abstract.

In creating this panel, I have tried to make it as diverse as possible. The panel incorporates a diversity of voices in that it includes scholars across rank, geographic location, and gender.

Timing: Introduction (5 minutes) + three papers (18 minutes each) + discussion (16 minutes).

References

Coundouriotis, E. (2014). The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony. New York, NY: Fordham UP.

Engberg-Pedersen, A. and N. Ramsey, eds (2023). War and Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Goldberg, E. and Moore, A., eds (2012). Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. New York, NY/London: Routledge.

McClennen, S. and Moore, A., eds (2016). The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. London: Routledge.

Parikh, C., ed (2019). Human Rights and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.