The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary 3838209583, 9783838209586

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? • Gareth Griffiths
Part 1: Narrative and Human Rights in the Contemporary Moment
Life, Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say • Joseph R. Slaughter
Writing Transgenderism and Human-Rights-with-a-Difference in Post-Apartheid South Africa • Chantal Zabus
Human Rights after the Human Being per se: Narration and Numbers in Net-centric War • Mike Hill
“The massacre of our voices”: Indigenous Rights and Narrative in Contemporary Australian Literature and Law • Kieran Dolin
Ethnographic Collections, Indigenous Narratives, and Post-Colonial Rights in Australia • David Trigger and Richard Martin
Contrary Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction • Nicholas Jose
How to Kick Ass when Life’s a Bitch: A Human Rights Bulletin from India • Asha Varadharajan
Bringing Literature to Rights: Asylum Seekers as Subjects of English • Gillian Whitlock
Part 2: Imaginative Representation and Human Rights
The Universal and the Local in Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Human Rights Novel Nairobi Heat • Russell West-Pavlov
The Politics of Representation in Joe Sacco’s Palestine • Ned Curthoys and Golnar Nabizadeh
“Pictures on the Wall, Music in the Air”: Popular Culture Forms, Human Rights Agitation and Fiction in Africa • Gareth Griffiths
On Show: Truth and Reconciliation in Canada • Helen Gilbert
Cognitive Maps and Spatial Narratives: US Deportation Hearings and the Imaginative Cartographies of Forced Removal • Ethan Blue
“Visual history at its best!” Visual Narrative and UNESCO’s 1951 Human Rights Exhibition • Jane Lydon
Balancing the Quotidian and the Political: Beyond Empathy in Australian Multi-platform Refugee Narratives • Sukhmani Khorana
Humanism’s Pharmakon: Subalternity and Universality • Michael R. Griffiths
Sovereignty of the Mind • Philip Mead
Afterword • Philip Mead
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

,

STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE

“If postcolonial thought has a singular lesson to teach, it is this: We have never been ‘enlightened’ although we repeatedly aspire to it. The dialectical force that binds civility and barbarism is at the very heart of the ceaseless labour to strive for human rights in the fight against human wrongs. These fine essays, curated with considerable skill, are marked by the imaginative struggle to mobilize cultural ethics and aesthetics in the service of the freedom of thought, speech, and action.” Homi K. Bhabha

Isabel Hofmeyr, NYU, University of the Witwatersrand

Contributors: Ethan Blue, Ned Curthoys, Kieran Dolin, Helen Gilbert, Gareth Griffiths, Michael Griffiths, Mike Hill, Nicholas Jose, Sukhmani Khorana, Jane Lydon, Richard Martin, Philip Mead, Golnar Nabizadeh, Joseph R. Slaughter, David Trigger, Asha Varadharajan, Russell West-Pavlov, Gillian Whitlock, Chantal Zabus

The Social Work of Narrative Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary

The Social Work of Narrative

This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational forms have influenced and helped implement the project of human rights across the world, and seeks to show how public discourses on law and politics grow out of and are influenced by the imaginative representations of human rights. It draws on a multi-disciplinary approach, using historical, literary, anthropological, visual arts, and media studies methods and readings, and covers a wider range of geographic areas than has previously been attempted. A series of specifically-commissioned essays by leading scholars in the field and by emerging young academics show how a multidisciplinary approach can illuminate this central concern.

Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead (eds.)

“This finger-on-the-pulse collection dramatically expands debates on human rights, law, and literature. Recognizing the paradox of human rights as universal but exclusionary, these elegant essays cover an impressive range of media genres, showing how narrative form shapes claims-for-rights, not the other way around. Addressing pressing issues like new technologies of war, indigenous struggles, the refugee crisis, and much more, this interdisciplinary volume needs to be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in human rights.”

Vol. 4

STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE Series Editors: Janet Wilson, Chris Ringrose

ISBN: 978-3-8382-0958-6

ibidem

Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead (eds.)

ibidem

Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead (eds.)

The Social Work of Narrative Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary

STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE

Editors: Prof Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK Dr Chris Ringrose, Monash University , Australia

Advisory Board: Dr Gerd Bayer, University of Erlangen, Germany Dr Fiona Tolan, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

The book series STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE is devoted to the analysis of global literature, and the multiple, sometimes contradictory, tendencies it accommodates. Its field of enquiry is the ‘new’ world literature, a category currently emerging through multiple changes from the old Romantic concept of Weltliteratur, attuned to the challenges posed by postcolonialism and multiculturalism, the increasing globalisation of literature (but also its reverse trend, regionalisation), and the diversification of the market place. STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE encourages research which celebrates and critically assesses a phenomenon that can be understood, as Pheng Cheah points out, as the ‘literature of the world—imaginings and stories [...] that track and account for contemporary globalization as well as older historical narratives of worldhood’. World literature can be brought into dialogue with postcolonial writing through scrutiny of how it is written, read, circulated, and received transnationally within the contemporary circuit of global cultural capital. The series also responds to the need to examine the inherent contradictions in the concept of a world literature and dependence on a hegemonic (often English‐centred) literary and critical discourse. The series seeks to address these tensions, and consequently welcomes: 1) volumes which debate such matters theoretically (including definitions of what counts as ‘world literature’ and the place of postcolonial literary production within this larger category); 2) comparative studies of texts and genres from different countries and cultures under common headings or concepts such as memory, ethics, and human rights. Volumes on national literatures, when these are set in a world/comparative or generic context, will also be considered, and the series will include discussions of other complementary aspects of discourse, narratology, and media. While writing by ‘canonical’ authors will be covered, the series will additionally propose wider cultural and intellectual genealogies for ‘minor’ or occluded writers. A key aim of this series is to redeploy the familiar rhetoric of postcolonial theory and discourse in relation to concepts relevant to world literature by introducing arguments that will be integrated with the evidence of individual literary practice. This emphasis on contesting definitions of ‘diasporic’ or ‘postcolonial’ writing, ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ literatures and ‘world’ literature as used by writers, critics and thinkers may lead to a reconsideration of the boundaries that divide and intersections that link these related fields. Recent volumes: 1 Nadia Anwar Dynamics of Distancing in Nigerian Drama A Functional Approach to Metatheatre

3 Bruce King From New National to World Literature Essays and Reviews





ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0862‐6

2 Vincent van Bever Donker Recognition and Ethics in World Literature Religion, Violence, and the Human

ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0867‐1

ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0876‐3

4 Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead (eds.) The Social Work of Narrative Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary



ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0958‐6

Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead (eds.)

THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary

ibidem-Verlag Stuttgart

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Cover picture: © freshidea - Fotolia.com

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-6858-3

© ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press Stuttgart, Germany 2018 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Acknowledgements We would like to record our thanks to the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia which sponsored the sympo‐ sium, “Narrative, Culture and Human Rights” (March 28, 2014) when this book was first planned. We would also like to thank the general editors of the Studies in World Literature series, Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose, for invit‐ ing us to contribute this volume to the series and for their support and en‐ couragement through the task of editing. We also wish to acknowledge the work of Daris Jayyusi who helped with the index and Russell West‐Pavlov for his generous editorial advice. Finally, our thanks to our partners Carolyn and Jenna for their love and support.

V



Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... V 

Gareth Griffiths Introduction: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? .... 1 

Part 1: Narrative and Human Rights in the Contemporary Moment .................................................................................... 13  Joseph R. Slaughter Life, Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say........................................ 15 

Chantal Zabus Writing Transgenderism and Human-Rights-with-a-Difference in Post-Apartheid South Africa .......................................................................... 39 

Mike Hill Human Rights after the Human Being per se: Narration and Numbers in Net-centric War .................................................. 61 

Kieran Dolin “The massacre of our voices”: Indigenous Rights and Narrative in Contemporary Australian Literature and Law............................................... 85 

David Trigger and Richard Martin Ethnographic Collections, Indigenous Narratives, and Post-Colonial Rights in Australia ..........................................................103 

Nicholas Jose Contrary Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction ...............................121 

Asha Varadharajan How to Kick Ass when Life’s a Bitch: A Human Rights Bulletin from India ............................................................139 

Gillian Whitlock Bringing Literature to Rights: Asylum Seekers as Subjects of English .....161 

VII

Part 2: Imaginative Representation and Human Rights ...... 183  Russell West-Pavlov The Universal and the Local in Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Human Rights Novel Nairobi Heat ..............................................................185 

Ned Curthoys and Golnar Nabizadeh The Politics of Representation in Joe Sacco’s Palestine ...........................201 

Gareth Griffiths “Pictures on the Wall, Music in the Air”: Popular Culture Forms, Human Rights Agitation and Fiction in Africa......221 

Helen Gilbert On Show: Truth and Reconciliation in Canada ...........................................243 

Ethan Blue Cognitive Maps and Spatial Narratives: US Deportation Hearings and the Imaginative Cartographies of Forced Removal ............................263 

Jane Lydon “Visual history at its best!” Visual Narrative and UNESCO’s 1951 Human Rights Exhibition .............................................................................279 

Sukhmani Khorana Balancing the Quotidian and the Political: Beyond Empathy in Australian Multi-platform Refugee Narratives ............................................301 

Michael R. Griffiths Humanism’s Pharmakon: Subalternity and Universality ...........................319 

Philip Mead Sovereignty of the Mind ...............................................................................339 

Philip Mead Afterword ......................................................................................................365  Contributors..................................................................................................377  Index .............................................................................................................383 

VIII

Introduction: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? Gareth Griffiths “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” is the title of one of Gauguin's most famous paintings, painted in December 1898. It was meant to be his last. After completing it, he later said, he in‐ tended to commit suicide but in the event he did not and continued to paint and to live on, presumably with these questions still unanswered. (Shack‐ leford et al 2004, 168).1 I use the title from the painting here ironically. Alt‐ hough Gauguin was regarded with suspicion by the French colonial author‐ ities on Tahiti, especially after he criticized the Governor and others in a satirical journal he edited, nothing in his life or art can be construed as of‐ fering a conscious resistance to colonialist ideology. His fascination with the world he discovered and celebrated in the islands of Polynesia was al‐ ways tinged with the quintessential colonial fascination with the Other, with an exoticisation of the Polynesian people. Nevertheless, in the title of this painting one can see Gauguin striving to understand what connected his life and theirs, what they and he shared and where they differed. It is as if he is asking, were these beautiful but, as they were regarded in his day, “primitive” people his originaries, his human antecedents? Was their world the world from which his own had come? And if so what did this mean? Like his contemporaries at the end of the 19th century Gauguin clearly saw so‐ called “primitive” people as exemplars of an older stage of human history, with history itself seen as a sort of Darwinian progression, a simultaneous journey through both time and evolution: where do we come from? who are we? where are we going? But in these haunted questions we might see also the spectral traces of the collapse of the enlightenment confidence that had allowed the thinkers and artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries to conceive of the human as a universal category. A category clearly and un‐ ambiguously defined by unquestioned and unquestionable characteristics, all flowing from the claim that reason was the defining core of humanity

1

In the top left corner of the painting are the following words from which the title is derived: “D'où venons‐nous ? Que sommes‐nous ? Où allons‐nous?”

1

2 GARETH GRIFFITHS and that humanity's increasing capacity to "reason" was a sign of their pro‐ gress in evolutionary terms from the “primitive” to the “civilized”. The same confidence allowed intellectuals from the time of Rousseau and Voltaire on‐ wards to assert that through human reason the rights of human beings could also be defined and achieved. In Gauguin's despairing set of questions at the end of the 19th century that confidence can be seen to be crumbling and it is in the wake of this disillusionment that the modern struggle to de‐ fine and achieve human rights has been conducted for a century or more since, right up until the present day. The essays collected in this book are written in the aftermath of that long process of disillusion with that self‐confidence in the definition and valuation of the human. As a number of the chapters in this collection show the modern documents that sought to define and institutionalize a universal concept of human rights did not emerge until a half‐century after Gauguin's agonized questions and in the aftermath of two of the most dev‐ astating wars in human history. That we still debate and question these is‐ sues again more than half a century later illustrates both the persistence of this need to define the human and their inalienable rights and the increas‐ ing difficulty of doing so in any way that seems meaningful and acceptable to all the people it seeks to encompass. Most people recognize that the for‐ mal documents set out after the Second World War, especially the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the starting point of most con‐ temporary assertions of human rights. These documents are framed within a year or so of the start of the post‐war dismantling of colonial power that begins with the granting of Indian independence in 1947.2 In fact the Dec‐ laration itself has its origin in the processes within the UN to resist the re‐ imposition of colonialism at this time. This suggests a strong link between the two ideas: anti‐colonialism and human rights. But even that link is dis‐ putable given the "imperial" role played by the new world powers to emerge post‐1945, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union; this despite the fact that they both at the time protested their anti‐imperialist stand. For this and other reasons in recent times the idea of human rights

2



Though, of course, the revolt of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Car‐ ibbean and in Meso and South America and their independence struggles began over a century–and‐a‐half earlier, while the American Independence War against Britain and the Haitian Liberation War from France date from the late 18th century.

INTRODUCTION 3 has been subject to direct criticism, with the very idea of human rights be‐ ing seen as a tool used by powerful countries and institutions to justify in‐ tervention into regions of the world where those countries and institutions have strategic interests to be served. Other organisations have emerged that perceive these powerful forces as needing direct exposure or opposi‐ tion, for example Wikileaks or Anonymous. These groups and protest or‐ ganisations assert the need for a violent contestation over international policy and the control of the media and political institutions that deploy the idea of human rights. Organisations such as the WSF (World Social Forum) have emerged to oppose and offer alternatives to the international group‐ ings represented by the institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) set up after the Second World War and in their view still dominated by the major powers represented in the meetings of the so‐called G8 and G20 nations. Similarly the NAM (Non Aligned Move‐ ment), inheritors of the post‐war attempt to avoid the Third World nations (as they were widely called at the time) being drawn into the Cold War, see themselves as offering a different and less controlled model than the United Nations, whose policies they argue are limited by the veto rights of the elite nation members of the Security Council. Alongside this clash of contending groups, and seeking to avoid direct involvement in the conflict between them, are other groups who also claim to represent the defense of human rights, such as Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, and PEN International. Such groups seek to act and speak out against all those they see as inflicting suffering and violence on the weak, whatever their source or cause, and to avoid engaging directly in a political struggle. Whether such a stance is or is not possible is not addressed specifically in this book but the implicit challenge this struggle poses to the idea of a unilateral and un‐ contested concept of human rights is implicit in many of the chapters here if only under erasure. The essays collected here do not answer these con‐ tinuing problems concerning the concept of human rights. In fact, if any‐ thing, they suggest their ongoing intractability. But they insist too, despite these problems, on the need to continue to struggle to understand what hu‐ man rights might be and how they might be defined and defended. The very difficulty the idea poses and the conflicting attitudes it arouses might, in the telling phrase used in a number of contexts by Gayatri Spivak, one of the most influential of modern critical thinkers and activists, suggest that for



4 GARETH GRIFFITHS all its problematic nature human rights is one of those concepts “one cannot not want” (Spivak et al 1993, 28). If I may locate these concerns within my own speaking positions, as perhaps all who engage in this debate must do, I would emphasise that as a white, western‐educated, male critic my concern with these issues orig‐ inates in my earlier work developing theories of the postcolonial from a rel‐ atively privileged position. Postcolonial theory takes as its starting point the validity of difference and the need to allow the voices of all people to be heard. But it also begins with a realization of how problematic the task of distinguishing those differences and recording those voices is in practice. Postcolonial theory then begins with a questioning of the idea of an unprob‐ lematic universal. Postcolonial theory is also concerned with locating dis‐ courses within the unequal structures of power, and like the discourse of human rights postcolonialism may be critiqued for the fact that it has been promulgated and sustained by Eurocentric institutions that are almost ex‐ clusively located within and dependent upon the dominant, post‐war Euro‐ American powers. But if I may again quote Spivak, this time on the complex problematic that links the postcolonial and human rights discourse: The usual thing is to complain about the Eurocentrism of human rights. I have no such intention. I am of course troubled by the use of human rights as an alibi for interventions of various sorts. But its so‐called European provenance is for me in the same category as the 'enabling violation' of the production of the colonial subject. One cannot write off the righting of wrongs. The enablement must be used even as the violation is renegotiated. (Spivak 2004, 524) In addressing the issue of human rights certain groups have been foregrounded as the subject of this practice, which in itself raises the issue of whether or not the concept itself is locked into a top‐down vision of who defines its idea and who is defined by them and for what ends. The idea of the precariat, those groups whose existence is predicated upon ongoing and seemingly implacable precariousness, which threatens their access to basic needs such as food, water, health and safety from violence, is too often limited to groups defined only by race (e.g. blackness) or gender (e.g. women or LBGTI people), or both in conjunction. The first of these groups is often more heavily represented either in certain regions (the so‐called



INTRODUCTION 5 undeveloped world more recently named the “Global South”, which have often though not always been seen as coterminous with the postcolonies) or in the diasporic migrants from those regions increasingly resident in the erstwhile colonial or neo‐colonial metropoles. The latter, though not so ob‐ viously locatable geographically, may be especially vulnerable to cultural discrimination in regions which reject gender equality or even claim a phantasmagoric freedom from gender diversity of the kind represented by LGBTI people, as Chantal Zabus's chapter here discusses. In the essays col‐ lected here there is a strong focus on these regions for that reason and on the treatment of such groups there, reflecting the link this book sees be‐ tween the concerns of earlier discourses such as the postcolonial and those of modern human rights activists. Of course, discriminations are as pro‐ found in every society but the emphasis on human rights is often directed from the erstwhile metropoles toward the post‐colonies or “underdevel‐ oped” regions as if they are to be the recipient of a support in suppressing these practices that is innocent of the power structures within which it plays out. It is for this and other reasons that human rights discourse has been justly critiqued in recent times. The increased discrimination against and demonization of specific religious groups that has emerged in recent times as a powerful factor in denying many people their basic human rights, often leading to their being forced into exile or killed, has made their per‐ secution in their own regions and the role of the metropoles in reacting to this the most powerful new example of the abuse of human rights. The mi‐ grant diasporic groups in the metropoles referred to earlier do feature in some chapters here. But since this book was conceived and the chapters commissioned in late 2013 the size of this group has increased to an extent and with a speed that no‐one then could have predicted. The appalling and discriminatory policies pursued under the euphemism of “border protec‐ tion” by the country in which the editors live (Australia), policies that to our shame are now being held up by right‐wing and racist groups in Europe and elsewhere as examples to follow, are the subject of some discussion in sev‐ eral of the chapters here. But the huge and increasing discrimination of the many people displaced by war and other forms of social violence for which the wealthy countries of the so‐called west have to take much responsibility is clearly going to be a major focus in future work on the subject of how human rights are actually practiced. How those issues are recorded and how the stories of those people are told will be a major force in the future



6 GARETH GRIFFITHS public discourse on human rights. The reaction of countries across the world to the unprecedented numbers of migrants fleeing conflict, violence and life‐threatening poverty, frequently because of discrimination on eth‐ nic or religious grounds within their own countries and regions, poses the most powerful questions for those who claim to support international con‐ ventions and treaties to protect human rights. Some might go further and ask whether or not the intervention into these conflicts by the countries that defined those conventions and set up the institutions to enforce them may have been a major factor in causing these abuses to proliferate so rap‐ idly. How the human and expressive forms of narrative have dealt with and will deal with these issues will be crucial to our understanding of them and to our reactions and if we were able to commission more articles now in 2017 when this book was finalized this would clearly be an area to address. Even so many articles here imply that how we express and represent these complex issues may be crucial in creating the context that helps in resolving them Of course we have also to acknowledge other gaps in the coverage of this book, though more will inevitably suggest themselves to readers and reviewers. One of the growing critiques of human rights discourse comes from animal rights activists. Their contention is not only that the human as a category comes into being through the false dichotomy between human and animal, leading to speciesism as a major discriminatory force, but also that this leads to an ongoing privileging of human rights over those of ani‐ mals at a time when environmental destruction threatens to engulf all living forms on the planet. We acknowledge these powerful arguments, though we do not have a chapter that addresses them specifically. The other field that arguably should have been included is that of the rights of the disabled and the mentally ill. Discrimination against those suffering from the disa‐ bility of a mental illness is a feature of all societies, and even when social forces acknowledge the need to address those inflicted as suffering from an illness their representation in media and popular public discourse is often still deeply prejudicial. The number of people suffering from such illnesses may or may not have increased, but the numbers acknowledged as requir‐ ing treatment and needing to have their human rights acknowledged is on the increase in every society. Both editors of this collection have a close family member suffering from a major mental illness, and as anyone in that position knows it is almost impossible to find anyone, who when the subject



INTRODUCTION 7 is raised, does not indicate that they have a family member or friend who suffers from a mental illness. The silence in many societies about such peo‐ ple is deafening and if in rich countries the provisions for dealing with these conditions are woefully inadequate in many poor countries they are virtu‐ ally non‐existent. Not in any sense in justification of these omissions, nor even in mit‐ igation of them, but to suggest the concern of the book that has emerged our focus here has been neither to present a discussion of the ongoing de‐ bate on the theories of human rights discussed above nor even to seek to give expression to all the forms that it has taken in the groups listed here. The question we sought to address was the role that "narratives" of many kinds have played in articulating or defining human rights, from the role narrative played in the very conception of the idea of human rights to the wide variety of forms that narrating human rights concerns have taken since then. We have also sought to address this across a number of regions of the world. Again the areas on which we focus, Africa, South Asia, Austral‐ asia and East Asia, suggest the lifelong interests of both editors in the ongo‐ ing effects of colonization, and the preponderance of a concern with texts in English reflect their own linguistic limitations. But within those parame‐ ters we have sought to define narratives in the broadest possible way. One of our principal assertions is that imaginative narration, the telling of sto‐ ries, the transformation of the world by the act of imagining it and speaking it forth, is one of the most powerful tools that people can employ in search‐ ing for justice or in confronting and overcoming oppression. These imagi‐ native tellings are not limited to written words or even to words at all. Im‐ ages, pictures, cartoons, graffiti and music are all powerful ways of allowing silenced voices to be heard. Narrative, and especially imaginative narrative (to avoid or rather to extend the limited capacity of literature and the written to include more forms of imaginative story‐telling and human memorialization) is not in it‐ self an unproblematic tool to employ in discussing and defending the con‐ cept of human rights. As Joseph R. Slaughter has noted, human rights dis‐ course is imbricated in the idea of a progressive and rational view of hu‐ mankind that formed itself around the idea of literature as the expression of human growth and development, exemplified in the so‐called Bildungs‐ roman (Slaughter 2007, 27). This enlightenment view of both literature and humanity has often been contradicted by the darker visions of 20th‐century



8 GARETH GRIFFITHS imaginings and 20th‐century realities. The genre has thus seemed far less viable as the certainties of the 18th‐ and early 19th‐century enlightenment ideas slipped into the darker spaces of late imperialism and 20th‐century global warfare. But, as Slaughter asserts, despite the fact that the idealism of the classical, affirmative Bildungsroman seems to have lost much of its social and aesthetic appeal in the age of mod‐ ernist irony and postmodern suspicion […] the genre retains its historic social function as the predominant formal literary tech‐ nology in which social outsiders narrate affirmative claims for in‐ clusion in a regime of rights and responsibilities. (27) It is this continuing usefulness of this kind of classic enlightenment narrative, metamorphised into film documentary, that Asha Varadharajan draws to our attention when she relates how the film maker Leslee Udwin asserts that in her film about the Gulabi Gang and its leader Sampat Pal Devi she wanted to “lend my energies to amplify their voice”—not help the voiceless find their voice or represent those who cannot rep‐ resent themselves. […] Udwin indicates that her film was not about “those people over there” but the result of her desire to film both the “blatant breach” of any “kind of civilized” principles and the inspiration of a society in the throes of change. (145) Varadharajan is alert to the dangers in the casual use of a term like "civilised" and the issue of Udwin's relations with powerful external insti‐ tutions, in this case the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) who spon‐ sored the documentary. She is also well aware that narratives such as Ud‐ win's clearly continue to pose the problematic issue long addressed by postcolonial theory of whether or not it is ever possible for anyone to speak about the Other without speaking inadvertently for the Other. Yet for all these strictures narrative remains the tool that often falls most readily to the hand of those whose voices have been silenced by oppression. And as these chapters show time and again the form narrative takes has developed into many modern types, employing diverse forms and media. Philip Mead's piece on Alexis Wright shows how the current disputes over how to



