Bringing Human Rights to Bear in American Literature

The travels and fate of human rights with respect to American literature and culture have been characterized by distance and disavowal. Human rights are regularly understood to be that which others, elsewhere are in need of, and which – sometimes – Americans deliver unto them, whether in the guise of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), religious missionary enterprises, or military interventions. After all, the institution of the international human rights regime with which most familiar, particularly in regards to the founding of the United Nations, took place in the cataclysmic postwar reorganization of great power relations and ascendance of the United States along with the Soviet Union as a military and economic superpower. Moreover, human rights norms articulate bare life to positive conceptions of "good life" too, i.e., robust forms of personhood beyond the mere absence of devastating violence and extreme forms of deprivation.

Environmental ethics · Geography · Human rights · Political science · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society