INTRODUCTION 9 recover Indigenous agency through engagement with the politics of the dominant society can be explored through the power of speculative fiction. Her latest novel The Swan Book uses a science fiction mode to place Indige‐ nous ways of thinking at the centre of a future world where Euro‐American technological excess has overthrown the casual assumptions of the benefits of progress and modernity on which this social imaginary has been con‐ structed. The silenced world of the indigene becomes the voice not of a past to be lamented but of a future in which the change inherent in diversity has to be embraced if humanity is to survive. These imagined narratives can give voice to those who are too of‐ ten voiceless, but as David Trigger and Richard Martin, Kieran Dolin and other writers in this collection show they are crucial ways of recovering and developing the cultural imaginary within which both oppressed and op‐ pressor have been formed. This cultural imaginary forms the unacknowl‐ edged ground upon which both oppressor and oppressed construct their social and legal being. It may be too simple to suggest unequivocally, as Shelley did in the early 19th century, that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" but it may be true to say that the forms of legisla‐ tion and the forces that bring it into being are deeply influenced by how people narrate the experiences of their world. Story, image, song and writ‐ ten or spoken memories all act to construct the cultural imaginary from which we derive our own identity and through which we seek, how‐ ever inadequately, to perceive that of others, recognizing the ways in which they differ from us and the ways in which we share their concerns and needs. It is arguable that what allows us to survive and develop as a spe‐ cies is not anything material, for example our ability to develop tools or to use language. As we reach out to broader ideas of where we stand as hu‐ mans in the evolutionary pattern we recognise that other species have de‐ veloped many of these characteristics. It is possible that it is the imagina‐ tion that really allows human beings to behave in the ways they do, for good or for bad. Imagination allows human beings to conceive a reality different from that which they are experiencing and to understand their world as part of a changeable past and future. The exercise of this power to imagine allows human beings to manipulate their world in a unique way. This may be why we can cause so much devastation but it may also be the means by which we can take control of our future in positive ways. The imagination



10 GARETH GRIFFITHS and its power, harnessed through story and memory, may be the most im‐ portant aspect of our lives and the most neglected. As this book comes to completion we see a world in which the de‐ fining certainties and authority of the mid 20th century seem increasingly remote. In late 2016, when this introduction was written, 65 million or more people had risked everything by fleeing to Europe in a desperate at‐ tempt to survive the violence of war and endemic poverty, both of which cannot be disassociated from the international relations of the last fifty years or more. In the wake of this event more people are currently dis‐ placed than at any time since the period immediately following the last so‐ called World War, the period that saw the attempt to regulate and define how human beings should deal with one another and how human rights should be defined and defended. Yet the protocols developed at that time seem less and less adequate, if they ever were. Legal and institutional forces seem unable to act as the human rights institutions and protocols the major world powers have promoted and defended for the last half‐century or more collapse through increasing isolationism and cultural bigotry. In face of this political bankruptcy the task of imaginative narration becomes in‐ creasingly vital. Since public media fails to do go beyond "a feeling of empa‐ thy or compassion, and seldom crosses over into the realm of responsibility or action" as Sukhmani Khorana's chapter in this book argues, the role of narrative to promote an engagement that demands action and not just sym‐ pathy becomes crucial. It is the ways in which narratives of all kinds have tried to address this issue that forms the core of this book. The history of narrative and of the human imagination and the so‐ cial role they have played is a story of persistence rather than conclusion, of unending effort rather than of triumph. Like human rights themselves the truths such narrative seeks to tell are perhaps inevitably deferred, al‐ ways a promise of what might be rather than what is, a promise of what we seek rather than what we have achieved. The social role of narrative is al‐ ways in this sense an engagement with the unattainable. As J. Hillis Miller put it: The law is always somewhere else or at some other time, back there when the law was first imposed or off to the future when I may at last confront it directly, in unmediated vision. Within that space, between here and that unattainable there of the law as



INTRODUCTION 11 such, between now and the beginning or the end, narrative enters as the relation of the search for a perhaps impossible proximity to the law […] the function of narrative for those who have 'eyes to see or ears to hear with and understand' is to keep this out in the open. (Miller 1987, 25) Despite the limitations of narrative in addressing human rights, as these chapters show the telling of the stories of those whose rights have been curtailed continues with unabated vigor, variety and persistence. In this regard perhaps we are still dealing with the issue that con‐ fronted Gauguin a century or more ago, and as for him so for us the im‐ portance of imagination remains central to the human venture. For Gauguin the end of his century saw a collapse of confidence in the certainties of post‐ Enlightenment humanism, a collapse he could only record through an act of the imagination. Just so in our time the moral certainty and unquestioned claim to authority of legal declarations have seemed increasingly question‐ able as we confront the ongoing violence and inequality that has defined the early 21st century. And again it is in the stories and images we have made through which this crisis of morality and authority has been best per‐ ceived and may best continue to be engaged.

Bibliography Miller, J. Hillis. 1987. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press. Shackleford, George T.M., and Claire Freches‐Thory. 2004. Gauguin Tahiti. Boston: Museum of the Fine Arts Boston, MFA Publications. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean. 1996. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gaytri Chakravorty. 2004. "Righting Wrongs." The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2/3): 523–81.



Holiday snap I look at myself suntanned a still serviceable body somewhere in the Maghreb and wonder who is that nonchalant guy holding a beach towel as though to wipe away so much deplorable history printed in sand at his feet? Camel or tank tracks swished by the desert winds of corruption and war and the newer tsunami of tourists. Is he deaf to the rumble of tanks that will come in three weeks to the indiscriminate shelling to the mercenary snipers to the murder of those who are serving his drinks making his bed too frightened even to whisper lest he’s a spy? Andrew Taylor



Part 1: Narrative and Human Rights in the Contemporary Moment





Life, Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say Joseph R. Slaughter “Go ahead and torture me. It will take my death to make me talk, and for your information I’m sorry for every bit of cooperation I have offered in the past,” I said. “First of all, your cooperation was achieved by force. You didn’t have a choice. Nor will you in the future: I am going to make you talk,” REDACTED said. – Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which con‐ sists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute. – Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology A plea to a jailer: “Please, I want you guys to understand my story okay, because it really doesn’t matter if they release me or not, I just want my story understood” (United States Department of Defense 2005, 14). The life‐storyteller willing to trade the possibility of freedom for the release of his detention narrative is Mohamedou Ould Slahi, detainee #760 held in the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) since August 2002. The “guys” whom he wanted to understand his story were the Presiding mili‐ tary officers at his 2005 Administrative Review Board Hearing who would make a recommendation about Slahi’s continued detention at GTMO to someone referred to in the transcripts simply as the “Designated Civilian Official”—a rather perverse pseudonym, as Slahi himself suggests, for what amounts to a bureaucratic version of an “implied reader”. “I am not really upset”, Slahi claims, after being told that the Review Board had no idea about when a decision on his possible release might be made, “but [it is] just amazing that my life is going to be at the hands of one person called the Designated Civilian” (33). At the same Review Board hearing, Slahi an‐ nounced to the presiding officers, almost offhandedly, the existence of an improbable manuscript composed on scrap pages of interrogation report‐ ing forms: “I just want to mention here that I wrote a book while in jail here 15

16 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER recently about my whole story okay. I sent it for release in District [of] Co‐ lumbia and when it is released I advise you guys to read it” (18). Thus, with both the Board’s recommendation and the hearing transcripts at his or her disposal, the Designated Civilian would seem to hold the fate of both Slahi’s life and his life story in hand. Although its author continues to be held in illegal detention at GTMO, the book whose release Slahi anticipated in 2005 finally saw the light of day in 2015, published as Guantánamo Diary, after a campaign of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests prompted the US government to release a declassified copy of the handwritten manuscript. The book was published with “more than 2,500 black‐bar redactions” of FOIA censorship and expansive editorial comments by journalist and human rights activist Larry Siems (2015, xi). The redactions pose a particular challenge to the editor and readers of the text, because they “often serve to impede the sense of narrative, [and] blur the contours of characters”, as Siems remarks (xiii). Indeed, the black spots on the story, which we might regard as forms of “textual bruising or scarring”, not only represent “dramatic patterns of [human rights] abuse” (Slaughter 2010, 209); they also give visible form to the coordinated assault on narrative that is a central—perhaps the quintes‐ sential—feature of contemporary US counterinsurgency policy. And yet, these anti‐narrative acts of textual negation, as they frustrate understand‐ ing, ultimately reveal the depth of our will‐to‐narrative as they “excite our narrative imaginations to try to fill in the gaps” (Slaughter 2010, 212). In other words, by disrupting the longstanding liberal equation between life and narrative, they pique our humanist desire to see signs of life in every fragmented narrative, or to see signs of narrative in every trace of life. (This is not, however, one more appeal for surface reading; the pitfalls of the sur‐ face are no less risky than the dreams of deep meaning.) In the context of our contemporary memoir culture of injury and survival, it has become something of an inspirational mantra to maintain that every life has a story. In fact, we have become so used to thinking in terms of “life stories” that the humanistic equation between life and narra‐ tive (that sees life as the source of narrative and narrative as the sustenance of life) can seem like a simple truism, rather than, say, a political commit‐ ment or a moral imperative. It becomes easy to overlook how contingent and recent a generic phenomenon the “life‐story” itself is. Indeed, a quick search in JSTOR suggests that the term gained currency in the mid‐19th



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 17 century, when it could as readily be employed to recount the life cycle of plants as the biographies of people. However, because this equation be‐ tween narrative and life may not be at all inevitable, it is striking how close narrative is to life—not in a mimetic sense, or even in a humanistic meta‐ physical or moral sense, but in an even more mundane spatial and temporal sense: the mere proximity of the words “life” and “narrative” in so much writing and speaking on law and violence. This is true not only in writings by philosophers, anthropologists, narratologists, and literary critics; life, in‐ sists Paul Ricoeur (1991) in “Life in Quest of Narrative”, is “a story in its nascent state [. . .] an activity and a passion in search of a narrative” (29; emphasis in original). But, the juxtaposition of life and narrative now also appears commonly in law review articles, human rights reports, humani‐ tarian appeals, journalistic news stories, medical and psychological treat‐ ment guidelines, and military field operations manuals. Whether we read Slahi’s stated willingness to exchange his life story for continued imprisonment (presumably free from torture) as a rhe‐ torical flourish or a sad commentary on the hopelessness of his situation, it nonetheless says something powerful about a fundamental will‐to‐narra‐ tive—about how much life wants to find expression in narrative, even at the expense of what we ordinarily value as freedom: the “freedom to pursue a storyline”, as Wayne Booth (1993) framed it so suggestively in his Oxford‐ Amnesty lecture (89). Although I have argued, following the life‐narrative line of thinking that we find in Booth, Ricoeur, and so many others, that hu‐ man rights represent a legalistic commitment to narrative (Slaughter 1997), I should say clearly that, as far I can discover, there is no explicit right anywhere to narrative, or a right to narrate as such—even if it remains an implicit assumption underwriting the law. And yet, the link between life and narrative seems so strong and so commonplace today that the idea is bandied about as if there were an unspoken natural right to one’s story. At best, however, narrative would be a right that derives from life itself—a fundamental right to narrate imagined as tantamount to a right to life. Still, the liberal assumption of a personal right to narrate one’s own story does a lot of work in the world today. The relationship between life and narrative is triangulated by vio‐ lence, which very often takes the form of law, or is subject to its command. In our contemporary moment, the laws, policies, and practices of national



18 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER security and state secrecy have enormous effect on the composition and ge‐ neric character of the bloodless prose of counterinsurgency, to modify the phrase Ranajit Guha (1988) famously used to describe the dominant histo‐ riography of political revolt “which excludes the rebel [insurgent] as the conscious subject of his own history” (77). With the bloodless prose of counterinsurgency, I refer to the massive (and growing) public archive of documentary texts from the US “war on terror” that includes redacted de‐ classified documents relating to intelligence‐gathering techniques, tran‐ scripts from the 9/11 military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, official investigative inquiries and reports, as well as counterin‐ surgency and anti‐terrorism tactical manuals. These official forms of the story employ various textual strategies that intend to exclude the bloody violence of the counterinsurgents—indeed, that will pervert every form of the humanist equation between life and narrative in order to effect that ex‐ clusion, to eclipse the violence of counter‐terrorism. Our counterinsur‐ gency efforts are fundamentally counter‐narrative, disrupting the relay be‐ tween life and narrative through violence that goes by other names and whose textual traces the counter‐narrative violence seeks to erase in what amount to narrative mop‐up operations. Such disruptive practices abide certain principles of formal composition and follow the (perverse) rules of counterinsurgency, creating narrative (or, more precisely, anti‐narrative) mechanisms of concealment performed under the sign of disclosure, strat‐ egies of unnarration that go by the name of narration, eclipsis marked as ellipsis—untelling that is telling nonetheless. As part of what literary theory once called the violence of representation, these anti‐narrative mecha‐ nisms may not be unique to “the prose of counterinsurgency” as Guha de‐ scribed it, but the ecliptic trope (itself often hidden) of the concealing dis‐ closure predominates in a wide range of life‐story forms that are character‐ istic of our age of perpetual counterinsurgency. A concise example of the sorts of “narrative violence” (Gana and Härting 2008) that render the prose of counterinsurgency bloodless can be found in the transcripts of the same Review Board Hearing where Slahi an‐ nounced his desire to have his prison story released from prison. While giv‐ ing his account of his experiences of abduction, extraordinary rendition, and detention, Slahi turns to recount the torture he suffered at the hands of American interrogators:



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 19 Around June 18th 2003, I was taken from Mike Block and put in India Block for total isolation. They took all my stuff from me. I complained to REDACTED because I thought she was a deceit [sic] lady. . . . I could end up dead or something . . . During this portion of the ARB, the recording equipment began to malfunction. This malfunction has caused the remainder of tape 3 of 4 tapes from clicks 3407 to 4479 to become distorted. The Detainee dis‐ cussed how he was tortured while here at GTMO by several in‐ dividuals. . . . [and] the alleged [sexual] abuse he received from a female interrogator . . . . The detainee wanted to show the Board his scars and location of injuries, but the board declined the viewing. The Board agrees that this a [sic] fair recap of the distorted portion of the tape. (United States Department of De‐ fense, 26; emphasis in original) Disappeared from Slahi’s narrative are 1,001 clicks of torture, cov‐ ering countless sleep deprived nights of narrating under duress. Instead of Slahi’s narration, we have an official (bold) record of the missing portion of the torture testimony and tape—an account of the missing account of vio‐ lence, whose disruption and distortion are here attributed to routine me‐ chanical failure rather than to the narrative violence of counterinsurgency or to the effective force of law. In a sense, the broken narrative (broken into by the official voice of law) “shares the violence of its object” (Gana and Härting 2008, 3) and takes on some of the qualities of violence that it fails to describe, thereby exhibiting textual echoes of the physical scars that the Board refuses to view on Slahi’s body. Such disruptions to Slahi’s testimonial narrative violate “our col‐ lective sense of story and of justice”, as Larry Siems has said of the ecliptic redactions that blot out passages and pieces of the story in Slahi’s declassi‐ fied diary (Siems 2015, xlix). If we feel that the broken tape recorder does violence to Slahi’s personal story, aggravating our sense of narrative injus‐ tice by undermining an imagined right to (narrate) one’s own story, this is because the awful banality of this particular violation shows just how pre‐ carious is (and how profound our faith in) the equation between life and narrative, and how dependent upon law. Historian Hayden White (1980) was getting at something like this connection between story and justice when he wrote that narrativity (or a will‐to‐narrative) “has to do with the



20 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority” (17; empha‐ sis in original). “Where there is no rule of law”, White insists, “there can be neither a subject nor the kind of event that lends itself to narrative repre‐ sentation” (17). If law, legality, and authority attempt to regulate violence, they also regulate narrative. Thus, I will pursue a hypothesis that is unex‐ plored, but latent, in White’s analysis: that violence not only intensifies but has a generative role in the will‐to‐narrative. Slahi’s broken story of torture is impelled first and foremost by a desire to speak of the violence he suf‐ fered. Narrative seems to align with life in part because it “strains to pro‐ duce the effect of having filled in all the gaps, to put an image of continuity, coherency, and meaning in place of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire”, as White put it (15). However, the images of continuity and coherence that narrative produces (in response to the violence of loss, imagined or otherwise) are themselves fantasies of plenitude that make life seem tantamount to narrative. Indeed, the pleasing humanist equation be‐ tween life and narrative that we generally take for granted may mask an originary role that violence plays in narrative and the cruel irony that the life‐narrative relay hinges on violence. Stories That Demand to Be Told Violence, enacted or threatened, has an important, if under‐unex‐ amined, role in many theories of narrative production. For example, socio‐ linguist William Labov (1997) revisited a storytelling paradox he identified nearly three decades earlier from audiotapes of life stories collected for a study of the limits of narrative in the face of a “sudden outbreak of violence” (397). Interested in “the use of narrative to deal with issues of life and death”, Labov describes the apparent double bind—what he calls the “re‐ portability paradox”—of a narrator who has an extraordinary personal story to tell but who, because of the sheer incredibility of the events of that story, bears an especially heavy burden in terms of narrative credibility (397). As he puts it, “Reportability is inversely correlated with credibility” (407). For Labov, “the credibility of a narrative is the extent to which listen‐ ers believe that the events described actually occurred in the form de‐ scribed by the narrator” (407; emphasis in original). This particular form of narrative credibility becomes a specific problem for stories he character‐ izes as “serious”: “straightforward accounts of events that are asserted to have actually taken place” (407).



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 21 Life and narrative are inseparable in Labov’s life narratives, en‐ twined in his analysis through corresponding events and clauses: “A narra‐ tive of personal experience is a report of a sequence of events that have en‐ tered into the biography of the speaker by a sequence of clauses that corre‐ spond to the order of the original events” (Labov 1997, 398; emphasis in original). Thus, his paradox of “Reportability” has to do with the fact that an audience is being asked to believe that the story being told actually hap‐ pened to the speaker. Although there is a seemingly simple relation be‐ tween event and narrative report in this configuration, the social circum‐ stances, condition, and context of the narrative performance matter for Labov, which means that his “Paradox” is especially a problem for moral‐ juridical narrative speech acts, or for quasi‐juridical genres such as testi‐ mony, confession, and witnessing, where the credibility of the speaker is at stake and the report of the events has serious potential personal conse‐ quences, legal or otherwise. “Credibility”, then, in Labov’s analysis, is not so much a character trait of the storyteller as it is the name of a narrative ef‐ fect, or, perhaps better, an achievement: the convergence (in the auditor’s or reader’s mind) of the world and the text, of experience and story, life and narrative. “Reportability” is the other key term in Labov’s paradox, and it, too, is a quality determinable only in terms of a specific narrative. For Labov, the reportability of an event is due to its singularity (or infrequency) within a narrative, rather than to the uniqueness of the event in the world of expe‐ rience, although the one may well reflect the other. Thus, the more uncom‐ mon an event (relatively speaking), the more “reportable” it is said to be‐ come within the narrative—the stronger its will‐to‐narrative. While the re‐ portability of an event is (for Labov) primarily a quality internal to narra‐ tive, it nonetheless is inflected by the social context of the narrative act. Thus, the reportability of an experience is relative not only to other story events; it is also related to the expectations, desires, and assumptions of a specific audience about what is remarkable or not (and, thus, reportable or not) in a specific time and place. “Certain events”, Labov concedes, “will al‐ most always carry a high degree of reportability; those dealing with death, sex and moral indignation” (1997, 406)—events that, at least in stories, of‐ ten involve violence. As much as Labov wants to keep narrative and experience sepa‐ rate—in order to show, ultimately, that they converge in the narrative



22 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER transaction with a reader or auditor—they consistently bleed into one an‐ other. Life and narrative are so deeply entangled in Labov’s discussion that one inevitably ends up talking about the other. And yet, we can envision the objective category that Labov calls “the most reportable event”, at least within (if not without) narrative: “A most reportable event is the event that is less common than any other in the narrative and has the greatest effect upon the needs and desires of the participants in the narrative (is evaluated most strongly)” (1997, 406; emphasis in original). This “most reportable event” is the most “unique” within a given personal narrative, the construc‐ tion of which (according to Labov) “must logically and existentially begin with the decision to report the most reportable event” (406). What initially is proposed as a purely technical category (reportabililty) is now imagined to emerge first in the storyteller as a pre‐narrative desire—a desire to tell or be told. Here appears a paradox that Labov does not unpack: from the perspective of narrative, the reportability of an event could only be deter‐ mined after the fact, after its reporting, when it has been “evaluated most strongly”. From the perspective of life (or experience), however, the report‐ ability of an event is determined in anticipation of the story—a pre‐narra‐ tive judgment that Labov describes as a “decision”. The assumption that the condition of possibility for a (life) narrative is an initial decision to report the most reportable event seems almost inevitable, unless we can imagine a narrative that begins otherwise, with (for example) an involuntary im‐ pulse rather than a voluntary decision to narrate that seems to come from the force of life itself. Or, a narrative that begins with no choice at all, from the force of death (as my epigraph from Slahi suggests), where life itself is in the balance. For Labov, narrative seems to be a voluntary human activity im‐ pelled by a decision to give life experience the form of a story; for Ricoeur, life itself consists of “stories that have not yet been told, stories that demand to be told” (1991, 30; emphasis in original), which seem to begin from a deep involuntary drive, perhaps even a compulsion, to report (in Labov’s terms) the most reportable event. However, the kind of decision of which Labov speaks would be a second order regulation of an initial narrative im‐ pulse. Indeed, such a decision might just as readily impede a desire to nar‐ rate as amplify it. I will return to discuss this regulation of pre‐narrative desire in terms of the force of law and of post‐narrative disruptions in terms



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 23 of violence. There is, of course, clearly a difference between stories that de‐ mand to be told (such as Slahi’s report of torture) and a demand that stories be told (the compulsion of torture itself), which perverts the ordinary nar‐ rative impulse. For now, however, I want to think about any imposition that curtails, constrains, or coerces the report of the most reportable event (be‐ fore, during, or after the act of narration) as a form of violence. The correlation between reportability and credibility can be in‐ verted and rewritten (at some risk of oversimplification): the more extraor‐ dinary the narrative events or outrageous the narrator’s experience, the less the speaker’s personal authority or character can be drawn upon to verify the experience and validate the narrative. Labov judges the success of a personal narrative by its “capacity [. . .] to transfer the experience of the narrator to the audience” (1997, 415). Given that metric, the “most report‐ able event”—especially when it comes to acts of violence—has a surfeit of incredibility, in the face of which the narrator necessarily begins with a def‐ icit of credibility. For Labov, it seems, the narrative itself is the medium and means to bring the disparity between the (high) reportability of events and the (low) credibility of the narrator into some kind of balance. Stated dif‐ ferently, this seems obvious enough to any enthusiast of storytelling: nar‐ rative is probably the best technology for making the unbelievable believa‐ ble, the incredible credible, the unimaginable . . . memorable. And yet, we might already see in Labov’s “reportability paradox” the outlines of the ter‐ rible narrative burden that survivors or witnesses of horrific violence re‐ port bearing, given (among other factors) that violence itself is always “open to contestation as to its very nature or even occurrence, permanently subject to the force of denial” (Anidjar 2015, 436–37). Thus, the “reporta‐ bility paradox” may capture something of the subalternizing effect of vio‐ lence that enlarges the gap between the existential incredibility of the event and the narrative (or social) credibility of the speaker who seeks to report violence, making the subaltern (so to speak) silent. If we already know (intuitively at least) that narrative can make an audience believe that a particular extraordinary event did in fact happen to a particular ordinary speaker, what may be surprising—especially given the overwhelming influence of affect theory today, which tends to reduce



24 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER the scope of the social work of literature, and narrative generally, to train‐ ing sessions in empathy1—is Labov’s conclusion that the successful narra‐ tive transfer of personal experience to an audience is “only possible if the narrator reports events as objective experience without reference to the narrator's emotional reactions” (1997, 415). In a sense, then, the reporta‐ bility paradox implies that narrative credibility is maximized by suppres‐ sion of affective markers of subjective narration, or by the appearance of cold historicist objectivity that, as Hayden White has written, “feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story” (1980, 7; emphasis in original). In other words, in Labov’s account, narrative credibility most effectively rises to the level of the incredibility of life and death experiences when such stories seem to tell themselves, when they seem unmotivated by any voluntary decision to report the most reportable event, when narrative seems as natural as life itself—when, in a word, narratives appear un‐nar‐ rated. That a story can seem to be unnarrated—that it can have the ap‐ pearance of objective (scientific) fact, (religious) orthodoxy, or (legal) doc‐ trine—is itself a curious anti‐narrative effect of narrative. Unlike so‐called empirical description, narrative implies perspective, a certain slant of sto‐ rytelling that is always necessarily partial but that provides a principle for organizing a set of events into a series that seems to make sense. As Ricoeur has observed, narrative “emplotment” operates by producing “a synthesis of heterogeneous elements” (1991, 21). Leaving things out (ellipsis) is, then, an ordinary part of narration, and, therefore, the fantasy of fullness that narrative exhibits is created as much by elision as it is by drawing disparate entities and events together. The formal principles of narrative generally allow a reader to intuit something about what has been elided to construct a story. However, when excisions cannot logically be reconstructed by a reader, as with the trope of eclipsis, narrative suppresses the signs of its own narrativity and pretends to be something other than subjective story‐

1



In a pair of essays that explore the importance of “humanitarian indifference,” I argue against the view that human rights problems are best resolved through empathy and that narrative literature is the best training for empathetic under‐ standing—promulgated most prominently by thinkers such as Lynn Hunt, Mar‐ tha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. See “Humanitarian Reading” (Slaughter 2009) and “The Enchantment of Human Rights” (Slaughter 2014).

LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 25 telling, thus denying the contingency of its image of coherence. Such eclip‐ ses, when detected, are often read not merely as signs of violence (violence done to the narrative or the narrator, such as the break in the tape of Slahi’s account of torture) but as acts of violence (violence done by the narrative or the narrator to the occluded subject, such as the eclipsed agency of the insurgent in Guha’s prose of counterinsurgency—the silencing of the sub‐ altern). Violence Behind Narrative Violence, Walter Benjamin ([1921] 1986) famously argued in “Cri‐ tique of Violence”, has a functional relationship to law as the means by which it is founded and defended; it is also bound up tightly with narrative, according to much recent theory, which sees violence alternately as an ef‐ fect (deliberate or inevitable) of narrative representation and as its origi‐ nary, even compelling, force. Despite the long tradition in Enlightenment thought of presenting violence and narrative (or language more generally2) as mutually exclusive alternatives—the use of language is said to obviate the need for violence, and violence is understood to obliterate language— critical theory today generally regards narrative itself as enacting forms of violence, although thinkers are divided on the matter of where, exactly, vi‐ olence and narrative interact. So, for example, the tropes of ellipsis and eclipsis are the kinds of “representational lacunae” that many characterize as narrative violence (Gana and Härting 2008, 4). Moreover, if we agree with Ricoeur that narrative organizes heterogeneity, then the ordinary eli‐ sions involved in forging links between different and discontinuous ele‐ ments are part of the inevitable epistemic violence of narration, which is “intrinsic to the very act of representation” (Noys 2013, 12). Nancy Arm‐ strong and Leonard Tennenhouse (1989) maintained this position in their influential introduction to The Violence of Representation: “the violence of representation is the suppression of difference” (8). Following these logics,

2



Benjamin asserts that language (“the proper sphere of ‘understanding’”) is “wholly inaccessible to violence” ([1921] 1986, 289). Slavoj Žižek (2008), by contrast, challenges this orthodoxy by asking “What if, however, humans ex‐ ceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak?” (61).

26 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER the epistemic violence of representation turns out to be a form of non‐rep‐ resentation, and narrative (through its integral acts of un‐narration) would be the continuation of empirical violence by other means.3 On the other hand, the “semiotic production” of difference (rather than its suppression) is sometimes said to be an act of “violence [that] is en‐ gendered in representation”, as Teresa de Lauretis (1989) proposed (240). Arguing that “violence is inseparable from the notion of gender” (240), de Lauretis challenged Jacques Derrida’s own phallogocentrism in Of Gramma‐ tology, where he identified the inscription of difference as the “originary violence of language” (Derrida 1974, 112). The very act of naming, turning something into a linguistic sign, which Derrida calls “the violence of the let‐ ter”, splits the subject, introducing a division between the thing and its rep‐ resentation: “to think the unique within the system [of differences], to in‐ scribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche‐writing: arche‐violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self‐presence” (112; emphasis in original). For Derrida, this “arche‐violence” of language precedes the “em‐ pirical possibility” of physical violence (112), but it also precedes any act of narration with its possibility of epistemic violence. If we accept both the “violence of representation” critiques and the originary violence of lan‐ guage theses (and there are good reasons to confirm and contest both po‐ sitions), then violence does double duty in relation to narrative—that is, violence lies at both ends of narrative. Thus, violence, involving both the inscription of difference and its suppression, is at once a pre‐condition for narrative and its inevitable consequence, a reason for narrative and that which narrative enacts through elision and eclipse as it strains to give an account that seems full. There is, then, no narrative without violence. At one end of narra‐ tive, the violence of difference sets the storytelling impulse in motion; at the other end, narrative executes violence as it elides the differences that are its enabling condition. In a sense, then, narrative (or the will‐to‐narrative) responds to the originary violence of language; driven by desire for coher‐ ence and continuity in the face of perceived loss, division, and disruption,

3



Keith Brown (2015) makes a similar point about what he calls the “narratorial violence” that was exercised during and after the Yugoslavia/Macedonia con‐ flict in order “to break up or fragment” a Macedonian story about the violence that contradicted official history: “The effect on the narrative was similar to that of the militia’s electric batons on the protesters” (312).

LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 27 narrative strains to answer White’s myth of emptiness with a fantasy of full‐ ness. That is, the gap introduced by the violence of language, which “has severed the proper from its property and its self‐sameness” (Derrida 1974, 112), opens up a space of difference across which narrative stretches to represent an image of coherence and, in the case of personal narratives of identity, to re‐present to ourselves an image of our own continuity and self‐ possession. This is part of the reparative or incorporative work of narrative, which I have written about in terms of the normative ideological work of the Bildungsroman that “plot[s] the acquisition of self‐narrative agency” and so sustains our everyday fantasies of self‐authorship (Slaughter 2007, 214). However, if a sense of self‐sameness is a fragile effect of narrative, its perceived “loss” is also a fantasy, because, Derrida insists, the subject is “al‐ ways already split”, and so the imagined originary violence of language that divides the subject from itself engenders a false sense of “loss of what has never taken place, of a self‐presence which has never been given but only dreamed of” (1974, 112). Nonetheless, this dreamed‐of‐violence (the fan‐ tasy of an originary linguistic violence that disrupted a primal wholeness that never was) compels our self‐grooming narratives, “stories”, as Ricoeur writes, “which the subject could take charge of and consider to be constitu‐ tive of his personal identity” (1991, 30; emphasis in original). However, to take charge of narrative is not the same as being in charge of it, and, thus, we can “learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story” without being able to become, in Ricoeur’s words, “the author of our own life” (32; emphasis in original). Violence may be notoriously difficult to define, in part because so many disparate phenomena are collected under its name; however, both epistemic and empirical forms of violence share at least this characteristic: they erupt suddenly to rend the illusion we ordinarily main‐ tain that we are both the narrators and authors of our lives and stories. In other words, violence does not just disrupt the life‐narrative relay; it inter‐ rupts biography, undercutting the fantasy of narrative self‐determination by reminding us of a loss that we never suffered and yet never stop suffer‐ ing (or repairing). Violence, then, makes it inescapably obvious that one (an individual, a group, or a people) may be the narrator of a life‐story but never its author.



28 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER Concealing Disclosures In Labov’s exemplary tale, violence plays this dual role as both the impetus for and the eclipsed center of narrative, appearing to organize the story but disappearing from the final account; it also threatens the narra‐ tive act itself, reinforcing Ricoeur’s insight that we can only retroactively assume the role of narrator for a life‐story we imagined ourselves author‐ ing. This very short story is typical, Labov says, of “the thousands of per‐ sonal narratives” (1997, 412) he studied, and its handling of the most re‐ portable event is especially telling in terms of its triangulation of life, nar‐ rative, and violence: Harold Shambaugh, Tape A‐304, Columbus, Ohio, 7/28/70 (What happened in South America?) a Oh I w's settin' at a table drinkin' b And—this Norwegian sailor come over c an' kep' givin' me a bunch o' junk about I was sittin' with his woman. d An' everybody sittin' at the table with me were my shipmates. e So I jus' turn aroun' f an' shoved `im, g an' told `im, I said, "Go away, h I don't even wanna fool with ya." i An' nex' thing I know I 'm layin' on the floor, blood all over me, j An' a guy told me, says, "Don't move your head. k Your throat's cut." (Labov 1997, 398–402) The tape remains intact, but the narrative breaks at the act of vio‐ lence. The “most reportable event” in Shambaugh’s narrative, the one that holds the greatest narrative and ethical interest for an audience and that also has the most vital consequences for the narrator, is also the most vio‐ lent—the cutting of the narrator’s throat. An act of empirical violence drives the narrative, which seeks to give meaning to the disruption, but that event remains, technically speaking, unnarrated. Interestingly, then, the ob‐ jectively most reportable event goes without saying, appearing in the story as a gap, the missing narrative link between the narrator’s saying “go away”



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 29 and his “layin’ on the floor, blood all over [‘im]”. The gap is filled in, retro‐ actively, not only by a third actor who announces “Your throat’s cut”, but also presumably by an audience who completes the plot, connecting the dots between the offended Norwegian sailor and the narrator’s slit throat. Within the narrative itself, however, in the place of the most reportable event—the originating violence—is a referential gesture toward that event (as we saw with Slahi’s disrupted taped testimony), “a report of the most reportable event” (Labov 1997, 414). As in classical Greek tragedy, the vio‐ lence occurs off‐stage, behind (metaphorically speaking) the backs of the audience, but, more importantly, behind (now literally speaking) the back of the narrator, who is cut down from behind. In the wake of Trauma Theory, we tend to think of what escapes or exceeds narrative as the traumatic kernel of experience, violence that can‐ not be (adequately) represented—“the real”, for Lacan, which resists direct signification in language and is, therefore, the unrecoverable object of ob‐ session and fantasy. Accordingly, the trauma paradox (or the terrible nar‐ rative paradox that produces trauma) would be that the least recoverable events are also the most reportable. In such a reading of Shambaugh’s nar‐ rative, “Your throat’s cut” becomes the functional equivalent of “Father don’t you see I’m burning” in Cathy Caruth’s reading of Lacan’s reading of Freud’s reading of a man’s dream about his recently deceased son (Caruth 1996, 91–112). From this perspective, the narrative gap in Shambaugh’s story that marks the violence—that is, indeed, the tell‐tale sign of narrative violence conventionally understood—is both unnarratable and the incite‐ ment for the act of narration. Thus, violence is the root of the initial “deci‐ sion” to report the most reportable event, producing a narrative that re‐ sponds to the loss of voice with an image of the continuity of the speaking subject—a fantasy sustained only by the narrative violence it eclipses. The fact that the most reportable event goes unnarrated, does not give Labov pause; instead, he turns to a kind of reader‐response account in which the audience (acting on its excited will‐for‐narrative) bridges the breach. Indeed, Labov’s explanation for the missing account of violence has nothing to do with trauma theory and everything to do with narrative effi‐ cacy, with the successful transfer of experience from narrator to reader. It is crucial, then, that the narrator and his audience are, at the end of the story, in the same position—floored, so to speak. We learn together, at the



30 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER same (story) time, of the most reportable event through the startling an‐ nouncement: “Your throat’s cut”. For Labov, it is precisely this shared ob‐ jective perspective (or shared narrative experience) that makes the story credible. In Labov’s reading, the violent event is not psychologically or ex‐ istentially unassimilable to narrative or a casualty of representation’s vio‐ lence; rather, the violence is unnarrated in the service of narrative itself, for the sake of effective communication—that is, in order to commute the vio‐ lence to the reader. So much in Shambaugh’s story depends upon the act of extreme violence; violence and its unnarration play the decisive role, as much for Labov’s analysis as for Shambaugh’s reporting, not only in the mediation between life and narrative, but in the construction and effect of the story. If this story structure is typical, then it suggests that the unnarrated is an es‐ sential part of narrative, maybe even be the crux of the matter. Ranajit Guha had a similar insight when he claimed that astute historians could read sub‐ altern insurgent agency in the elliptic gaps of the prose of counterinsur‐ gency. In that regard, it is worth noticing what else is unnarrated in the ecliptic gap of Shambaugh’s story, which hides a terrible secret: the subse‐ quent killing of the knife‐wielding Norwegian sailor by one of the narrator’s friends (414). The unnarrated act of throat‐cutting directly threatens our narrator’s life and his capacity for speech and narration; so, too, in the case of the Norwegian sailor, whose life and narrative have both been eclipsed by the unreported empirical violence of the hand and the epistemic vio‐ lence of Shambaugh’s narrative. This vicious narrative circle, where narra‐ tive strains to repair one act of violence as it (seemingly) inevitably enacts another, implies not only that one cannot be the author of one’s life story, but that even being a narrator is a rather tenuous proposition, as precarious as any “right” to narrative and life itself. Compelling Narratives, Eliding Narratology Labov’s paradigmatic story suggests that violence—empirical and epistemic—stands behind narrative, as the impulse for the story, as what threatens the possibility of narrative, and as what is elided or eclipsed by it. These same principles are behind the bloodless prose of counterinsur‐ gency, which takes cynical advantage of the humanist equation between life and narrative in order to hide the acts of violence (empirical and epistemic) that are part of its standard operating procedure. Most of the thinkers I’ve



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 31 discussed in this essay wrote from somewhere within the curves of the nar‐ rative turn in the social sciences and the so‐called ethical turn in literary studies, when narrative and ethics apparently turned into one another. Some lessons from the narrative and ethical turns have been absorbed so thoroughly into common thinking about law and violence, that they return to us from rather surprising quarters—from, for example, official doctrine for US counterinsurgency campaigns. These policy documents follow the pattern of Shambaugh’s narrative, but in this case narratology, not just vio‐ lence, is at the center of the story; that is, both violence and narrative theory are behind the story of contemporary counterinsurgency, and both have been eclipsed from the final account to create a fantasy of coherent war pol‐ icy that seems to reaffirm our commitment to life and narrative. To much fanfare in December 2006, the US Army and Marine Corps jointly released the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, commonly referred to by its classification number as FM 3–24, the first wholesale revision to US counterinsurgency policy since the Vietnam War. Drafted rapidly in just two months by an unlikely team of military leaders, soldiers, journalists, human rights scholars, and academics (especially anthropologists), the new “Petraeus Doctrine” represented part of the military’s response to a series of embarrassing reports of most reportable (yet officially unreported) events that included pictures of detainees tortured and sexually humiliated at Abu Ghraib. In the manual, the military outlined a narrative approach to counterinsurgency that would, it claimed, “provide a more compelling al‐ ternative to the insurgent ideology and narrative” (2006a, 5–2). Histori‐ cally, such documents are classified, but FM 3‐24 was prepared for “unlim‐ ited” distribution, its release widely advertised by the Bush administration, and an uncopyrighted version of the manual was quickly published by the University of Chicago Press. Promoting a kinder and gentler image of counterinsurgency, FM 3– 24 weaponized narrative, narratology, and cultural studies; it instrumen‐ talized literary humanism, with its loaded equation between life and narra‐ tive, pretending that US counterinsurgency doctrine has nothing to hide, since the non‐violent methods it now emphasized for combatting insur‐ gents were squarely on the side of narrative and, therefore, to all outward appearances, also on the side of life. As the manual explains in a section called “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations”: “Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot” (2006a, 1–27), chief among which is narrative. Thus, under the subheading “Exploit a Single Narrative”, the manual explains:



32 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER Since counterinsurgency is a competition to mobilize popular sup‐ port, it pays to know how people are mobilized. Most societies in‐ clude opinion‐makers . . . who set trends and influence public per‐ ceptions. This influence often follows a single narrative—a sim‐ ple, unifying, easily expressed story or explanation that organizes people’s experience—and provides a framework for understand‐ ing events. (2006a, A‐41) Counterinsurgents, the manual insists, can reconfigure and reroute insurgent attitudes, identities, and beliefs by “exploiting an alternative nar‐ rative” that counters the insurgent narrative (2006a, A‐7) or “tapping into an existing narrative that excludes insurgents” (2006a, A‐41). In an un‐ canny echo of Guha’s observations about the gaps in the dominant histori‐ ography of counterinsurgency, the new doctrine proposed exploiting the epistemic violence of narrative to target insurgents by constructing narra‐ tives that exclude them, as if the essays in Selected Subaltern Studies consti‐ tuted a grammar manual for the elision of insurgents. Narrative is a baggier monster in the field manual than in the tech‐ nical writings of narratologists (of course), but FM 3–24 nonetheless reso‐ nates with the insights of narratology. There is, I suppose, some small sat‐ isfaction for a scholar of comparative literature in finding the belief that the “literary” matters disseminated beyond the halls of the academy, in hearing that “out there” it really is all about narrative—even if such satisfaction must be tempered by the source of the disciplinary affirmation. Narrative, the military says, is “the most important cultural form” (2006a, 3–50), which it defines in Marxist sociological and new formalist terms as “the con‐ crete expression of the belief systems shared by members of a particular culture” (2006a, 3–49). Changing the battle‐terrain of the “war on terror” to fight insurgency in the symbolic realm of the imaginary, the manual in‐ structs counterinsurgent forces to pay especially close attention to “cultural narratives”, stories “recounted in the form of a causally linked set of events that explains an event in a group’s history and expresses the values, char‐ acter, or self‐identity of the group. Narratives are the means through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed by members of a society” (2006a, 3–50). The manual taps into the Enlightenment cultural narrative that vi‐ olence and narrative are radical opposites, in an effort to win back what some critics of the new counterinsurgency policy disparaged as the “hearts



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 33 and minds” of the American people, who were turning against the “war on terror” after the disclosure of a scandalous archive of declassified torture memos, damning photographs, and casual accounts of human rights abuses in secret US detention centers around the world. Indeed, the public an‐ nouncement that narrative matters was part of a story about American counterinsurgency taking the narrative turn (or taking advantage of the narrative turn), turning away from the excessive secrecy, extraordinary rendition, and brutal violence of the counterguerrilla tactics that had so far characterized the fight against terrorism. In a sense, however, the manual only promised to replace one form of violence with another, the (poten‐ tially) objectionable visible empirical violence of military operations with the (largely) acceptable invisible epistemic violence of narrative actions. In promoting a new story of a softer, narrative counterinsurgency, FM 3–24 superimposed such an appealing image of coherency on US military doc‐ trine that it is easy to miss what goes unreported in the manual, the violence that its disclosure is, in fact, designed to conceal. Despite the manual’s declared commitment to “open‐source intel‐ ligence” (“information of potential intelligence value that is available to the general public” [3–11]), its instant availability for download at US Army and Marine Corps websites, and the too‐much‐protesting statement of classifi‐ cation on its cover—“Approved for public release; distribution is unlim‐ ited”—FM 3–24 takes advantage of the cachet of open‐sourcism in order to pretend that it reveals everything. However, the manual leaves many things unsaid; it is less a revision than it is a supplement to traditional counterin‐ surgency tactics and covert operations, whose guidelines for violence have themselves been updated in manuals that remain classified. In fact, as the new counterinsurgency doctrine was being publicized, paramilitary tor‐ ture, forced disappearance, and enhanced interrogation techniques were being reauthorized for the CIA, while old counterinsurgency doctrine (some of it already in the public domain) was being reclassified as not for public distribution—in other words, it was being (retro)actively un‐dis‐ closed. FM 3–24 exploits the traditional association between narrative and life to disarticulate the traditional associations of counterinsurgency with violence and death. In doing so, it “unnarrates” the violence of counterin‐ surgency; like the report of the most reportable event (rather than the event itself), by burying the violence (in other manuals and behind the gen‐ tle veneer of narrative), the publication of FM 3–24 performed a kind of



34 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER revelation in the service of secrecy, declassification in the service of main‐ taining classified policy, telling (about a new policy of telling) in the service of untelling. The new counterinsurgency doctrine not only eclipses empirical and epistemic violence; in its very composition, it abides the trope of the concealing disclosure, the narrative techniques used to get the bloodstains out of the prose of counterinsurgency, eliding the narratology behind it. It is no coincidence that we may hear echoes of Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, William Labov, and others in the text of FM 3–24. Although the manual in‐ cludes the scholarly apparatus of bibliography and endnotes (whose func‐ tion is to reveal sources and methods), those do not include any narratolo‐ gists among the other documented “open‐source intelligence”. In other words, just as it twists the life‐narrative equation in favor of violence, the manual perverts the purpose of bibliography to hide its sources. However, a section of a draft of the manual that was unofficially disclosed in response to charges of plagiarism does report its sources—in footnote 41 on “cul‐ tural narratives” and other narratological concepts that (along with all these other footnotes) have disappeared from the final text of the counter‐ insurgency manual: The most important cultural form for counterinsurgency forces to understand is the narrative. A cultural narrative is a story re‐ counted in the form of a causally linked set of events that explains an event in group’s history, but which also expresses values, char‐ acter, or self‐identity of the group [sic]. 41 41. Narrative theory (“narratology”) has been used in psychoanal‐

ysis, see Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in D. Wood, ed., On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, London: Routledge, 1991. Narrative has also been used to understand the construc‐ tion of ethnohistory. See W. Labov, “Some Further Steps in Narra‐ tive Analysis,” Journal of Narrative and Life History, no. 7, 1997. Narrative has also been used to explore history: Hayden V. White, Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Represen‐ tation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. (United States Department of the Army 2006b, 7‐8)



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 35 The parts of FM 3–24 that I have quoted in this paper were all pla‐ giarized, in more and less explicit forms, from well‐known critical theorists: Ricoeur, White, Pierre Bourdieu, Clifford Geertz, William Labov, Donald Polkinghorne, Max Weber, among many others. These narratologists have all been conscripted (without knowledge or acknowledgment) to weapon‐ ize narrative in a fantasy of bloodless counterinsurgency, a story from which they have also been eclipsed. The new counterinsurgency hides behind the good image of the so‐ cial work of narrative. Indeed, FM 3–24 recruited not just narrative and its association with life, but narratology and its optimistic faith in the align‐ ment of narrative with life, in order to exploit the generally hidden anti‐ social work of narrative for the purposes of war. It takes advantage of the fact that life is “tangled up in stories” (Ricoeur 1991, 30) in order to disen‐ tangle narrative from life, retooling the humanist equation to enhance its violent underside, where narrative is entangled with death, disappearance, loss, and exclusion. Given that the humanist equation between life and nar‐ rative itself elides the epistemic violence upon which it depends, we narra‐ tologists and literary scholars should be wary “to speak of power and vio‐ lence as something that belongs [only] to the police or the military, some‐ thing that belongs to and is practiced by someone somewhere else”, as Arm‐ strong and Tennenhouse wrote (1989, 4). Plagiarism in the form of docu‐ mentation; censorship in the form of declassification; classification in the form of publication; untelling in the form of telling—these concealing dis‐ closures appear to be the obfuscating tropes of storytelling that have been normalized in the bloodless prose of counterinsurgency, modes of practic‐ ing violence in the names of life and narrative.

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36 JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER Benjamin, Walter. [1921] 1986. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books. Booth, Wayne. 1993. “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self; or, Does Amnesty Have a Leg to Stand On?” In Freedom and Interpre‐ tation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992, edited by Barbara John‐ son, 69–102. New York: Basic Books. Brown, Keith. 2015. “Order, Reputation and Narrative: Forms of State Vio‐ lence in Late Socialist Macedonia.” European History Quarterly 45 (2): 295–314. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Bal‐ timore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1989. “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender.” In The Violence of Representation: Lit‐ erature and the History of Violence, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 239–58. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. [1974] 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected Edition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop‐ kins University Press. Gana, Nouri, and Heike Härting. 2008. “Introduction: Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Af‐ rica and the Middle East 28 (1): 1–10. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. “The Prose of Counter‐Insurgency.” In Selected Subal‐ tern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 45–84. New York: Oxford University Press. Labov, William. 1997. “Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1–4): 395–415. Noys, Benjamin. 2013. “The Violence of Representation and the Represen‐ tation of Violence.” In Violence and the Limits of Representation, ed‐ ited by Graham Matthews and Sam Goodman, 12–27. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. “Life in Quest of Narrative.” In On Paul Ricoeur: Narra‐ tive and Interpretation, edited by David Wood, 20–33. London and New York: Routledge.



LIFE, STORY, VIOLENCE: WHAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T SAY 37 Siems, Larry. 2015. “Editor’s Notes” and “Introduction.” In Guantánamo Di‐ ary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, xi‐xlix. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Slahi, Mohamedou Ould. 2015. Guantánamo Diary. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Slaughter, Joseph R. 1997. “A Question of Narration: The Voice in Interna‐ tional Human Rights Law.” Human Rights Quarterly 19 (2): 406–30. ‐‐‐. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and Interna‐ tional Law. New York: Fordham University Press. ‐‐‐. 2009. “Humanitarian Reading.” In Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, edited by Richard Ashby Wilson and Rich‐ ard D. Brown, 88–107. New York: Cambridge University Press. ‐‐‐. 2010. “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There.” Journal of Human Rights 9 (2): 207–223. ‐‐‐. 2014. “The Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Hu‐ manitarian Indifference Make?” Critical Quarterly 56 (4): 46–66. United States Department of the Army. 2006a. Counterinsurgency. Army Field Manual 3–24. Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3‐33.5. Washington, D.C.: Headquarters Department of the Army. ‐‐‐. 2006b. Draft Excerpt from Counterinsurgency. Army Field Manual 3–24. Small Wars Journal Blog Post. http://smallwarsjournal.com/docu‐ ments/coin‐draft‐excerpt.pdf United States Department of Defense. 2005. “Summary of Administrative Review Board Proceedings for ISN 760.” Transcript. GTMO. Ac‐ cessed 15 December. http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/ detainees/760‐mohamedou‐ould‐slahi/documents/2 White, Hayden V. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27. ‐‐‐. 1987. Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Represen‐ tation, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.





Writing Transgenderism and Human-Rights-with-aDifference in Post-Apartheid South Africa Chantal Zabus Out of the 76 members of the United Nations which criminalize sex‐ ual dissidence, 37 are located in Africa and in the Middle East.1 In Africa, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is famous for his homophobic statements since he took over from Canaan Banana who was tried for "sodomy"; Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has, in February 2014, signed the "Kill the Gays Bill" which had been in the works since 2009, favoring, however, life im‐ prisonment over execution; and former President Goodluck Jonathan of Ni‐ geria signed a similar anti‐homosexuality bill in January 2014. Also, African Heads of State and citizens alike often cast homosexuality as a devious im‐ port from the west in the face of evidence of ancestral nexuses that were hospitable to gender variance prior to European colonization and continue to be, while co‐existing with other forms of same‐sex intimacies, in the post‐independence period. From Senegal to Southern Africa, many African gay men invoke the animistic belief in ancestor spirit possession. A Shona gay man in Zimbabwe claims that he is inhabited by his “auntie” (Hoad 2006, 77), whereas the Senegalese gor‐djigeen (male‐female in Wolof) claims to be haunted by the primordial severance between male and female in the Creation of the Uni‐ verse. In a novel La révolte des galsénésiennes by Malian, Dakar‐based Doumbi‐Fakoly (1994), the gor‐djigeen’s sexual preference is even vali‐ dated by some sort of amputated ancestor (see Zabus 2013, 227‐232)An‐ cestral beliefs such as spirit possession and local naming practices often vie with western‐influenced parlance for the ownership of African sexualities and, of late, transgenderism as a form of gender‐crossing that may or may not be directed towards a sex change. In The Dark Sides of Virtue, David Kennedy (2005) argues that in‐ ternational humanitarians should take up the hard‐core and somewhat technocratic responsibilities of rulership and stop being relegated to the margins of decision‐making. Drawing from post‐Marxist political theory,

1

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40743#.VhkLnFPouUk. Accessed October 9, 2015.

39

40 CHANTAL ZABUS Costas Douzinas (2007) opposes, in Human Rights and Empire, Kennedy’s “humanitarian‐military project” (225), countering that it amounts to an ad‐ mission of defeat before “the ideology of American nationalism at its impe‐ rial stage” (223)—that is, the American industrial‐military complex in its post 9/11 phase. Douzinas therefore pleads for a return to the redemptive role of human rights and their emancipatory power. His attempt to disen‐ gage rights from the projects of colonialism and imperialism finds reso‐ nance with the many paradoxes one encounters on the African continent regarding recent legislation on same‐sex relationships and transgender is‐ sues. I here focus on transgenderism in South Africa, because in the wake of the new Constitution of 1996, post‐Apartheid South Africa boasts one of the most modern legislations in the world, especially in its framing of the famous (9/3) clause against discrimination on the basis of “sexual orienta‐ tion”.2 As we will see, a lot of individuals’ same‐sex practices fall off the grid of legal terminology and, more generally, of language. Several narrative modes, including the novel, film and autobiography, testify to this tension between sexual practice and sexual identity. After Eric Auerbach and Edward Said, Joseph R. Slaughter has, in various writings, connected the rise of the novel and, more specifically, the Bildungsroman, with human rights legal discourse, taking his cue from the UDHR delegates’ reading of Robinson Crusoe to support their drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. Article 29 (1) of the Declaration builds on “the full development of the human person‐ ality” already mentioned in Article 26,3 a concept which Slaughter traces back to the Bildungsroman. “The novel of formation” is a product of German Idealism, which transformed the bourgeois, white male citizen and Crusoe‐ like protagonist into a universal subject aspiring “to promote the free and full personality development of so many Fridays” through what Slaughter

2

3



See http://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/chapter‐2‐bill‐rights#7. Ac‐ cessed October 9, 2015. Chapter 2 of the Bill of Rights says under Clause 9 (3): “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, con‐ science, belief, culture, language and birth”. See http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html#a29. Article 29 (1) spells out: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full devel‐ opment of his personality is possible”.

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 41 calls an “enabling fiction”. It is “enabling” in that the human personality is effected through Europe’s “transition to modernity” and this “transition narrative” (Slaughter 2012, 168) is in turn underwritten by the institutions of the modern European nation‐state. Along those lines, the transition to a democratic society in the wake of the 1996 New South African Constitution inevitably combines with the need, in Govinden’s (2008) words, “to create an alternative national identity that transcends the separate ‘nationalisms’ that existed in the past” (1). In Do South Africans Exist? Ivor Chipkin (2007) asserts that “authentic national subjects” are still in the making, even over a decade after the official advent of the new South African Constitution (189). This process of nation‐building “in the making” echoes what Na‐ dine Gordimer (1988), speaking from her South African platform before the end of Apartheid, called “the interregnum of identities”, that is, “not only between two social orders but also between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined” (270). Identity for‐ mation and nation building are linked in such a way that the nation‐state in becoming can be reflected in individual transitioning. The “transition nar‐ rative” therefore acquires another dimension when “transition” refers to a projected and as yet unrealized sex change and the “human personality” developing within an allegedly enabling “community” gets dissolved when an ancestor "takes it over” within post‐Apartheid Zulu African spirit pos‐ session cults and traditional healing milieus. Before the transgendered individual became synonymous with the “transnation”, as it were, the “gay person” was, with the end of Apartheid, as Brenna Munro (2010) has argued in South Africa and the Dream of the Love to Come, “a symbol of South Africa’s democratic modernity [. . .] and a radical departure from the traditional familial iconography of nationhood” (viii). This dream of a love to come through the reconfiguration of the very body of the nation, away from heteronormativity, can only be enacted through the application of human rights but what I would call human‐ rights‐with‐a‐difference, thereby returning human rights to its emancipa‐ tory power, as Douzinas argues. This presupposes that the difference lies in putting an end to the (mis‐)use of human rights to serve imperial(istic) goals and in enabling the fiction and then the realization of transnational governance and a transgendered future (see Zabus 2015, 201‐216).



42 CHANTAL ZABUS In the South African post‐1996 context, such a difference has been enacted through a blend of activism and autobiographical vestment, through the full development of “the human personality” for the new Fri‐ days: our Fridays are here women who are considering physical alterations that possibly only J. M. Coetzee in Foe (1986) had adumbrated when casting his unmanned, mute Friday in a female script. The script is here female‐to‐ male (FTM) and concerns specifically Zulu gender‐differentiated spiritual possession cults, as reflected in self‐writing, a genre which hosts some ele‐ ments of the Bildungsroman in documenting the growth and maturing of an individual while dissecting the anatomy of a nation in a state of flux. I here focus on three South African narratives by sangomas or Zulu traditional healers hinging on autobiography and experientiality: Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde’s (2008) Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma; Zulu sangoma Mkasi Lindiwe’s (2013) narrative around her re‐ search findings on transgenderism in KwaZulu‐Natal; and a couple of “nar‐ rated lives” (Schaffer and Smith 2004) in the collection Trans (Tebogo 2009), along with a short incursion into the transsexual Zulu novel. Through these narratives, one can trace a perceptible shift from transgendered “possession” to transsexuality, with a specific emphasis on FTMs, who remain worldwide a statistically less researched “personality” as well as on an increasing entanglement with human rights and activism. Before 1994, the official end of Apartheid, no published accounts existed about the lives of sangomas, let alone lesbian sangomas, who were only recognized as legitimate health practitioners in 1996. The Human Rights issue through “inclusive gender justice” was, however, dealt a cruel blow by the spread of HIV and the widespread practice of the “corrective rape” of lesbians. “Corrective rape” is practiced by urban male gangs such as the Jackrollers, a notorious Soweto gang of Tsotsis (gangsters); 1.4 is the average number of corrective rapes of lesbians reported per day in Cape Town alone.4 The practice aims to “put [lesbians] right” (Sam 1995, 186) and to coerce women into heterosexual relationships, thereby pointing to “the naturalization of heterosexuality” (Abelove, Barale, and Harper 1993, 229). In the process a lot of lesbians contract HIV, which is more than the dreaded acronym conveys at first sight, since it also opens a portal to the

4



See the protest on YouTube, Action against Corrective Rape, Cape Town, South Africa. May 15, 2011. 4.07 mins. Presented by Joburg Pride.

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 43 unprecedented discussion of sexuality amidst South African academic, reli‐ gious and political circles. Like the majority of female African autobiographers, Nkunzi Zan‐ dile Nkabinde (2008) in Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma conveys her experiences via an amanuensis, that is, a person who transcribes from dictation. As in anthropological discourse, in which the generally western anthropologist relies on a “native” informant, Nkabinde’s tall tale was recorded by Melody Emmet, who helped her “tell [her] story”, part of which had already been entrusted to US‐trained South African an‐ thropologist, Ruth Morgan, in an interview for a volume Morgan co‐edited with Dutch activist Saskia Wieringa, Tommy‐Boys and Ancestral Wives (Wieringa and Morgan 2005). The African Women’s Life Story project be‐ hind this book provided an opportunity to train women activists from dif‐ ferent African countries to carry out research on the double oppression of lesbian women by local African patriarchal systems. The Human Rights‐ori‐ ented workshops within that project covered traditional forms of women’s same‐sex relations ranging from oumapanga or motsoalle or female bond‐ ing, “mummy‐baby” relationships, and women marriages, to transgender and same‐sex identified healers (Wieringa and Morgan 2005, 13). In this activist context facilitated by the Gay and Lesbian Archives (GALA), directed by Ruth Morgan, and the African Lesbian Alliance,5 Nka‐ binde was not only interviewed, but she also collected interviews of fellow‐ sangomas. Experiential accounts can be voiced orally or committed down to writing, or both. Nkabinde’s task was facilitated by her insider‐status as a sangoma, who could be trusted by her peers, even with the obtrusiveness of the recording of an audiotape between taper and taped. Nkabinde’s work is part of the post‐1994 forays into the lives of same‐sex‐identified women traditional healers such as, for example, the interviews already carried out by Morgan and Reid (2003) and the 2000 film documentary, Everything Must Come to Light, by the late South African gay activist and film maker Mpumi Njinge and Paolo Albertyn (Njinge and Albertyn 2000). In the very title of Nkabinde’s autobiography, Black Bull, Ancestors and Me (Nkabinde 2008), the “I” is relegated to the last position, with Black Bull and Ancestors preceding her access to the presumed selfhood behind

5



It was renamed CAL or, the Coalition of African Lesbians in Namibia in 2004.

44 CHANTAL ZABUS the UDHR’s “human personality”. The subtitle, “My Life as a Lesbian San‐ goma”, with its autobiographical amplification of “my life”, complicates the already oxymoronic conflation of “lesbian” with its culture‐specific redo‐ lence in the history of western sexuality and the Zulu word, sangoma, which points to the traditional art of healing. Black Bull is a transgender narrative which slowly transitions into a transsexual narrative. As a “male woman”, Nkabinde is “possessed” by a male dominant ancestor, Nkunzi or the “Black Bull” of the title, after her great‐uncle’s totemic self‐designation. The intercessory male ancestor val‐ idates her female masculinity as well as her choice of an “ancestral wife” or female sexual partner. Of note is that the phrase “ancestral wife” was coined by Morgan and Reid (2003, 378–79) to refer to women who marry female sangomas, but the Zulu original word for “wife”—unkosikazi or umfazi or the etymon umka—remains unattested. Nkabinde belongs with Thai “gen‐ der‐robbers”,6 in that she believes that she has been “called” by her male ancestor and is possessed by him. In one of her dreams, conceived as com‐ municating tools between the Amathwasa or “trainees”, the spirits, and the spiritual mother who runs the training school,7 Nkabinde sees herself as a being with male genitals desiring her female trainer. In another dream, she cross‐dresses as a Zulu bridegroom about to marry a bashful bride. As Nka‐ binde puts it, Nkunzi “uses [her] body”, privileging “the back of [her] body [. . .] up [her] spine” (2008, 54) when communicating with her, as if mount‐ ing her from behind. The “human personality” of Nkabinde takes on a spectral quality when mediated via that of her intercessory ancestor, Nkunzi, whose male gender is compounded by the coding of healing as masculine; sangomas are referred to by the reverential Zulu accolade of “baba” (meaning “father”). The “human personality” of Nkabinde is therefore doubly constructed as male. Her ancestral wife calls Nkabinde “a modern husband” (2008, 153– 54), who fulfills the conventionally accepted male duties of being the bread‐ winner and protector, thereby reinvigorating dominant/submissive for‐ mations. Black Bull endorses not only Nkabinde’s “female masculinity”, and therefore the exclusive association of sexuality with masculinity, but also the male privileges that are paired with it and continue to be a source of

6 7



From the Thai language, lakkapheet, meaning “transvestitic/transgender, to steal another’s pheet—sex/gender”. (Sinnott 2004, Glossary). For more detail on dreams, see Mlisa (2009, 114).

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 45 oppression for women in that such privileges inhibit or limit their empow‐ erment and agency. Born in Soweto, the South Western Townships of the City of Johan‐ nesburg in 1976, the year of the Soweto riots following the Apartheid gov‐ ernment’s policy to enforce education in Afrikaans on Black high school stu‐ dents, Nkabinde speaks of her fated birth. She was born into a family that already had two daughters and expected the third progeny to be “a son to carry forward [the father’s] name” (Nkabinde 2008, 4). Her mother miscar‐ ried her first born, a son, while his twin, Nkabinde, survived, which earned her the name “increase” in Zulu (6).8 Nkabinde construes her survival as a spiritual sign from her Amadlozi or ancestors; she is told that she “resem‐ ble(s) [her] father” (9) and, as of age six, practices various forms of cross‐ dressing. She is sexually abused at age eight by her uncle and then by a neighbor’s son, when living at her grandfather’s on a kraal or homestead in KwaZulu‐Natal. Memories of these early experiences, during which she “couldn’t scream” and “collapsed” (28, 29) came back in fragments after she finished school, as in a narrative of post‐traumatic stress disorder. Like many female autobiographers before her who have under‐ gone a form of bodily violation, Nkabinde has fixed and claimed, through her writing, the experience of delayed recall, in the way that adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse remember, through psychotherapy, their trau‐ matic past after years of silence and secrecy. Her “confession” to her aman‐ uensis thus acts as a kind of psychotherapy, as these aberrant memories left her “not in a clear light about [her] sexuality” (Nkabinde 2008, 29), sexual abuse as a child reinforcing rather than creating her nascent female mascu‐ linity. Nkabinde self‐identifies as a “tomboy” (23) in childhood; at 13, as a “lesbian”, which is a word she has to look up in a dictionary; and later as a “butch”; she has adopted this imported word to describe her preference for sexual dominance without calling her “ancestral wife” a femme. However, she concedes that she is not opposed to being visited by a female spirit even though such a visitation is equated with menstruation. Her late menses at age 18 also moves Nkabinde beyond sexual dimorphism. She writes: “I have never learned to cope with menstruation or with having breasts. I have never bound my breasts but my breasts are a part of my body that I don’t

8



In the informal interview Nkunzi Nkabinde granted me on May 27, 2016 in her home in Protea Glen, Soweto (Johannesburg), the word used was “surpass”, which has more positive connotations.

46 CHANTAL ZABUS like. If I was rich, I would have an operation to remove my breasts” (19). Her contemplation of one day undergoing mastectomy moves her narrative of transgendered “possession” by a dominant male ancestor into the realm of the transsexual narrative, which is, however, not discursively acted out in her autobiography. Along the lines of western skirmishes between FTMs and butch theorists, Nkabinde, at the time of publishing her autobiography, could be called a “butch” and even a “stone butch” on account of her giving pleasure to her ancestral wife, but never allowing her partner to reciprocate that pleasure. 9 If one looks at Nkabinde from an FTM perspective, the stone butch becomes a pre‐FTM whereas, if one theorizes Nkabinde as a butch, as Halberstam holds for western texts, “the stone butch becomes a nonsurgi‐ cal and non‐hormonal version of transgender identification” (Halberstam 1998, 148). Nkabinde in the 2000s may be said to occupy a grey zone be‐ tween the stone butch and the pre‐FTM, and a then picture by South African visual activist Stevenson Zanele Muholi confirms that she had not, at the time, undergone a mastectomy. Through her female masculinity and her then butch status, the Nkabinde of Black Bull, Ancestors and Me acknowledges that she is “defi‐ nitely two people” (2008, 155–56), possibly a “two‐spirit” person, the translation of niizh manitoog, the northern Algonquian term in vogue since 1990 in Canada, to reflect the First Nations’ distrust of the colonial nature of many North American LGBTQ movements. Cherokee critic and Two‐ Spirit activist, Quo‐Li Driskill (2010), has built theoretical alliances be‐ tween Native American and queer studies, but also environmental justice and traditional knowledges based on a “sovereign erotic” in an attempt to “heal historical trauma and as a tool in decolonial [sic] struggles” (73). Erot‐ ics rather than spirituality can here become central to Indigenous re‐ sistance, which is predicated on the recognition of multiple genders, and returns us to Gilbert Herdt’s idea of a “third sex, third gender”, or what Will Roscoe (1996) terms, in his study of Zuñi berdaches, “a third process rather than a third category” (341, 356). Nkabinde thus operates at the juncture between a troika of core identities, lesbian, transgender/Two‐Spirit, and

9



The expression “stone butch” was popularized after the publication of pre‐ Stonewall novel by transgender activist Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (1993).

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 47 sangoma, while her narrative of spiritual questing merges with the west‐ ern‐style coming‐out narrative and the transsexual autobiography, imbued with Human Rights. Black Bull is visually linked with Human Rights as it boasts a black‐ and‐white picture inside revealing the “butch” with shaven head dressed in dark trousers girdled with a leather belt, a leather jacket, and a man’s shirt. Nkabinde proudly holds on to a railing at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, the seat of the Constitutional New Court of South Africa, which was for‐ merly a Fort Prison, built by the Boers to hold British captives. In the back‐ ground one can distinguish the picture of Mahatma Gandhi, who spent some 20 years in South Africa, and was imprisoned in the Old Fort in 1906. Nkabinde claims Constitution Hill as a site of anti‐imperialism but also of Human Rights, allowing gays and lesbians “to marry legally” (Nkabinde 2008, 153), were she to envisage a marital union with her ancestral wife in the Rainbow Nation. Nkabinde’s then claim has presently taken on an extra political di‐ mension in that he now works at Constitution Hill in the LGBTI Unit. The time gap between the publication of Black Bull, Ancestors and Me in 2008 and this new activism within a legal context allowed for his transitioning process. Nkabinde has indeed undergone hormonal treatment and then a mastectomy at Bara Hospital in Soweto; he is now, by his own reckoning, a trans man while awaiting further surgery. Now renamed Nkunzi Zaen Nka‐ binde, he lives with his ancestral wife (who is different from the one in the 2008 autobiography but is likewise a sangoma), divides his life between his practice as a trainer of sangomas and his work at Constitution Hill, and has asked the Administration for his identity card to match his recovered iden‐ tity.10 Transgenderism, rather than gayness in the immediate post‐Apart‐ heid period, therefore comes across as the new litmus test for ascertaining the “modernity” of the new South African transnation. This enactment is arguably a heavy burden to bear for any “human personality”, whether a Robinson Crusoe or a Friday.

10



I am most grateful to Nkunzi Zaen Nkabinde for entrusting me with this infor‐ mation while I visited him and his wife in Soweto, Johannesburg on 27 May 2016. A change of names, however, is possible in South Africa without having undergone SRS or Sex Reassignment Surgery. The interpretation of this infor‐ mation is my own.

48 CHANTAL ZABUS Zandile Nkabinde’s Black Bull is part of the research which Zulu fe‐ male sangoma Mkasi Lindiwe (2013) tapped in order to carry out her “queer analysis of same‐sex relationships amongst female traditional heal‐ ers” (ii) in Kwa‐Ngcolosi and rural Inanda in Durban, KwaZulu‐Natal, 11 while building on Van Klinken and Gunda’s study of the role of African women theologians in addressing the issue of homosexuality as “an issue of inclusive gender justice” (Van Klinken and Gunda 2012, 119) against a tense legal background. Out of the three types of sangomas, according to Pretorius’s terminology—“diviners”; “faith healers”; and “herbalists” (1999, 251; quoted by Lindiwe 2013, 22)—the latter group clashed with the Doctors for Life International on account of the lack of trust in “the effi‐ cacy of traditional remedies” or umuthi (Lindiwe 2013, 22). Yet, in the 2004 Bill passed to regulate the work of sangomas and offering them protection, these remedies were endorsed by the South African Medical Association and the Traditional Healers Organization (THO). Such clashes between Hu‐ man‐Rights factions and THO do not affect the popularity of the 200,000 sangomas who are consulted by 70 percent of the South African population. “Changing the dress code” (Berglund 1976, 136) as a form of cross‐ dressing among sangomas is accepted as part of the ceremony of teaching ukubhula or “divination” which involves other rituals like drinking Zulu beer and goat and chicken blood. Most participants in Lindiwe’s study ac‐ cepted this form of ritualistic cross‐dressing as well as clarifying “the exist‐ ence of female traditional healers and same‐sex relationships in terms of spirit possession” (Lindiwe 2013, 36). However, the reasons evoked by the female sangomas for being in same‐sex relationships was that “heterosex‐ ual sex is regarded as unclean and can weaken the medicine” (Phiri 2006, 163), or a preference for “being part of a polygamous household” (Lindiwe 2013, 38). The same‐sex relationship between two sangomas is given a lin‐ guistic twist, for if a dominant male ancestor possessing a female sangoma causes her to be patriarchal and make her ancestral wife submissive, “these relationships are perceived to be male‐female relationships rather than same‐sex relationships” (40), further complicating the “sexual orientation” clause in the New Constitution.

11



It was part of her co‐supervisors’ (Apawo‐Phiri and Nadar’s) project, “Broken Women ‐ Healing Traditions? Indigenous Resources for Gender Critique and Social Transformation in the context of HIV”.

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 49 Although most of these aspects have been covered by Zandile Nka‐ binde in Black Bull, Lindiwe’s contribution to the debate lies in her targeting Christianity and African traditional religion in oppressing gender‐variant individuals. One recalls that Costas Douzinas had announced “the end of human rights”, the death of God and His replacement by international law as well as the return of Human Rights to the tradition of resistance and struggle against the advice of the preachers of moralism, suffering human‐ ity and humanitarian philanthropy” (2000, 293). Yet, “God” is still very much alive in African Independent Churches (AICs) in South Africa. Through her focus group discussions and in‐depth interviews, Lindiwe demonstrates that homosexuality is associated with demon possession and that AICs are instrumental in setting up an anti‐homosexual arsenal com‐ prising the use of prayers and “cure”, which, if unsuccessful, results in ex‐ communication. A participant in Kwa‐Ngcolosi, who faced rejection, said: “I just drink (alcohol) to forget about it all” (quoted in Lindiwe 2013, 34). This kind of testimonial oral narrative links up with Human Rights when some rejects from the AICs join “a Pentecostal Church which claims to accommo‐ date lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender (LBGT) in Durban” (51), thereby slotting the AIC reject into one of these categories. Parker and Aggleton (1999) have cautioned that although African communities are aware of same‐sex relationships, “they do not understand the concept of homosexuality” (22). In that regard, Lindiwe’s own transla‐ tion of western concepts is fascinating: i. Lesbian—A female sangoma who is possessed by a female spirit; ii. Bisexual—A female sangoma who is possessed by a female and a male spirit; iii. Transgender—A female sangoma who is possessed by a male (authoritative) spirit, or vice‐versa; iv. Hermaphrodite—A sangoma with both sexual organs” (2013, 48). One notes that the word “transgender” is preferred over the word “gay” to describe the counterpart of a “lesbian” sangoma. Confusion reigns when the participants themselves claim “to be lesbian one day, the next day . . . bisexual; the following day . . . transgender” (quoted in Lindiwe 2013, 56), thereby confirming what the American Psychological Association



50 CHANTAL ZABUS (2011) had intuited, i.e. that “sexual orientation could occur on a contin‐ uum” and is “fluid for some people”. More largely, this post‐Apartheid boom of published “narrated lives”, which in western contexts resulted from the advent of Human Rights and emanated from historically marginalized individuals (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 13) highlights the connection between spirituality and transgender and/or homosexual identities. More specifically, the “narrated lives” of these FTM Fridays also reveal that African words and European, imported terms to refer to sexualities, including transsexual sexualities, are often at odds. The issue of language crops up again in a Zulu novel by Nakanjani Sibiya, a prolific IsiZulu short‐story writer and the author of plays and one debut novel, Kuxolelwa Abanjani? (2003). Published in 2008, his second novel Bengithi Lizokuna (I Thought It Would Rain)12 is contemporaneous with Nkabinde’s Black Bull in addressing the deregulation of masculinity and in creating narrative spaces for expressing new masculinities (Reid and Walker 2005, 1–20; Mathonzi and Mazibuko 2011, 300). As Sibiya (2008) writes in Zulu: “Unbunkonkoni bugqame kakhulu enkathini yamanje. Nanonma babekhona abantu ababengaqondakali kuqala kwakulukhini ukuphumea obala. Manje umuntu usephumela nje obala aziveze ukuthi uyinkonkoni” (166).13 The word uyinkonkoni (from inkohnkoni) also trans‐ lates as the South African male wildebeest or gnu, famous for mounting other males. Uyinkonkoni, like istabane, refers to the misnomer “hermaph‐ rodite”, which, surprisingly, covers lesbianism, gayness, and transgender. For instance, Thandazo Alice Kunene saw the word “lesbian” for the first time in a magazine and vague rumors about stabanes became clearer: “I knew that logically I couldn’t be stabane because that is a hermaphrodite, someone with both male and female genitals” (quoted in Sam 1995, 188), thereby giving the imported word “lesbian” positive associations with lib‐ eration movements and media acting as triggers of visibility. However, Sibiya here reappropriates ikonkoni (lit: “deviation”) to refer to a “gay”

http://www.literarytourism.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti‐ cle&id=259:nakanjani‐sibiya&catid=13:authors&Itemid=28 13 “Male gayness is very common these days. Though in the past there were peo‐ ple who were suspected of being gay, it was difficult for them to come out. To‐ day gay people easily reveal their orientation”. Many thanks to Joan Hambidge for helping with double‐checking this translation. 12



WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 51 male, which he uses to supplant the derogatory isiZulu words, isitabane and ungqingili, also spelled uncukumbili, to refer to a person who is intersexed and identified as a homosexual. Matters come to a head when in Sibiya's second novel, Bengithi Lizokuna, the son Mhlengi, who has come out to his father as “gay”, envis‐ ages an expensive sex change operation in order to perfect his liberation— “wayezizwa ekhululekile ngaphakathi” (Sibiya 2008, 12) 14 and as MTF Mahlengi envisages being able to love men as a woman. The Zulu novel is probably the first Indigenous African narrative mode to address gender variance. However, testimonies, such as those collected by Lindiwe, shed light on what the Indigenous narratives attempt to convey while awaiting translation in English and other languages. Another participant from Ntuzuma in Lindiwe’s study testifies that “when my husband was not around I took local girls and slept with them in his bed. I would be very happy knowing that I would have my girlfriends over” (quoted in Lindiwe 2013, 37). The Lindiwe interviews reveal the secrecy in which same‐sex re‐ lationships are shrouded and by lifting that veil of secrecy, she contributes to the visibility of same‐sex practices in a country where they are legally protected but stigmatized by ordinary citizens who, however, tolerate the fact that, in a Zulu context, “sangomas are expected to change roles, their gender is not fixed” (14). Does it mean then that to validate one’s sexual dissidence one has to join a spiritual cult? Already Mlisa had distinguished between bona fide Zulu sangomas who have received, like Nkabinde, the “calling” or ukuthwasa and have un‐ dergone “a personal journey of sorts” culminating in ukuphothula or “grad‐ uation”, and those sangomas who have gone through a period of “training” or ukuthwala only (Mlisa 2009, 114, 163). In Hungochani, historian Marc Epprecht (2004) provides an Appendix of sample interviews in Zimbabwe for the Gay Oral History Project, February‐June 1998. In one such interview, Tina Machida, an elderly male n’anga or traditional healer recounts: “if it’s a man who is gay, the brother would sleep with the wife so as to have chil‐ dren, and the community will never know the truth”. Now that the new, Hu‐ man‐Rights‐oriented generation has brought the ngochani issue out into the open, some of the gays and lesbians, who fear stigmatization, pretend to be “traditional healers with the opposite sex of a spirit medium”. In his

14



“He felt free inside” (Google Translation, accessed October 17, 2015).

52 CHANTAL ZABUS own practice as n’anga, this healer teaches “some gays and lesbians” to be herbalists, but charges them a fee “because it’s different from having a real spirit medium. Still, they will be welcomed in the traditional healers’ circle because of their knowledge of herbs, despite their sexual orientation” (Ep‐ precht 2004, 248–49). Ngochani in ChiShona is translated as “homosexual” 15 but it has come to designate more largely msm (men who have sex with men) or wsw (women who have sex with women), themselves new acronyms used in ep‐ idemiology and HIV‐AIDS‐related literature. The word ngochani is also rooted in a specific linguistic history, as it is an import from the South Afri‐ can, often Bantu, mining milieus where intergenerational and initiatory male‐male marriages take place between the “boss‐boys” or “hubbies” (in‐ dunas or injongas) and their “boy‐wives” or “girlfriends” (picannins, tinton‐ kanas, skesanas) (see Zabus 2013, 35–43). These “mine‐marriages” involve various degrees of cross‐dressing and transgenderism and point to the dif‐ ference in Human Rights‐with‐a‐difference. There is therefore more to it than the “gays and lesbians” ritualistically initiated to mediumship by our elderly Zimbabwean n’anga. Outside of Africa, to provide only one example, Des hommes et des dieux (Of Men and Gods), a 2006 Franco‐Québécois film documentary by Lescot and Magloire, posits that all Haitian transgender masisis, translated as “homosexuals” and “transvestites”, have embraced voodoo because the religion is hospitable to gender variance. To complicate matters, the regulation of transgenderism through spirit mediumship is also compounded by another type of regulation through activism. Until oral history projects yielded plays like After Nines! by South African Robert Colman (1998), transgender people had been featured in “didactic” film documentaries such as Woubie Chéri (1998), set in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, or Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free (2000), set in small town South Africa. Trans, a 2009 collection of South African narratives by and about trans people, falls into this new trend in “narrating lives”. For our purpose, it features the story of young male sangoma, Tebogo, “My Ancestor Was Living Through Me”, which parallels Nkabinde’s Black Bull up to his sex reassignment surgery (SRS). Growing up as a girl in Pretoria, Tebogo quickly dissociated from the “lesbians” at school and thought of himself as a “transie” before being

15



See http://vashona.com/dictionary/sna/ngochani. Accessed October 18, 2015.

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 53 diagnosed at the age of 14 as a pseudo‐sangoma and passing as male among traditional healers, who deem he has “inherited [his] masculine ways from [his] ancestors, who were also male” (Morgan, Marais and Wellbeloved 2009, 121). OUT, the Pretoria‐based LGBT Well‐Being Association founded in 1994, then introduced Tebogo to the term “transsexual” as well as to “gender disorder identity” (GID) (Tebogo 2009, 123, 124). Tebogo then picks up the phrase “sex change” from an interview with an FTM on The Oprah Show and after hormone treatment, undergoes a mastectomy, an oo‐ phorectomy and a hysterectomy, which makes his narrative as a trans man part ways with the non‐surgical transgender Nkabinde of Black Bull, Ances‐ tors and Me. Yet, like Nkunzi Zaen Nkabinde, Tebogo Nkoana will take ac‐ tivism to new heights by at first working as an outreach officer for Gender‐ DynamiX, a human rights organization in Cape Town, and later launching and then directing TIA, Transgender and Intersex in Africa, outside Preto‐ ria. Tebogo’s successful story is, however, toned down by other stories of gender‐variant individuals, who depending on where they are “on the scale” (Joy in Morgan, Marais and Wellbeloved 2009, 134), remain stuck in transition or, to misappropriate Gordimer’s words, in this “interregnum of identities”, for lack of funding and appropriate guidance and may resort to prostitution. In moving from the autobiographical “I” behind “the human per‐ sonality” to a communal “we”, Tebogo and Nkabinde gesture, through their activism, towards the building of a “transgender nation” within the South African nation‐state. One can legitimately wonder whether trans individu‐ als can access rights without ineluctably becoming staunch advocates of these rights. But Tebogo’s activism, however coercive it may have been at first, has engendered other narratives or enabled other fictions. Such is the case with MTF Kgaogelo, who met Tebogo, whose “words really gave [her] courage”: “I had accepted the fact that we are different and I also came to understand the difference between transgender and gay” (quoted in Mor‐ gan, Marais and Wellbeloved 2009, 54). This testimony emanates from someone whom “gogos” (isiZulu for “grandmothers”) would call ngwanin‐ yana (Sepedi for “little girl”), was called “gay”; and yet “felt like a moffie or isitabane”, that is, respectively “a derogatory Afrikaans word for gay peo‐ ple” or “a derogatory isiZulu word for gays and lesbians, meaning ‘her‐ maphrodite’ or ‘intersexed person’” (Morgan, Marais and Wellbeloved 2009, 52). Moreover, the very use of “gay” in South Africa is susceptible to



54 CHANTAL ZABUS a category crisis, as a South African “masculine man” playing the dominant role in a relationship with another man is called “a straight man” (Nkabinde 2008, 126) and “some women self‐identify as gay women rather than lesbi‐ ans” (Morgan, Marais and Wellbeloved 2009, 5). This recoding into western jargon shows that even if the partners in traditional relational nexuses increasingly align themselves transnation‐ ally and even transglobally with Euro‐American sexual politics, phrases like “lesbian men” or “male lesbians” reveal a certain level of translational un‐ easiness and possibly the incommensurability of African same‐sex. Con‐ trary to what the famed sexual orientation clause intimates, it appears that lesbian sangomas and their ancestral wives are not united in a common identity based on a shared sexual orientation, but rather are distinguished from each other according to gender difference, complicated by spirituality. On August 5, 2008, after her book came out, Nkabinde told her audience about her coming out to her mother but does not use the word “lesbian”; instead she speaks of having “feelings for other women”.16 For their part, ancestral wives can only function in their relation to “male women”, the way “dees” (from the last syllable of the English word “lady”) function solely in their relation to “toms” (from “tomboys”) in Thailand. 17 Even though Nkabinde, unlike the Thai tom, translates her initial gender identity in Back Bull, Ancestors and Me into “tomboy”, “lesbian” and “butch”, and later into trans man, the Zulu label tagged onto her ancestral wife, like the Thai term “dee”, falls off the grid of a global, translational vocabulary so that ancestral beliefs and local naming practices often vie with western‐influenced par‐ lance for the ownership of African sexualities. Read against this grid, the couple lesbian sangoma/ancestral wife is therefore asymmetrical and may reflect the clash between pre‐industrial or “traditional” modes of thought and new, transnational imaginings, as they are augured in the sangoma cou‐ pling between a “wife” and a male woman or trans man. In legal terms, Tiwonge Chimbalanga Kachepa and Steven Monjeza Soko were arrested in Malawi on charges including “gross indecency” and

16 17



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLlB‐HiEt00; accessed October 7, 2015. Thai toms are capable (khlong‐tua) biological women who protect and perform sexually for dees or female partners, without toms and dees being thought of as “lesbians”; “toms and dees both generally disdain the term ‘lesbian’ and its sex‐ ual and homosexual connotations” (Sinnott 2004, 29).

WRITING TRANSGENDERISM AND HUMAN‐RIGHTS‐WITH‐A‐DIFFERENCE 55 were sentenced to 14 years’ hard labor until they received presidential par‐ don in the wake of UN Secretary‐General Ban Ki Moon’s visit to the country in 2009. While the courts defined the couple as “gay”, Tiwonge, one half of the couple, identified herself as “a woman”. 18 In Senegal, Jupiter Tamsir Ndiaye, a journalist and employee of UNESCO, was sentenced to a four‐year prison sentence (later shrunk to six months) in Dakar without parole in Oc‐ tober 2012 for having gay sex and causing bodily harm to his partner Matar Diop Diagne, who was also sentenced for committing “acts against nature” according to article 319. The Senegalese Court passed such a severe judg‐ ment because of the public outcry, the widespread moral panic, and anti‐ gay rhetoric. To the director of Human Rights within the Senegalese Ministry of Justice Moustapha Seye’s plea for more leniency, Imam Baba Sow, a promi‐ nent Muslim cleric responded: “the place of homosexuals is in hell”. The so‐ cial and religious pressure intensified so much that Ndiaye’s lawyer and family refused Human Rights organizations’ help, and Ndiaye is said to be “repenting for his sins” (Littauer 2012a); in October 2015 he was evacuated from the prison hospital for being “very ill”.19 Speaking with Gay Star News, Omar Kuddus, an openly gay Muslim LGBT rights advocate based in the UK said: “The Imam’s statements further show that persecution of gay Senega‐ lese does not stop even when they are imprisoned” (Littauer 2012a). It also shows that, paradoxically, Human Rights advocates can exacerbate a situa‐ tion and further help stigmatize the victim, thereby pointing, as Douzinas has done, to the double‐edged dimension of Human Rights which can act as instruments of imperialism in the employ of the nation‐state or as their very opposite, the enablers of transnational governance beyond the nation‐ state. The Indian Supreme Court ruled in April 2014 to recognize hijras (ancestral "eunuchs") and transgender individuals as a "third gender"; the transgender bill was implemented in July 2016. In October 2014 in Kenya, MTF Audrey Mbugua won a court case to have the "M" on her identity card

18

R v Soko and Kachepa, Case 359/2009, Blantyre Magistrates’ Court, May 20, 2010; MWHC 2 http://www.malawilii.org; and in Viljoen 2012, 261. 19 “Gravement malade Tamsir Jupiter Ndiaye évacué à l’hôpital principal.” 2015. Seneweb.com, October 9. http://www.seneweb.com/news/People/grave‐ ment‐malade‐tamsir‐jupiter‐ndiaye‐e_n_165530.html



56 CHANTAL ZABUS changed to "F". In January 2013, Nepal's government started issuing citi‐ zenship certificates with the category "third gender" for people who do not wish to be identified as male or female. In 2013, Australian passports started displaying three categories of sex: M for male, F for female, and X for indeterminate, unspecified or intersex. Similarly, a New Zealand pass‐ port may now be issued in an applicant's preferred sex/gender, without the need to amend these details on his/her birth or citizenship record. In addi‐ tion to the already spelled out Clause 9 (3) of the South African Bill of Rights, Clause 9 (5) further makes clear that “discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair”. Moreover, “gender” and “sexual orientation” to refer to the sex of those to whom one is sexually attracted are here conceived as two separate “grounds” that do not take into account “gender identity” to refer to one’s sense of oneself as male, female or transgender. Neither does it take into account the difference inherent in “gender” as a multidimen‐ sional category of personhood and transgender as the sum of practices of embodiment that cross or transcend normative boundaries of gender. How‐ ever, the narrated lives of South African trans individuals faced with the global regulation of sexuality point to the relative failure of the current Con‐ stitution to encompass local homosexualities and transgenderism based on preexisting cultural patterns of other ways of expressing sexual desire. The South African narrative of transgenderism is therefore in transition.

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Human Rights After the Human Being per se: Narration and Numbers in Net-centric War Mike Hill The battle narrative is a full‐blown battle in the cognitive dimen‐ sion of the information environment, just as traditional warfare is fought in the physical domains (air, land, sea, space, and cyber‐ space). (US Joint Forces Command 2010, xiii) The key term for my purposes in this chapter on human rights, nar‐ rative, and net‐centric warfare is, perhaps surprisingly, neither "cogni [tion]", "information", or "physical domains" (including here: "cyber"), nor is it even "warfare" itself. Rather, to find a term that encompasses all of these and alludes to the complex interconnections between them in what goes by the name "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), the term I have in mind: "full‐blown". Or, if you put the irony of the word "blown" to the side (21st‐century war doctrine is also “full” of irony), the word "full" is suitable all on its own. That is because the episodes, or better, the technologies of war—I say, technologies in the sense that war is increasingly dependant on computationally based applications of power—have reached a sense of "full[ness]" so full that war is changing everything sacred to the project of modernity, which was never really very stable in itself. If, as Bruno Latour (1993) ventures to say, modernity was never modern, then I would follow up by saying: civil society, and all that comes with it with the name civil‐ ian—identity, rights, the human being per se—has not transcended its oc‐ culted partnership with violence. Instead, war in the “full” sense I want to discuss here is recogniza‐ ble and not within civilized existence depending on where you happen to be in relation to that string of civilian‐based enlightenment terms that I just lifted from Jürgen Habermas. The ambiguities of imperial achievement so effectively critiqued in the founding moves of postcolonial studies almost goes without saying. The freedoms on offer in the founding of the public sphere—novel and newspaper reading, a sense of the citizen's rights, and not least, access to capital—were in their inception (and after) enjoyed by a relative few. Habermas ([1962] 1991) is absolutely honest about this. And 61

62 MIKE HILL depending on your frame of geo‐political scale, from the 18th century for‐ ward the paradox of what might be called unequal equality has been, and still is, humanity's defining contradiction. That enlightenment's promises are, at best, "unfinished", as Habermas insists—or we could say worse, are a shill for so much inequality and violence—is inarguable given the current conditions of neo‐liberal governance. To cite Etienne Balibar (2004), after Wendy Brown (2003) and contra Habermas's ([1962] 1991) faith in the re‐ turn to the modernity that never was, the current moment might be char‐ acterized as "de‐democratic". This is not the same as to use the term: anti‐ democratic. The prefix de‐ should more precisely signify the antimony within liberal concepts of civil society, already there at its inception, such that enlightenment values like individuality, community, and human rights are being disintegrated from within the tradition that founded them. There is a kind of annihilation of the human being per se, that subtends the neo‐ liberal way of making war and of applying violence even—or better, espe‐ cially—when war occurs as it does in the 21st century on humanistic terms. Or so I want to argue in my analysis of the RMA. Before getting there, consider Joseph Slaughter's (2007) challeng‐ ing observation in Human Rights, Inc. (and by extension, his essay in the current volume) that "the contemporary international conditions of human rights" proceeded in the post‐World War II era—and indeed, as an exten‐ sion of the consequences of total war—alongside a "global increase of hu‐ man rights violation". More disturbingly than that, "human rights [. . .] tri‐ umph in their apparently banality and “have achieved [. . .] political hegem‐ ony in international affairs" in a "systemic, corporate, and institutional" form (2). Here Slaughter rightly puts the "Age of Human Rights" and the "Age of Human Rights Abuse" into their factual proximity (2). It is as if to suggest that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaimed by the United Nations (UN) in December of 1948, a moment accompanied closely by the Holocaust's condemning revelations, presented the double move of protection and annihilation. Rather than being opposite to the in‐ violable status of the human, such a move hinges on positing some humans as disposable (think here of Mike Davis's [2006] planet of slums; or cata‐ strophic climate change), while imaging some powerful group of others as survivors. Such a way of ordering the world marks a new defining split in the category of humanity as a species. We have declared a state of "world wide normativeness", in other words, at the same moment as we have at



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 63 least "tacit[ly] acknowledg[ed] th[e] failures" of liberalism in an updated and more sinister guise (Slaughter 2007, 15). An Amnesty International annual report of 2015 declares the pre‐ vious year an ultimate low in human rights: "From Washington to Damas‐ cus, from Abusa to Colombo, government leaders have justified horrific hu‐ man rights violations by talking of the need to keep the country safe", states the report. "In reality, the opposite is the case" (Common Dreams, 2015, n.p.). Millions of civilians were killed in 2014, while more than 50 million have been displaced. As of 2016, for the first time in human history, there are more than 65 million refugees (Prupis 2016, n.p.). Indeed, the five per‐ manent members of the UN Security Council—Britain, China, France, Rus‐ sia, and the US—are said by the Secretary General of Amnesty to "promote their political interest or geopolitical interest above the interest in protect‐ ing civilians" (Common Dreams, 2015, n.p.). The UN Human Rights Commit‐ tee itself gives the US a failing grade in the "protection of civil and political rights" (Zamani 2015, n.p.). Indeed, it ought also be noted that Barack Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a mere 12 days into his presidency, has failed to close Guantanamo Bay; has killed US citizens around the globe without due process; has suspended habeus corpus; and has terrorized villagers in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan with the omnipresent threat of weaponized drones. He has also authorized the sale of more arms globally than any president since World War II (Middle‐East‐ ern Eye 2016, n.p.). President Obama is the first President since World War I to use the Espionage Act, to prosecute individuals not attempting to assist a foreign government (Consortium News 2014, n.p.). The record thus de‐ clares to a half‐conscious western world that we have crossed a line beyond our own natural law tradition, a point from which we are now permitted to no longer even dream of having to return. Along the lines of Slaughter's work, though in a more sanguine fashion that would appeal to the counter‐insurgency operatives of our day, in the NATO‐funded volume, Intelligence and Human Rights, Steve Tsang highlights the intertwining of rights and war in a "new [post 9/11] era" within which "tolerance, respect for rights and dignity" fit comfortably un‐ der the heading of military security. "The high standards of [. . .] liberal rhet‐ oric" can be effectively applied as a form of Human Intelligence (HUMNIT), "the most effective or suitable instrument to counter global terrorism" (2007, i; x). "Enhanced security through better intelligence and protecting



64 MIKE HILL human rights everywhere are not mutually exclusive", one contributor to the NATO volume writes: "On the contrary, they must be made to comple‐ ment each other" (De Graaff 2011, 5). It is an apt observation in a letter of protest by more than 100 scholars and activists against the prominent agency Human Rights Watch (funded by a $100 million dollar gift from George Soros) that it operates with a revolving door policy in employing former members of the CIA. This "calls into question the independence of the agency", which according to the letter, effectively supports "the illegal practice of transferring terrorism suspects around the planet" (Kinzer 2014, 1), and exaggerates human rights abuse reports against countries that oppose neo‐liberal doctrine, like Venezuela, while overlooking them for US allies like Honduras. In a time of “de‐centralized” or “net‐centric” war, where human rights are a moveable feast, where non‐state actors are a primary threat, and where crime and war have mingled one within the other, human rights become security's tradecraft. The title of a book by Brad Evans (2013) thus offers the term: "lib‐ eral terror". His companion terms, taken from Ignatiev (2003), "empire [sic] lite", and "humanitarian empire", further emphasize the complicated rela‐ tionship between rights and security, violence and civil society, peace and war, that Slaughter delineates from the UDRH forward, and that postcolo‐ nial studies has uncovered going back to modernity's 17th‐ and 18th‐cen‐ tury origins. Even Habermas supported the suspension of the law and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (Evans 2013, 9). Neo‐liberalism as such is a term for thinking about what Evans calls "an entirely new social morphology of life" (2013, 11). The moral horizon encompassing "human rights" and "the whole of humanity" extends now seamlessly and unapologetically to "the global security agenda" (43, 44, 47).1 The most challenging part of Evans's argument, and the part that is so useful for my purposes in naming the aspects of enlightened civil society that were once (too easily) presumed to be on the side opposing war— identity, culture, language—are subsumed in what is not just the preserva‐ tion of life for security's sake but also, beyond the question of how govern‐

1



Further on the 1990s connection between human rights and security, see Smith (2006).

HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 65 ment authorizes certain ways of living, to the way that populations are po‐ sitioned to die.2 We might call this a new bio‐militarism, or the warifica‐ tion—without limits—of the human beings and (or as?) non‐human matter alike. This conjunction between being and matter will be central to what I have to say later ABOUT the US Army's "Human Terrain Sytems" program (HTS) and how it is related to the more recent security front of Brain Ma‐ chine Interface (BMI) and war neuro‐science. (Perhaps you see this coming in the—again, unintentionally ironic—adjoining of the terms “human” and “terrain” in the very title of the Army program). Building on the work of Castells, Evans thus provokes us to consider neo‐liberal ways of making vi‐ olence immanent to sociability in the way death is now immanent to life, which is to say, as a kind of technologically supercharged epistemo‐military art. Neo‐"liberal terror" is becoming visible, he writes, "especially in the field of communication and biology [. . .] which alters our sense of space and time", and as such, designates "not simply a new form of social organiza‐ tion" but also a "new social morphology in which everything changes" (2013, 21). That word "everything" works nicely with my attention in the epigram to the word "full", as in "full‐blown battle". Evans puts on the table "a new science of life", one that stretches beyond Foucault's notion of bio‐ power, such that it "radically undermines spaces of fixed residency", and where "life itself is radically transformed" (21). Quoting from the RAND Corporation, whose mission is to offer research and analysis for the US armed services, "net‐centric" thinking—which I will suggest expresses the "full" reach of counterinsurgency (COIN) and brain‐machine interface—"is key to understanding all of life" (quoted in Evans 2013, 15; emphasis in original). The very concept of the network came from the neuro‐modeling of second generation cyberneticists associated with Warren McCulloch's theorization of biological inputs and outputs where the brain is conceived as a "combinatory total of nodes" (Dillon and Reid 2009, 68). In that sense, to quote Francois Jacob (1989), "biology belongs to the new age of the mechanism" (9). In this way of fostering "radical interconnectivity", and through this innovated proximity between biology and technology, quantitative

2



Further on Foucault and the war on terror, see Reid (2006).

66 MIKE HILL techniques that treat the world as so much calculable matter are in the pro‐ cess of replacing or superceding the qualitative ones we are used to having when we think, for example, of identity, culture or language, and this is no‐ where more apparent than in the US military's oscillation on the counterin‐ surgency front between "humanistic" enterprises. The so‐called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is revolutionary because it enjoins both culture and materiality, crosses and reverses courses between them. War today makes people into things, and gives things a life of their own. Such a hy‐ pothesis is akin to the paradoxical loop within humanistic discourse that I already introduced, which is nothing less totalizing than a kind of redraw‐ ing of the lines demarcating life from death. The more human we are, the more at risk; the greater the capacity we have to identify ourselves and oth‐ ers, the better suited we become as targets; the greater our capacities for diversity, the more efficiently state‐as‐military security functions; the citi‐ zen is always also a suspect, politicians unabashedly suggest; "see some‐ thing, say something", reads the billboard in the park; "freedom isn't free", or so the bumper sticker proclaims. In the rest of this chapter I want to argue more concretely that "freedom" is un‐"free" in the same way peace is now an extension of vio‐ lence, which is to say, on human terms that paradoxically annihilate what‐ ever humanity the species might have left with it. Thus again the unique extremity of violence here is less an issue of the high level of spectacle (though it is that too) than of war's unprecedented duration, the capacious‐ ness of war, the way violence under the heading of rights begins to morph (recalling Evans’s interest in morphological terror) the most basic features of contemporary life. According to Balibar on net‐centrism as a kind of po‐ litical heuristic, "no symmetric counter‐power or counter violence can be opposed that does not disseminate or worsen it (think of the case of the 'War on Terror'), pushing politics toward its own self‐destruction" (2015, 2; my emphasis). The rise of asymmetrical (read: "net‐centric") warfare on this order portends a new war‐reality that operates in unusual ways at the level of scale, category, and time: "compressing the kill‐chain", as COIN doc‐ trine says, such that war exists without fronts and with the full inclusion of ordinary life; such that citizenship and the distinctions between citizens be‐ come fluid demographic arrangements; and such that enemies are killed al‐ most before they are identified as such (Chamayou, 2014; Hill 2011). These



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 67 are the basic contours of what Derek Gregory (2001) aptly calls the "every‐ where war". And they are reframing as well as intensifying the antinomies of human rights. Terrorists with Stories Attached Terrorists come with little story attached—RAND Corporation. (Treverton 2011, 162) The following section of this chapter is counter to a long standing tradition that says the ability to have a story is part and parcel of existing safely within a juridically protected, rights‐based social order. We should again recall Habermas's influential connection, well known to literary scholars, between print culture—specifically focused on the realist novel— the rise of modern (bourgeois) subjectivity, and the penultimate accom‐ plishment of the reasoned‐based and consensus‐producing institution he endorses: a public sphere cleansed from affect, power, and violence (Ha‐ bermas [1962] 1991). Before getting to how those items are changing in the context of my COIN examples of human terrain systems and brain machine interface, let me stay closer to the connection between narrative and rights by alluding again to the important work done by Slaughter in this area. Without rehearsing his overview here, Slaughter has produced a fine and convincing account of (literary) narrative specialists and related social the‐ orists, ranging from Wayne Booth and Hayden White, to J. Hillis Miller, Bar‐ bara Harlow, and Rita Felski, all of whom consider more and less critical the relation between narrative and law as mutually supportive elements (one communicative, the other institutional) of a well‐functioning civil society. Slaughter writes, "the narrative turn in the social sciences and the ethical turn in the humanities [. . .] converged with [. . .] human rights and social justice" (2010, 207). Thus White, characteristically: "narrativity [. . .] pre‐ supposes the existence of a legal system against which or on behalf of which the typical agents of narrative militate" (quoted in Slaughter 2010, 212); and thus, more critically, Harlow remarks on the UDHR as following a "standard literary paradigm of individual versus society" (Slaughter 1997, 416; my emphasis). I emphasize the word "standard" both to highlight Slaughter's (and Harlow's) caveat regarding how the "individual versus so‐ ciety" relationship does not guarantee outcomes of real equality (to the



68 MIKE HILL contrary, individualism in its commercial form forbids it) and to suggest that there is nothing at all "standard" about how stories are assigned to ter‐ rorists in COIN. On the one hand, traditional models of human rights may swerve oppressively into "the homogenizing project of colonialism" (419), which makes the assimilated voice as desirable as it must be docile. On the other hand, more pertinent to the material I want to cover in this chapter, modern counter‐insurgency doctrine overtly rejects "homogenization" and, to the contrary, seeks stories of elevated difference—albeit tactically arranged—with an indefatigable emphasis on the fluid and the plural. So I am suggesting that we must rethink what is "standard" as much as what is "story", and more than that, must critically reemphasize the role of specific media technologies as they make available new relations between people, and relations between people and things, especially the predominately violent ones. I am thinking of course of net‐centric narrative, if such a thing is even possible, and it may not be, insofar as COIN‐technol‐ ogy turns story into data. This is to extend Slaughter's observation in this volume that "despite the enlightenment thought of presenting violence and narrative [. . .] as mutually exclusive alternatives [. . .] critical theory [. . .] regards narrative as enacting forms of violence" (25). Such revision must include a test about the "suppression of difference" by narrative remarked upon in early work from Armstrong and Tennenhouse, and consider the newly mediated proliferation of difference at capacities of scale that change not only how people are categorized one‐from‐the‐other, but change too in the larger category of the human being per se. Slaughter writes, our "pleas‐ ing humanist" faith "in the equation between life and narrative" is a "pre‐ carious" one, and that, with still more "cruel irony[. . .], the life‐narrative re‐ lay hinges on violence" (Slaughter this volume, 19). I should merely em‐ phasize that the "life‐narrative relay" may not only be "precarious" but for some it may be fatal. Thus at issue in the epigram above is not that terrorist stories ought to be erased but instead that their absence creates an oppositional vacuum, which military ethnology is happy enough to fill in. We are in a condition of net‐centric war where the center versus margin paradigm, in‐ deed, all traditional binaries, are shattered by a time of planetary margin‐ alization that awaits some new form of organization so far only realized (and projected) as terror. To quote the US National Security Strategy, in‐ stead of big armies with clearly demarcated front lines, we are now up



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 69 against "shadowy networks [. . .] that reach into every corner of the globe" (Bush 2002, 5). Let us go into the shadows now, and see how "stories" are— operationally speaking, as in the RAND‐inspired language—net‐centrically "attached". Let us examine some concrete examples of what I have called the antinomies of human rights. As I have stated, what the doctrinal literature calls a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) construes warfare differently than before. And this difference is what former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has expressed by recruiting the very concept "culture and people" as an instrument of geo‐ political conflict. The RMA depends upon mobilizing "multiple" sources of enmity according to a newly expanded logic of “network[ed]" conflictual grids. In the lexicon of the RMA, that term "multiple" signifies a turn to quantitative reasoning that, I would suggest, subsumes—or proposes to subsume—the qualitative aspects of cultural analysis that are invisible un‐ less they can be known by numbers through machines. The techno‐scien‐ tific recalculation of human populations has radical consequences for the way in which people are traditionally categorized insofar as population is offered up as a negotiable tactic of net‐centric warfare in the US Army's newly revised Counterinsurgency Field Manual (COIN) (2007). Drawn from the lessons of Napoleonic Spain, French Algiers, British Malaysia and other examples of empire's eventual failure, the Manual is both a tactical blue‐ book for combating urban insurgency and a sustained effort in critical race studies as war by other means. With its high dose of up to the minute social network theory, this is a post‐ postcolonial studies text: its purpose is to wage low‐intensity conflict within what it loosely calls the "global civil so‐ cieties" of our "host countries" and make "culture" a decisive "Area [of war] Operation" (or AO). Counterinsurgency operations are designed to focus on those paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions [that are necessary] to defeat insurgency" (Counterinsurgency Field Manual 2007, xxiii), and to place those AOs within the charge of US war tactics. COIN operations are thus designed to manipulate "identity‐focused insurgencies" (24; my emphasis) as "soft [ly]" re‐instrumentalized mechanisms of popu‐ lation control that—unlike past orders of liberal govermentality—do not presume to separate civil society practices with the strategies of war. Notably, the new counter‐inurgency Manual presumes that the sol‐ dier‐ethnographer's work in redrawing global systems of "racial" belonging "may not conform to historical facts [. . .] or may drastically simplify [them]



70 MIKE HILL (Counterinsurgency Field Manual 2007, 93; my emphasis). This aspect of the Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) program, which is the practical off‐ shoot of the new CFM, highlights a temporal dimension to "identity‐fo‐ cused" tactics of counter‐insurgency. History itself is placed at the service of war. Time being a more plastic feature of human experience in this sense, new levels of anthropological analysis take advantage (or seek to) of what can no longer be categorized with certainty. In that manner, culturally em‐ bedded violence is a keystone of so‐called "global civil society" where new technologies allow strategists to "create divisions between movement lead‐ ers and the mass base" (Counterinsurgency Field Manual 2007, 181). Com‐ manders can thus "seek [. . .] cleavages between groups [. . .] crosscutting ties between [them]; reinforcing or widening seams between [them]" (87). And as the HTS literature points out, the "cultural analyst" cum advance guard soldier should accordingly "gather, store, manipulate, and provide cultural data from hundreds of categories [that also] reaches back [. . .] to US academic sources" (Kipp 2006, 8; my emphasis). The "dynamics of identity politics and group loyalties" in this context are assumed to be "fluid, opaque, and variable across localities that counterinsurgents cannot afford to neglect [as part of] its legitimacy building tool kit" (14). What's being de‐ ployed here is an explicitly non‐normative conception of identity politics and on a scale—only calculable with the computational capacities of digital technology—that extends beyond nation‐based forms of self‐enumerated census tacking. The kinds of things that a good deal of cosmopolitan theory has celebrated over the last decade or so—hybridity, difference, trans‐cul‐ tural affiliation, etc.—are being used for military ends. Here again Slaughter's essay and my own in this volume intersect. Whereas Booth and Ricouer find a legalistic commitment to narrative", re‐ garding the "humanist equation [. . .] between life and narrative", the pre‐ sumption that having a story extends equivocally to the "right to life" is complicated by COIN's appropriation of narratology as an epistemic martial art (Slaughter, this volume, 20). Narrative has become a weapon, though a "softer" one, in the discourse of the HTS, and its effectiveness is realized according to the increased precision and malleability of the categories of communal belonging. The narratological turn in countering insurgency is easily contrasted with terms like "the human family" as set forth in the UDHR of 1948, which I have already described as (partly anyway) a docu‐ ment of mourning. The term "all" in "all peoples of all nations", like the term



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 71 "everyone" which starts off nearly every one of the UDHR's 30 Articles, pre‐ sumes an inclusive form of species discourse that should exist "without any distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status" (United Nations 1948, n.p.). Three points, then, by way of contrast to this post‐World War II form of humanist "all[ness]": the first is that the distinction that allows the idealized disappearance of distinction is the less negotiable difference be‐ tween nation‐states. We may all be human and have the right of recognition as such, but we can do so only within the code of law. That is not relevant, or relevant in the same way, in net‐centric war where combatants and ci‐ vilians are no longer distinguishable, and where war and crime overlap be‐ neath the blanket of violence called "everywhere war"; second, therefore, the "all[ness]" in the context of 21st‐century COIN. While the RMA has uni‐ versalizing ambitions, the preservation of life is less at issue than the effi‐ ciency by which intelligence operators may sort populations such that its members are always, at least potentially, subject to death. Third, the form of mediation that enables this sorting, while it may "attach" stories, is less dependent on the analogical moorings of language (read: qualitative, con‐ sensus‐making communication) than on the digital ones of mathematics ( read: quantitative analytics, or data). Elsewhere I have asked a question about what it means to think of US hegemony under the conditions of multi‐racialism and its demographic correlate—not even a generation away—of a coming white minority (Hill 2000). At the center of my interests there was the US census 2000, which for the first time since the advent of self‐enumeration in the 1960s allows for a "check all that applies" option on the issue of race and ethnicity.3 Even limiting one's choice to just two combinations, this new law stands to in‐ crease the tabulation from five to 128 possibilities (O'Hare 1998). Categor‐ ical speculation on this order is something the National Association for the

3



In the 1850 Census the term “mulatto” was used, and in 1890 populations could be identified as “quadroon” and “octoroon”. The new decision is not substan‐ tially different from the interagency recommendations issued in the 1977 man‐ dates of OMB 15 (US Government 1977). For the Census 2000 standards, see Federal Register (US Government 1997).

72 MIKE HILL Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) finds understandably disquiet‐ ing.4 As the NAACP is quick to point out, the relatively recent fine‐tuning of identity‐based claims for civil rights works on behalf of reversing half a cen‐ tury's worth of racial jurisprudence. The re‐division and re‐multiplication of the OMB official five effectively enables a way to undermine all forms of juridical redress involving race by complicating racial identity to a point of massification that is also a point of categorical collapse. To point out this paradox is to confirm Balibar's investigation into the unique way in which racialized domination "progresses in the contem‐ porary world" (1999, 9); how it can in turn be connected to "the negative repercussions of post‐national integration" (Balibar 2004, 116). The emer‐ gent post‐white racial imaginary confirms Balibar's neo‐racism, with a con‐ temporary twist: the prospect of "becoming‐minority" that he borrows from Deleuze in order to affirm the potential for a re‐invigoration of mass struggle on the side of racial and economic justice beyond the limits of lib‐ eral consensus leans in the adjoining of war and demography in the oppo‐ site direction. The economic order that a governmental embrace of multi‐ tudes so‐called, "a rival to identity politics"—and I am adding to Balibar's point: a cynical governmental appropriation of them—"reflects the devel‐ opment of a quasi‐apartheid social structure" (116). To sum up, "the rights of the different individuals involved add up, or, even better, multiply [. . .] to the extent [that] they neutralize each other, or even lead to a cycle of mutual destruction" (Balibar 1998, 62; my emphases). It is telling both in Balibar's use of the word "destruction"—which is the logical end of a citizen's right to be recognized under conditions that reinforce the security of "a fabu‐ lously wealthy minority" (xvii)—and in the fact that this last set of citations are taken from Balibar's book on Spinoza, not the one on race, that violence is positioned as historically immanent to, and not as Hobbes would have it, contracted out of, social existence. I will have more to say below about the importance of that term quantifiable, how it is dependent upon a whole new techno‐informational

4



In a letter presented at the congressional hearings in 1993, the nation's top civil rights leaders expressed "extreme concerned that [the] new [multiracial] cate‐ gory will inadvertently cause confusion and inconsistent reporting". See Hear‐ ings, 224. An editorial by Charles Byrd (2000) blames the NAACP directly for maintaining "the one drop rule" and discouraging multiracial Census reclassi‐ fication.

HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 73 regime that is apposite to what we have already seen in the making of "hu‐ manity" and "culture" into "terrain". But to sum up here, let me simply em‐ phasize that the US census since 2000, on the inside of the state, and the Army's HTS program, on its outside, use identity politics to blank out iden‐ tity. Slaughter's study of the "blanked out" sections of the heavily redacted US war documents that appeared in Holzer's art show at the Whitney mu‐ seum in 2009, "The Redaction Series", links "black spots" to "black outs" and "black sites" (2010, 209). "The redaction paintings foreground and en‐ large the unnarrated passages that they don't (or can't) reveal". They show how "the capacity to make the invisible visible" works by way of Holzer's remediation of absence (here a visual, not a print‐based form of represen‐ tation, if representation at all) in turn "hints at an alternative genealogy of modernity" (Slaughter 2010, 212; 208). I think that this alternative moder‐ nity is key to understanding whatever different historical moment we are in at the present time, and to linking up from here with some other than a naively liberal humanist past. But I also think that in addition to "black sites", to what is hiding and what might be revealed as it hides, what we might call white sites are equally curious and important. This means finding war less within information's hidden places than of recognizing its ubiquity in what is almost too readily apparent—like the rhetorical attention paid to human rights’ absent concerns about real equality—and in what we habit‐ ually take as on the other side of war. This work would be less concerned about story suppression on the order of the narrative‐as‐law tradition, and more about informational overload—call it: the strategic overproduction of difference—as in net‐centric war.5 In 2008, the Canadian military also tarried with an HTS approach to war, deploying what they called—without irony—"white situation awareness teams". These teams were given the objective of "map[ping] out the movers and shakers of [Kandahar] and how they relate to one another" (“Mapping 'White' Afghans” 2008). I say without irony because the "white‐ ness" being mapped here occurs in a context where color takes on a more functional than descriptive quality; perhaps call it, techni‐color reality, or maybe a virtual one. Just below I will return to the apparent retreat allowed by this from subjectivity and toward biology, and precisely through ma‐ chines, as we shift topics from HTS to military neuroscience. But further on

5



On the way images are used in US military photography, see Forte (2014).

74 MIKE HILL the unmooring of whiteness from its place within traditional race and eth‐ nic divisions, note that in military parlance, "Red" means foe, "Blue" means friend, and "White", as evident here, simply means civilians of whatever ra‐ cial or ethnic identity. So the mapping of "white Afghans" in this sense treats "whiteness" as a local and temporary condition of demographic‐mil‐ itary inactivity in the form of a remorseless and eternal, and minutely ne‐ gotiable, battlefield‐census. "Whiteness" as such is produced in a context of insurgency where friend and foe slip in and out of designation, and where battles are won and lost at the level of information management, you could say, by "greening" the data, as much as they are through kinetic means. As the Afghan whitens—fails to become white, or travels, day‐to‐day, in and out of whiteness—such knowledge can be recorded, transmitted, stored and manipulated immediately and in real time, or at least, as soon as com‐ putational analysis can quantify the data. The meaning and the means of counting people in the human ter‐ rain program converge upon the thing‐ifcation of what used to be regarded as immaterial forms of agency: “culture”, thought, and as is especially inter‐ esting, the study of communal and individual memory. The notion of the “human” being as “terrain” presents formidable challenges to traditional notions of the separation between subjectivity and objectivity, which is ev‐ ident in both the scale of data being processed as key to the war effort as well as the planetary extent of today’s battle‐grid. Thus I move now to a concluding set of points on the objectification of the human and the disintegration of the human being per se. Information Regardless of Frontiers Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, through any media regardless of frontiers. UDHR, Article 19 (United Nations 1948, n.p.) I was gratified to find references to "information" and "media" in the UDHR document, which compared to the terms "right" and "freedom", are less examined ones. (The stipulation in Article 26 that "higher educa‐ tion shall be free" must appear utterly scandalous to today's corporate‐ minded politicians and their university leaders.) In the closing pages of this



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 75 chapter, I want to consider the informatization of story, the turning of nar‐ rative into numbers, as an indicator of the further dis‐ and re‐integration of the human being per se. I consider this further evidence of machinic reme‐ diation, a radical re‐wiring (literally, in the sense of BMI) of the relationship between narrative and life. What happens when "media" take us from the right of "expres‐ sion", or thinking about knowledge as something we have, "information" of something we "free[ly]" self‐consciously "impart" between rights bearing people, to a reality that turns humanity into information? The "frontiers" that "media" is leaving behind, in this sense, are no longer the national ones that were presumed for the existence and protection for rights. BMI is less a matter of "ideas" crossing between state boundaries than it is "infor‐ mation" redrawing the boundary between mind and body. To connect this to the HTS program, military neuroscience leans heavily toward turning subjects into (more and less disposable) objects: turning "human" beings into "terrain". This too is part of the hyperbolicization of war. In the common language of geological mapping we have seen used by HTS, neurons are “targeted” as “populations”. “Biology” in defense re‐ search terms is an “application”. “Nodal positions” are monitored on the or‐ der of insurgent elements, charted as “terrain” or “signal systems”, that can be manipulated in the form of short‐term memory downloads that the sol‐ dier‐patient may not even know she has (Caygill 2010). Memory has itself become a military frontier in the same way COIN creates histories without facts and attaches highly negotiable stories to suspect populations. Here, too, self‐ and community‐awareness fundamentally change: what the sol‐ dier‐patient can willfully recall from a battle is sidelined by ways of seeking memory as math. Thus the recalculation of what constitutes the human be‐ ing as a category moves all subjective processes in a material direction. In this way, the opposition between COIN's narratological turn and BMI's bio‐ logical focus—recall Slaughter's caveat about the fragility of the "life‐nar‐ rative relay"—looks less oppositional and more like a deliberate oscillation that also moves forward, toward the common goal of turning subjects into things. UNESCO's insistence that "all mankind is one [and] belong to the same species" (UNESCO 1945) begs the question of how mankind is divided not against one another by thought, culture, or tradition, but how new divi‐ sions are discovered and re‐tallied within each individual body and as thought turns into digital code.



76 MIKE HILL Such a change is apparent not only at the level of scale and cate‐ gory, as we have seen—HTS: the fluidity of demography; BMI the fluidity of human life itself—but also, as I have intimated already, at the level of time. In Narrative Dynamics, Richardson (2002) reminds us that temporality has been of central concern to story telling since Horace (1). His goal in assem‐ bling the wide range of narrative theorists that he does is to offer a different approach to the same premise: "the fundamentally temporal structure of human experience is entirely homologous with the temporality of narra‐ tive" (9). Thus Ricoeur: "'I take temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity, and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent. Their relationship is therefore reciprocal" (quoted in Richardson 2002, 12). Slaughter too em‐ phasizes the importance of temporality in the formation of the “persona ficta”, “the person that emerges from the law and literature" (2007, 19). What I find compelling for thinking through the time‐life‐war relation is first, that Slaughter names it: “the Westphalian narrative unites nation‐time and‐space" (2007, 31). More interesting still is the description of this unity as "the perversity of the tropological gamble of human rights" (23). Rights are fragile to the extent that categorical belonging is at least partly subject to chance, where chance means change that subjectivity neither prescribes just by thinking but instead becomes an aleatory process whose logic is only machincally knowable, and therefore exceeds a person's will. Time at war is both a material event and a morphologically consequential process. With a kind of Spinoza 2.0 approach (no Cartesian mind‐body split here), military Cognitive Augmentation (AugCog): "targets [. . .] memory enhancement [but] not long‐term memory . . . rather working memory, which encompasses processes used for both storage and manipulation" (Royal Society 2011b, 8). What enables the prospect of increasing working memory is the ability to visualize it on screen—virtually, which is to say, according to a computational representative reality—as an "electrophysio‐ logical event [. . .] where changes in the visual field held by an unconscious mind [. . . can be pictured by] information processing" (Royal Society 2011a, 15). In other words, you saw where that IED, or sniper, or target was before you shot or were shot. But you simply did not know that you saw it and, by letting the machine remember for you, we can access those unknowns to deal with similar situations at a later date. As Jonathan Moreno (2006) has revealed, “by programming neurons to respond to light, neural activity can



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 77 be controlled [. . .] optogenentic[ally]” (33). What is being manipulated in the course of BMI is an area of the brain where the sub‐disciplines of com‐ putational and affective neuroscience interact. Memory, especially trau‐ matic memory, is where a good deal of war neuroscience is happening. This is exactly counter to the traditional practice of self‐enumera‐ tion up to—and superceded by—the schizogenic US census 2000. This mo‐ ment, recall, not only challenged the difference between self and other in the history of population counting but also jettisoned the assumption that racial categories would maintain a stable sense of communal fidelity for a sufficient duration of time for rights to be secured. Neither flatly binaristic nor communal boundaries are stable when brain meets machine. What the latest neuroscience makes clear is that the brain, like we used to say about the unconscious, knows more than you do. On the problem of scale, neuro‐ scientific complexity extends beyond the new demographics preferred by HTS—not tens of thousands of diverse cultures here but a 100 million nerve cells differently wired together by a million billion connections. Just one cu‐ bic millimeter of brain tissue contains 100s of thousands of nerve cells. As the last frontier of the last frontier, the scale of the brain, though micro‐ scopic, far exceeds the global communications network, which has only 5 billion mobile phones. Consider on the further “terrain‐ing” of the “human”, not the prob‐ lem of whiteness that I mentioned in US census 2000, nor the “white sites” I added to Slaughter's "black" ones, nor even the "white Afghans" invented by Canadian HTS, but relatedly, the problem of the human brain's “white matter”. “White matter” is composed of bundles of axons, and not the more famous neurons and synapses of grey matter. The tightly packed axon suites themselves, are seen literally, not figuratively, as “composed of mil‐ lions of communication cables, each containing a long, individual wire, or axon, coated with a white, fatty substance called myelin” (Fields 2008, 56). If the wire in question is not white enough, that is, if myelination occurs ir‐ regularly in certain brain regions or is malformed along the axon wire, then high‐level cognition is adversely affected (examples range from autism and schizophrenia, to compulsive lying). “Whiteness” is in this sense performing a supremely integrative function, but on a scale and at a velocity that is not conceivable without one network (the brain’s) plugging in bio‐electronically to another (the ma‐ chine’s). In “grey matter”, “memories are stored” (Fields 2008, 56). In the



78 MIKE HILL more difficult to map “white matter”, “electric signals [. . .] jump swiftly down the axon, node to node” (56). Apposite to non‐linear modalities of war, scientists working as part of the BRAIN initiative have followed a net‐ centric method of “non‐linear” data analysis to map the brain because it is organized in the same way. Thus the “brain census”, which allows for “finer categories [of] enumeration” than mere whole body counting has been able to produce, the finer‐tuning of US Census 2000 notwithstanding (National Institute of Health 2017, 20). An important moment of progress in the map‐ ping of the brain has been the ability to simply name “cells” and to calculate “circuits”. This is a move seamlessly from census, populations, and subjects, to mathematics, chemistry, and machines, a non‐narrative way to present (human?) codes. It is a problem explicitly stated in neurology as one for the “quantitative sciences”: “machine learning”, literally, the adding to the brain’s networks the necessary forms of computer interface that, in turn, do more effective adding than we humans alone could ever achieve. “Algo‐ rithms” in turn become “prosthetics” (38). In the unapologetically anti‐hu‐ manist language of the neuroscientists, what they are after is a “parts list” (14). But this parts list is tremendously large, so large the scientists say that it changes the very status of the human. The census‐work being done here, like the fluid demography we have seen in HTS (only with the brain, literally fluid), involves “quantities of information” that detail “thousands of millions [of] parts”, and at “petabytes of scale” (14, 32). We should say then that “whiteness” in the Afghani as well as the myelinated sense is no longer a subject position but instead a flowing, fleshly, substance, one ready for the net‐centric forms of morphological change that we have found in the contemporary COIN. “Whiteness” has be‐ come a medium, not the memory itself, nor any longer the message—both of which are the work of grey matter—but instead the key electro‐chemical component of a massive data infrastructure that re‐organizes categorical and temporal value. Thus the fulcrum of bio‐militarism as a matter of terrain‐ing popu‐ lations of people on scales inconceivable until the new media‐technology of computers is encapsulated by not only (a) the way that human corporeality itself, rather like the disappearance of the enemy into the fabric of the Homeland under terror, is dissolving into violence; but also (b) the way non‐subjective elements of human life are being given agency through the translation of narrative into numbers. Here a neo‐liberal order of war exists



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 79 within a new conception of the human that challenges traditional notions of human rights. This happens according to the means of a more accurate and technically sophisticated—both machinic, and paradoxically, fluid—re‐ mapping of traditional population typologies at both macro‐ and micro‐cos‐ mic levels of scale. Here we have gone past whiteness, to post‐whiteness, to “white Afghans”, and at this latter stage, to the even more nettlesome prob‐ lem of “white matter”. Putting the question of human rights and narrative in the context of “white sites” like HTS and BMI is finally not to diverge very far from a locus classicus of western literary theory: the work of Bakhtin. It is uncanny that we have left the human being per se behind and yet we return still to this humanistic starting point. But how else other than this back‐and‐ forth—I said before, oscillating—way should we expect to experience the progress (and/as the regress) of time? Bakhtin writes: “we will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in litera‐ ture". Indeed, "the chronotope is a formally constitutive category of litera‐ ture" (Bakhtin 2002, 15). We have seen how war in its data dependence, even with COIN's so‐called narratological turn, has moved both between the literary and the human, to the algorithmic and machinic, and how this moving‐between challenges traditional rights‐based discourse. Thus Bakh‐ tin writes further: this term [space‐time] is employed in mathematics and intro‐ duced as part of Einstein's theory of relativity. The special mean‐ ing of relativity theory is not important; for our purposes we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). (2002, 15; my emphasis) Mathematics, almost unimportant to literature? It is curious to think about Bakhtin hedging his bets at the table of Slaughter's "perverse" human rights "gamble”. What if Bakhtin was a brain scientist? Does the syn‐ apse have a story, and if so, to what rights is its story attached? If we take Bakhtin's definition of time as a matter of "thickening", of "taking on flesh" in a literal way, we have to at least start entertaining a new partnership between subjective and objective categories with the tools we now have,



80 MIKE HILL and how that partnership might work with what's left of human rights after the human being per se.6

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6



Further discussion on the link between biology and culture in the context of neo‐liberalism might begin from Balibar's notion of “equaliberty”. For discus‐ sion of this term, see Hill (forthcoming).

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82 MIKE HILL IBM. 2014. "New IBM SyNAPSE Chip Could Open Era of Vast Neural Net‐ works." News Release. https://www‐03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pr essrelease/44529.wss Ignatiev, Michael. 2003. Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. London: Vintage. Jacob, François. 1989. The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity and the Possible and the Actual. London: Penguin. Keys, Barbara. 2014. Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revo‐ lution of the 1970s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kinzer, Stephen. 2014. "Are Human Rights Activists Today's War Mongers?" Blog Post, May 25. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014 /05/24/are‐human‐rights‐activists‐today‐warmongers/gef04rpP xgEdCEdx4DQ87J/story.html Kipp, Jacob. 2006. "The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Cen‐ tury." Military Review 5 (September‐October): 8–15. “Mapping 'White' Afghans Aim to End Civilian Deaths." 2008. National Post. Editorial, November 8. http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/st ory.html?id=a6df4358‐cec0‐4555‐9efa‐d7e66b4a31bc. Moreno, Jonathan D. 2006. Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the Twenty‐first Century. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ‐‐‐. 2015. "Do Human Rights Increase Inequality?" The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29: 13–15. National Institute of Health (NIH). 2017. “What is the BRAIN Initiative?” January 19. http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/ O'Hare, William. April 1998. "Managing Multiple‐Race Data." American De‐ mographics 20 (4): 42–44. Posner, Eric A. 2014. The Twilight of Human Rights Law. Oxford: Oxford Uni‐ versity Press. Prupis, Nadia. 2016. "Refugee Planet: There Have Never Been This Many Displaced People on Earth." Blog Post. http://www.commondream s.org/news/2016/06/20/refugee‐planet‐there‐have‐never‐been‐ many‐displaced‐people‐earth Reid, Julian. 2006. The Biopolitics of the War on Terror. Manchester: Univer‐ sity of Manchester Press.



HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE HUMAN BEING PER SE 83 Richardson, Brian, ed. 2002. Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Clo‐ sure and Frames. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Royal Society, The. 2011a. Brain Waves Module I: Neuroscience, Conflict, and Security. London: The Royal Society. ‐‐‐. 2011b. Brain Waves Module III: Neuroscience, Conflict, and Security. Lon‐ don: The Royal Society. Smith, Rupert. 2006. The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. London: Penguin. Slaughter, Joseph. 1997. "A Question of Narration: The Voice of Interna‐ tional Human Rights Law." Human Rights Quarterly 19: 406–30. ‐‐‐. 2007. Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and Interna‐ tional Law. New York: Fordham University Press ‐‐‐. 2010. "Vanishing Points: When Narrative is Not Simply There." Journal of Human Rights 9: 207–33. Treverton, Gregory F. 2011. "The Future of Intelligence: Changing Threats, Evolving Methods.” In The Future of Intelligence: Challenges in the Twenty‐first Century, edited by Isabelle Duyesteyn et al., 27–38. London: Routledge. UNESCO. 1945. "Constitution." http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ID =15244&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html United Nations. 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Decem‐ ber 10. http://www.un.org/en/universal‐declaration‐human‐righ ts/Declaration. US Joint Forces Command. 2010. Commanders Handbook for Strategic Com‐ munication and Communication Strategy. 3.0. Washington, DC: US Joint Forces Command. http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/j wfc/sc_hbk10.pdf US Government. 1977. Federal Register. 62.131. July 9. US Government. 2000?. Federal Register. https://www.archives.gov/open /dataset‐fedreg.html Werlerman, C.J. 2016. "Obama: Global Arms Dealer‐in‐Chief." Middle‐East‐ ern Eye. Blog Post. http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/obam a‐global‐arms‐dealer‐chief‐311000658



84 MIKE HILL Zamani, Nahal. 2015. "US Government Gets Failing Grade on Human Rights." Center for Constitutional Rights. Blog Post, August 6. http://ccrjustice.org/home/blog/2015/08/06/us‐government‐g ets‐failing‐grade‐human‐rights



“The massacre of our voices”: Indigenous Rights and Narrative in Contemporary Australian Literature and Law Kieran Dolin Recent studies of the relations between literature and human rights have emphasised the importance of the “vehicles” as well as the “vo‐ cabularies” involved, the forms or media in which rights claims are articu‐ lated as well as their discourses (McLennen and Slaughter 2009; Dawes 2009; Antaki 2013). This scholarship draws attention to the significance of literary and cultural genres, and of disciplinary fields in the advancement of rights. Sophia A. McLennen and Joseph Slaughter urge the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach, and in particular the integration of legal per‐ spectives into literary analyses of this subject: “students of culture risk practical irrelevance if we fail to recognise the juridical importance and in‐ stitutional status of human rights as a legal regime” (2009, 6). The study of legal narrative practices has become an important site for such practical humanities work. In a review of this particular intersection, Greta Olson (2015) invokes Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s (2004) research on life writing and human rights: The rights of Indigenous peoples have been rendered tangible through personal narrative; and their narratives have contributed to challenging the legal status quo. Commenting on how such nar‐ ratives function as forces for legal emancipation, Schaffer and Smith write: “Emergent in communities of identification margin‐ alised within the nation, such movements embolden individual members to understand personal experience as a ground of action and social change.” (Olson 2015, para. 18) Olson is here referring to the significant place of narrative in criti‐ cal race theory, and cultural studies of law more broadly. In this scholar‐ ship, literary modes and personal histories are juxtaposed against stand‐ ard‐form legal discourse “to reveal and undermine the law’s dominant structures” (Coombe 2001, 48). Narrative does not always work on the side of the angels, however, as Peter Brooks (1996) notes: “storytelling is a 85

86 KIERAN DOLIN moral chameleon, capable of promoting the worse as well as the better cause every bit as much as legal sophistry” (16). To provide a more critical foundation for claims about narrative and justice, Brooks recommends a more practical analysis of legal storytelling’s “functions and procedures” (2006, 28). These debates illuminate the recent history of Indigenous rights narratives in Australian legal and literary forums. For Alexis Wright (2002), one of the leading Indigenous writers in Australia, and a long‐time activist, “the role of Aboriginal writers is to put the true name to the testimonies and times of our people with our use of language, our visions, our imaginations, our facts” (19). Wright’s concep‐ tion of the testimonial function of literature and its possibilities took shape against a growing awareness of “haunting memories . . . and frightening si‐ lence”, in her own family and more broadly in Aboriginal society (10). She understands this silence as a mechanism for surviving horrors, for dealing with shame, for protecting culture and reputation, and other psychic and social functions, but she also identifies its deleterious effects and seeks to “put the true name” to the problem: “we [. . .] have suffered through each successive generation from things that happened in the past which our fam‐ ilies will not talk about. I call this the massacre of our voices which contin‐ ues to this day” (13). This powerful metaphor, with its juxtaposition of gen‐ ocide and the key human faculty of language, implicitly appeals to human rights standards, especially to freedom of speech and freedom from fear. The “massacre of our voices” evokes not merely silencing, but violence. It opens up a range of possible referents, particularly the aphasia that is known to afflict victims of traumatic events, and the phenomenon of trans‐ generational trauma (Atkinson 2002). More broadly, it encompasses the erasure of Aboriginal experience from national histories and archival rec‐ ords, the loss of Indigenous languages through assimilationist policies, and the containment of subaltern political expression by dominant discourses of authenticity and tradition (Griffiths 1994). The plurality of the formula‐ tion, “the massacre of our voices”, is noteworthy, implying a correlative commitment to collective rights, and according primacy to “our rights as a people” in a discourse usually associated with individualism (Wright 2002, 12). Wright describes how in the 1990s she experienced a crisis due to the failures of various efforts to advance those rights: “As individuals, as com‐ munities, as peoples with Indigenous rights, everything we did to accom‐ plish anything seemed to be a meaningless exercise because the force of



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 87 ingrained, inherited racism stood against us”. The hysterical backlash against the belated recognition of Indigenous native title by the High Court of Australia in its historic judgment in Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) and the limitations placed on that doctrine by subsequent cases and statutes, as well as the rejection of key findings of the Stolen Generations report by the federal government (discussed below) are possible examples of this pro‐ cess (Strelein 2006). Wright’s metaphor, “the massacre of our voices”, is, I suggest, a heuristic tool that offers readers new insights into Aboriginal peoples’ ongoing struggle for rights and recognition in Australia. As a result of the frustration and dismay created by those defeats, Wright turned to literature as an alternative means of countering the eras‐ ure and repression of Aboriginal experience, and of asserting their rights. In “Politics of Writing” she recounts how she drew inspiration from Indige‐ nous writing from around the world, from writers who were witnesses to political oppression, such as Solzhenitsyn and Camus, and from those who critiqued histories, particularly Eduardo Galeano and Günter Grass. Linda Hutcheon (2003) has noted the attraction of narrative for postcolonial writ‐ ers wanting to write “historically, in terms of reclaiming the repressed, the blocked out, the marginalised” (19). Quoting Dominick La Capra, she argues that the traumatic past of empire, “which is essentially not over”, works in conjunction with a testimonial imperative: “Like trauma [. . .] postcolonial witnessing is belated” (20; emphasis in original). “Politics of Writing” is an essay that combines a memoir of Wright’s political and aesthetic education with the analysis of race politics in Australia. As well as critiquing the eras‐ ure of Aboriginal experience, it reveals the writer’s search for an appropri‐ ate narrative voice. Wright aspires to discover the “silent and elusive” voice of an ordinary member of the Waanyi community, through an exploratory creative process that develops new aims and techniques (2002, 20). Like‐ wise, her fictional world is drawn from Indigenous cosmology and history: “The world I try to inhabit in my writing is like looking at the ancestral tracks spanning our country which, if I look at the land, combines all stories, all realities from the ancient to the new, and makes it one” (20). Wright, then, derives an ambitious vision of narrative out of a political context of disappointment, by drawing on traditional as well as modern bodies of knowledge and visions of the human.



88 KIERAN DOLIN Rather than using these reflections as the framework for reading Wright’s own fiction, I intend to bring the account of rights and representa‐ tion developed in “Politics of Writing” to the analysis of Indigenous rights narratives published in the juridical and literary fields. Schaffer and Smith stress the need for a contextual approach, asking “Why, when, how and where do narratives become intelligible as stories of human rights?” (2004, 5). Wright deconstructs these terms in her analysis of the ethics and politics of recognition: “it is hard to be heard when your rights are not recognised” (Wright 2002, 16). It is therefore not surprising that, in their chapter on Australia, Schaffer and Smith point to two official inquiries, the Royal Com‐ mission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–89) and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s National Inquiry into the Sep‐ aration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Fami‐ lies (1996–97), with its report entitled Bringing Them Home, as key events, enabling “Indigenous life experience [to be] seen as integral to the politics of human rights” (2004, 98). They argue that these two inquiries trans‐ formed the circuits of narrative production, circulation and reception. Their hearings and reports helped to generate an upsurge in life writing by Indig‐ enous people, and a groundswell for legal change. In this section I wish to concentrate on the latter inquiry, and its report, as the narrative work of an institution of the official state apparatus charged with advancing human rights. In the case of the Bringing Them Home report, an emphasis on nar‐ rative was visible, to a degree unusual in such documents, which contrib‐ uted to its public success and its political vulnerability. Thus it offered a particularly strong example of the “chameleon” quality of storytelling noted above. Before discussing the report, it is useful to summarise the pre‐ex‐ isting human rights landscape. As Schaffer and Smith note, in Australia, un‐ like other white settler states, the British Government made no treaty with the Indigenous peoples, and Australia has no national Bill of Rights among its constitutional documents. Although attempts have been made to insti‐ tute such a national Bill of Rights, they have not succeeded in securing ma‐ jority support. Political and civil rights originating under the common law or the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy are recognised and protected, and this British tradition remains the dominant legal ideology. The vocabulary of modern human rights deriving from the United Nations Declaration and subsequent international covenants has been adopted into



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 89 Australian law in a piecemeal way, through particular statutes, such as the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The Human Rights Commission was only established as a full‐time body in 1986, with authority to monitor Aus‐ tralia’s adherence to international human rights provisions, and to hear complaints. Its remit has been expanded with the passage of new interna‐ tional covenants, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and lo‐ cal legislation, such as the Privacy Act 1988. As a consequence, human rights discourse occupies an equivocal space in Australian public culture, thor‐ oughly endorsed in many contexts, but vigorously resisted in certain forms and mooted extensions. One of the limit points of human rights discourse in Australia concerns Indigenous rights. This was never more clearly man‐ ifested than in 2007 when Australia was one of only four nations to vote against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United Nations General Assembly. Aboriginal people were first declared to be subject to the jurisdic‐ tion of English law in the late 1830s, as part of the consolidation of settler sovereignty some 50 years after the initial colonisation of New South Wales (Ford 2010). In principle, they then became British subjects, with equal ac‐ cess to the common‐law rights enjoyed by the colonisers. However, almost immediately the pragmatic and self‐interested demands of the colonists saw the rights of Aboriginal people reduced by means of discriminatory special legislation. Alongside the extra‐legal violence of the frontier, then, law was an instrument of conquest. Aboriginal people occupied a distinct category of legal personhood reflecting their subordinate social position, characterized by a lack of control over their own lives. Along with women, infants, the mentally ill and criminals, they were regarded as needing the protection of a legal guardian. Alluding to the common‐law focus on “rem‐ edies” as well as the discourse of human rights, Schaffer and Smith conclude that “protections, rights and remedies, therefore, were limited. When rec‐ ognised at all, Aborigines were incorporated into legal and political frame‐ works as objects to be controlled and manipulated by the states in which they lived” (2004, 100). In the early 20th century, under a self‐described policy of “protection”, laws further intensifying control over Aboriginal peoples’ lives were passed throughout Australia (Behrendt et al. 2009, 24). Reviewing the comprehensive controls enacted in the West Australian stat‐ utes, Paul Hasluck observed trenchantly:



90 KIERAN DOLIN The dominant feature of the later legislation has been this steady reduction of the status of the native, and, though the in‐ tention has been protective, legislation has now gone so far that it may well be asked what purpose or plan there is or what pos‐ sible outcome there can be from a system that confines the na‐ tive within a legal status that has more in common with that of a born idiot than of any other class of British subject. (Hasluck [1942] 1970, 160–61) Of particular interest here is the application of an ethical concern for human development to the field of legal policy analysis. Although using a discourse of status rather than rights, Hasluck’s words confirm the truth of Alexis Wright’s insight that “it is hard to be heard when your rights are not recognised” (2002, 16). By constructing “the native” as a lesser legal subject, and masking a regime of control under a discourse of “protection”, the law reduced Aboriginal people to the status of infancy, that is, etymo‐ logically, in‐fans, incapable of speech. Thus the legal order was itself a vehi‐ cle of the “massacre of [the] voices”. The removal of mixed‐race children from the custody of their Abo‐ riginal mothers was an integral part of the protection policy from 1910 to 1970. Whereas white children could only be taken from their parents in cases of proven neglect, Indigenous children of mixed descent were re‐ moved by virtue of their race. Bringing Them Home documents this policy of forcible child removal across Australia, its legal bases and practical op‐ eration, and more importantly makes findings about its psychological and social effects on both the children and their parents. The report explicitly relates the evidence collected by the Commission to the terms of the Uni‐ versal Declaration of Human Rights, setting out the ways in which the prac‐ tice of child removal contravened the Declaration. It found that families and children “were denied equal enjoyment of virtually all the rights recognised by the Universal Declaration” (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Com‐ mission 1997, 268). More specifically, it concluded that child removal con‐ stituted “systematic racial discrimination” and “genocide”. The Commission found that the removal of Indigenous children by compulsion, duress or undue influence was usually authorised by law, but that those



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 91 laws violated fundamental common law rights which Indige‐ nous Australians should have enjoyed equally with other Aus‐ tralians. [. . .] The Inquiry further found that from about 1950 the continuation of separate laws for Indigenous children breached the international prohibition of racial discrimination. Also racially discriminatory were practices which disadvan‐ taged Indigenous families because the standards imposed were standards which they could not meet either because of their particular cultural values or because of imposed poverty and dependence. (277) To provide redress for these breaches and the harm they caused, the Commission concluded that the Australian government ought to pay reparations and offer a national apology. Ten years later, a subsequent gov‐ ernment tendered the apology in a specially organised Parliamentary ses‐ sion to which members of the Stolen Generations and their families were invited, and which was televised live across the country, though to date the recommendation for reparations to be paid has not been implemented. The Inquiry was a quasi‐judicial process, but it accommodated its procedures so as to maximise the ability of victims to offer their testimony, holding sessions in outback Australia as well as capital cities. It took steps to mitigate the trauma of witnesses relaying evidence that would inevitably revisit the breaking of emotional bonds and reawaken memories, by providing counselling support for them, and other assistance. The final re‐ port is a strongly dialogical text, with excerpts from witness statements and even whole testimonies interspersed among its discussion of evidence and findings. On its first page of text, it exhorts readers to a mode of receptive engagement with these voices: the “continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians”, it states, “cannot be addressed unless the whole community listens with an open heart and mind to the stories of what has happened in the past” (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, 3; emphasis added). The report frequently refers to evidence in nar‐ rative terms, having recognised an ethical imperative to respect the voices of witnesses:



92 KIERAN DOLIN Throughout this report we have remained faithful to the lan‐ guage used by the witnesses quoted [. . .]. The Inquiry took evi‐ dence orally or in writing from 535 Indigenous people through‐ out Australia concerning their experience of removal policies. In this report we relay as many of those individual stories as pos‐ sible. (20–21) By excluding forensic practices such as cross‐examination, and privileging an idea of personal narrative authenticity, which included affec‐ tive dimensions and reflections on the meaning of events, rather than simply emphasising acts and events, the Inquiry aimed to contribute to the healing of the victims. Its first recommendation was that testimonies con‐ tinue to be gathered and recorded by appropriate Indigenous agencies, so that those who were unable to give evidence to the Inquiry might not be deprived of the “beginning of the healing process” (22) that the Commis‐ sioners had observed. The title of the report, Bringing Them Home, gestures to the plot of a narrative which remains unfinished, namely the reunion of families and return to the ancestral country. The report implicitly accepts one of the key tenets of narratology, that narrative is “a particular mode of knowledge”, both through its treatment of testimonies and its own dis‐ course (Prince 2000, 129). The Inquiry interprets the witnesses’ stories, human rights norms and social science data as forming a complex totality in which the forced separations of the past continue to affect families, and disclosing avenues to a transformed future. In this respect, Bringing Them Home achieves one of the specific functions of narrative identified by Prince, in that it “mediates between the law of what is and the human desire for what may be” (129). In taking up the human rights discourse of the international instru‐ ments as its primary interpretative framework, and in adopting a dialogical approach to the process of inquiry, namely an ideal of listening rather than a formal hearing, the commission was able to obviate the closed circuit of silence and exclusion noted by Wright, “it is hard to be heard when your rights are not recognised” (2002, 16). Bringing Them Home sold over 12,000 copies in the first few months after its release, and many thousands more in video and community guide formats, galvanising a public debate around its recommendations and conclusions. In the political arena, how‐



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 93 ever, a new government took issue with some of the major recommenda‐ tions, notably the call for a national apology and for reparations, arguing that “current generations of Australians could not be held accountable for or regarded as guilty for the acts of earlier generations over which they had no control”, as the Prime Minister, John Howard, told the House of Repre‐ sentatives on May 27, 1997 (Bird 1998, 126). This refusal led to heated dis‐ putation around the narrative presented by the Commission, and to ques‐ tioning of its methodological choices, its departure from a more legalistic process of evidence testing. Schaffer and Smith posit that the process of na‐ tional reconciliation was “stalled” as a result (2004, 108). It is instructive to turn to the legal cases brought by members of the Stolen Generations seeking compensation against the federal or state governments. Jerome Bruner (2002), who approaches narrative theory from a background in psychology, has argued in a pithy and pragmatic for‐ mulation that, “law stories are narrative in structure, adversarial in spirit, inherently rhetorical in aim, and justifiably open to suspicion” (46). Bruner points out that the adversarial structure dominates the common‐law trial, and that advocacy is “saturated with self‐interest” (45), which means that both sides distrust each other’s story, and that the judge or jury are likewise suspicious of the stories they are told. The “adversarial” and sceptical di‐ mensions have been vigorously deployed against the claimants in the Aus‐ tralian Stolen Generations cases. In what was a systemic difference from the ethos of the Commission of Inquiry, such cases as Cubillo and Gunner v. Commonwealth and Trevorrow v. South Australia, saw every point disputed and put to proof, and the plaintiffs and their witnesses subjected to gruel‐ ling cross‐examination (Burnside 2007, 219–221; Guilliatt 1999). In these two cases, one concerning actions in the Northern Territory, the other South Australia, the experiences of the victims of removal had first to be translated into legal categories, such as false imprisonment, breach of stat‐ utory duty or negligence, rather than being directly litigated on the inter‐ pretation of human rights provisions. The Cubillo and Gunner case ended in defeat for the plaintiffs, with the judge finding that their evidence fell short of what was required for every element of their case, and in particular that they had not proved that they were removed from their families without consent. In Mr Gunner’s case, the judge accepted a thumbprint of his mother on a relevant document as indicating her informed consent to his



94 KIERAN DOLIN removal. Although there were gaps in the archival record, he preferred doc‐ umentary evidence to what he saw as the fallibility of oral evidence that relied on memories of events that began in the 1940s (McRae 2003, 600). As a result, the judge disbelieved the story of traumatic forcible removal and lifelong loss told by the plaintiffs, casting doubt on their reliability as witnesses. Through an analysis of Mrs Cubillo’s “testimonial voice”, Trish Luker (2008) argues that these findings were derived largely from the cross‐examination, which attacked her memory of events, and thereby un‐ dermined the coherence of the narrative she sought to present (4). In the contest of narratives in this trial, Luker shows that “certain narratives are considered acceptable in legal discourse because they conform to notions of pre‐existent truth” (5). The story presented by Mrs Cubillo and Mr Gun‐ ner of a policy that violated their human rights at the time of removal and at later stages of their lives could not surmount the systematic obstacles facing the acceptance of Indigenous testimony in the white law. For Luker, the case showed that their suffering could not be adequately represented in western legal discourse (12). Ten years later, an opposite result was reached in the Trevorrow case. Mr Trevorrow had been sent to hospital by his parents as a baby for treatment, and from there he was placed in the care of foster parents with‐ out authorisation or the consent of his natural parents. Documentary rec‐ ords of his time in care, of an unsuccessful return to his birth family, of a troubled adolescence, and an adult life marked by alcoholism and a diffi‐ culty in forming emotional bonds with others, were available to the court. These archives, a product of the extensive state monitoring of Aboriginal lives, confirmed the story told by the plaintiff, and contained evidence sup‐ porting every element of his claims for negligence, misfeasance of public office and other wrongs. More damagingly, they contained proof that the South Australian Aboriginal welfare authority had received and circulated legal advice that it did not have the power to remove children, and was therefore pursuing its policy unlawfully. Not only did Mr Trevorrow be‐ come the first member of the Stolen Generations to obtain redress through the legal system: the court awarded exemplary damages against the state to punish its cavalier disregard for the law. Another factor contributing to the coherence of the narrative was evidence about the psychological im‐ portance of maternal attachment in early infancy; it was shown that this



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 95 knowledge was well established at the time, and was available in South Aus‐ tralia. This evidence provided a foundation for the traumatic life history narrated to the court, ensuring that it conformed, in Trish Luker’s words, quoted above, “to notions of pre‐existent truth” In a discussion of Indige‐ nous rights, Larissa Behrendt (2001), a lawyer, novelist and member of the Eualeyal and Kamillaroi peoples, wrote that a “rights agenda” offers among other things “a language in which to communicate about harms suffered and political aspirations held” (856). This is certainly borne out by the Tre‐ vorrow case, where the psychological damage caused by the actions of the authorities at various times in Mr Trevorrow’s childhood and youth, and their continuing effects, were addressed, including his loss of cultural iden‐ tity. The government of South Australia appealed against this result, but the original judgment was upheld on all counts except one (that removal amounted to false imprisonment). In particular, the trial judge had allowed the claimant an extension of time in which to bring his case beyond the usual limitation period, and the appeal court approved this ruling, noting that the State agency, the Aborigines Protection Board, had contributed to the delay, and that there was a public interest in allowing the claims of members of the Stolen Generations to be litigated, this being a “matter of national concern and controversy” (Van Rijswijk and Anthony 2012, 637). To date, Trevorrow is the only Australian case in which a member of the Stolen Generations has successfully sued for the harms they suffered as a result of their removal. A 2013 case, Collard v. Western Australia, was dismissed for reasons similar to those in Cubillo and Gunner. While Tre‐ vorrow illustrates the possibility of justice through the common law, its rea‐ soning and decision have not yet been followed by any other courts, that is, it has not yet become a precedent. Overall, then, Australian law, whether through statutory provisions or case law, exhibits severe limitations upon its recognition of the rights possessed and harms suffered by removed chil‐ dren. In this context, literature will remain a vital field for the exposition, dissemination and reception of narratives of what Larissa Behrendt has called “the precarious place of Indigenous rights” (2001, 853). In his major study of the Bildungsroman as a symbolic form integral to the human rights project, Joseph Slaughter (2007) observes that it con‐ tinues to be a generative element “even in those postcolonial novels that narrate the failure of incorporation” (135). He goes on to argue that “it tends to become a vital literary form within a particular identitarian group



96 KIERAN DOLIN when the public sphere is susceptible to reform” (135). The “incomplete inclusion” of Aboriginal people in the imagined community of the Austral‐ ian nation, the contestation of the rights of removed children in the courts, and the history of native title all suggest a dialectic of reform and resistance (McGregor 2011, ix). In this context, it is not surprising that Aboriginal nov‐ elists have turned to the Bildungsroman. Jeanine Leane (2012), a Wiradjuri scholar and writer, has analysed the symbiotic interplay between a rite of passage structure and the novel of education in a number of recent Aborig‐ inal fictions. In these works, of which Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006) is one, the narrator protagonists discover, and then embrace “cer‐ tain rights [they . . .] felt they were not entitled to as young Aboriginal Aus‐ tralians” (Leane 2012, 108). Swallow the Air seldom directly invokes the rhetoric of human rights in its narration, but instead dramatises their vio‐ lation in the traumatic history of the protagonist’s family and in her own experience. Out of a narrative of loss and struggle emerges a cogent sense of identity and home, and a defiance of proposed infringements against them. Leane notes that the values revealed in these narratives of develop‐ ment are not individualist ones, but relate to the protagonists’ collective identity as Aboriginal, above all, their “belonging and a sense of place” (107). They therefore represent an implicit critique of the privileging of in‐ dividuation in modern societies, by invoking traditional models of personal development and social incorporation. Swallow the Air presents the life of May Gibson through a series of scenes which are at once realist and highly metaphorical in their represen‐ tation of her traumatic passage from childhood to maturity in young adult‐ hood. As Leane points out, the text is really a short story cycle, a form that reflects the fragmentation of identity and community that is part of the leg‐ acy of colonialism (2012, 116). Narrative gaps are foregrounded, not only the events and times between stories, but also experiences that May cannot name, repressed memories that emerge into discourse only through flash‐ backs much later in the narrative. Key events in childhood, such as her fa‐ ther’s violence towards her mother, her mother’s suicide, her grand‐ mother’s pregnancy, are hinted at in successive stories through metonymic displacement, and the reader is forced to decode the narrator’s defensive articulations. This mode of writing institutes what Mark Antaki (2013) calls “affective dissonance” in the reader, for it disallows the ready empathy so‐ licited by sentimental narratives, and ensures that the form of the text



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 97 works “as a mode of critique” (988). Taken together, these stories point up the fragility of plot, the contingency of personal survival, and the uncer‐ tainty and lack of closure in the overall narrative. These narrative effects can be seen in the opening story, “Swallow the Air”. Set on the day May’s mother died, the text places that event off‐ stage, as May narrates her memories and observations on being sent to the beach to go fishing, by her mother. Although narrated in May’s voice, the story moves associatively through a series of images: her mother’s tying ice‐cream containers on May and her brother Billy’s heads as protection against magpies; a dead stingray lying by a rock‐pool; and the ancestral tale of Mungi, a tribesman who was wounded in a battle, and was transformed into a turtle by the ancestor spirit. The stingray, which absorbs May’s atten‐ tion, is a kind of unconscious prefiguring of her mother’s fate. She then re‐ calls a contrasting image, a memory of a turtle coming to the surface of these waters. That in turn elicits the narrative of Mungi, part of the cultural heritage transmitted by her mother, and illustrative of both maternal love and the Aboriginal identity that will help to orient May and Billy as they grow up. The story of the metamorphosis of Mungi, which may be read as a fable of vulnerable life protected, is faintly and poignantly paralleled in the image of May and her brother wearing plastic ice‐cream containers. In mod‐ ulating from one image to another, the text suggests a differential notion of humanity, evoking the fragility of life in the realm of nature, and the added provision of a protective armature by traditions of law, morality or reason. Both the stingray and the turtle foreshadow possible plot trajectories for May and Billy, as well as providing figures for her mother’s life and death. Soon even the beach becomes an unsafe place for May, as the ex‐ pansion of white suburbia brings new pressures on social space, demands for exclusion via racist graffiti, and violence against Aboriginal residents (Lucashenko 2013). At the age of 13, May is raped at the beach by a surfer, who tells her, “This gonna show ya where ya don’t belong dumb black bitch” (Winch 2006, 36). She is exposed to further trauma when she witnesses her aunt being assaulted by a partner, and her brother seeking relief in drugs. Homeless in Sydney after the break‐up of her remaining family, May is ar‐ rested for squatting and graffiti offences, and matter‐of‐factly refers to rights discourse: “Living, making camp was no right of ours” (127). In the lockup this negation is countered by another normative resource, a vision of the Wiradjuri resistance hero, Windradyne, who shows her images of her



98 KIERAN DOLIN mother’s ancestral country, of its dreaming tracks and watercourses, and urges her to “Follow the yellowback turtle through tide, the waterbirds fly between currents” (129; emphasis in original). Released from the lockup without being charged, she resolves to act upon this vision, and embarks on a “quest to belong and find her identity” (Leane 2012, 119). The turtle of the opening chapter reappears as a totemic image, modelling tactical path‐ ways through a hostile environment. In the wake of the Stolen Generations report, the journey home has been a privileged form of narrative desire. Life writing has provided a form for exploring the pain of separation and dream of reunion, for recounting the re‐establishment of broken family ties and the completion of identity. Swallow the Air deviates from that plot of a journey to healing. Although May reaches her country and learns from the land and the elders she meets, her larger hopes of finding her physical and social “place” are disappointed. Lake Cowal, the sacred centre of her mother’s country, has become a mine site, and is fenced off. Of her relatives, she finds only one great‐uncle, who has assimilated into white society and is unwelcoming. Momentarily recog‐ nising her hopes, he tells her, “There is a big missing hole between this place and the place you’re looking for. That place, that people [. . .]. It’s gone. It was taken away. We weren’t told, love; we weren’t allowed to be Aboriginal” (Winch 2006, 181–82; emphasis in original). Here the discourse of child re‐ moval resurfaces as an irreplaceable loss. The moral strength May has gained on her journey through Wiradjuri country makes her “hardened” to this rejection (182). The narrative ends with a further challenge: her return to her aunt’s house is shadowed by the presence of demolition equipment in the yard. As the engines of dispossession start up, May analyses the stakes of her own narrative act: “I wonder, if we stand here, if we stay, if they stop digging up Aunty’s backyard, stop digging up a mother’s memory, stop digging up our people, maybe then we’ll all stop crying” (198). In elab‐ orating these final images of erasure and resistance, May articulates her family’s suffering and implicitly asserts their rights. The narrative discourse of Swallow the Air invests a historical un‐ derstanding with poetic intensity. Its pessimism suggests the continuing vulnerability of Indigenous rights as well as what Wright calls “the hope of writing” (2002, 20). While autobiographical narratives may “function as forces for legal emancipation” (Olson 2015, para. 18), and the Trevorrow



INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND LAW 99 case illustrates what may be achieved through legal processes, the equivo‐ cal nature of Winch’s ending and the figurative mode of her text highlight the still unreformed state of Australia’s public sphere, and the timid devel‐ opment of its rights culture.

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Ethnographic Collections, Indigenous Narratives, and Post-Colonial Rights in Australia Richard J Martin and David Trigger Acknowledgement to Tommy George Tommy George was born in the vicinity of the Queensland/North‐ ern Territory border in the Gulf region of northern Australia. With connec‐ tions to Waanyi and Garawa languages, he was committed to both mainte‐ nance of Aboriginal cultural traditions and work in the cattle industry. He was head stockman on several cattle properties and one of the leaders who achieved success in the Nicholson River traditional land rights claim in the early 1980s. Tommy George was known as a talented singer and composer of songs in the Waanyi language throughout his life. He passed away in 1993 and his work is published here posthumously in accordance with his desire to promote his views about Indigenous culture and social change. We acknowledge the commitment from Tommy George and his surviving family to the research on which this chapter is based. The re‐ search has been supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. Mary Laughren and Ilana Mushin provided valuable linguistic advice on as‐ pects of the translation.

* In 1980, a senior Aboriginal man from northwest Queensland, Tommy George, visited ethnographic museum collections in Australia with his countrymen Barney King and Neville Ned, as well as the anthropologist David Trigger. At The Institute of Anatomy at The Australian National Uni‐ versity in Canberra, the group focused particular attention on cabinets with materials of the kind traditionally made and used in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia, including items collected from Turn Off La‐ goon in the Waanyi country of these visitors. Later, the group also visited The Queensland Museum and The University of Queensland’s Anthropol‐ ogy Museum, viewing other collections of Aboriginal artefacts.

103

104 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER After viewing these collections a second time a few years later, Tommy George provided an exhaustive account, audio recorded and tran‐ scribed by the anthropologist, of the suite of artefacts he had seen, inter‐ preting the ways in which they showed distinctions between saltwater (marine‐focused) and freshwater (inland) traditions, and further offering insights into Aboriginal life when people were living in the bush (Trigger 1987). Late one night, at Trigger’s Brisbane residence immediately follow‐ ing the inspections in 1980, he revealed verses of a song he had just com‐ posed about the experience of travelling to cities to see Aboriginal material culture on display in Australian institutions. One of the verses expressed his dismay that the objects’ connections to people and country had been severed. In the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia, Tommy George was recognized as a knowledgeable person, a man whose parentage enabled his inheritance of Waanyi as well as Garawa cultural traditions from his mother and father respectively. Tommy George significantly saw himself as a custodian of objects coming from Waanyi and Garawa country. In describing the artefacts and then composing his song, Tommy George was fulfilling this role of custodian, drawing upon his knowledge of contin‐ uing Indigenous traditions in working with the anthropologist Trigger. His song, which we discuss in this paper, clearly fits into these Indigenous tra‐ ditions, contributing a new narrative to the rich archive of Waanyi and other Aboriginal “little history” songs about the Gulf Country that articulate memorable events in everyday life (Bradley and Mackinlay 2000, 6). However, while knowledgeable about Indigenous traditions, Tommy George was experienced about multiple facets of “Whitefella stuff” (Moran 2016), including anthropology, having worked closely with David Trigger and other anthropologists on land claims and cultural heritage mat‐ ters for several years prior to these visits to Canberra and Brisbane muse‐ ums. Tommy George had also worked for years with non‐Aboriginal people in the Gulf Country cattle industry as a younger man, and further known Whitefella missionaries and government agents. While strongly committed to an Aboriginal domain of knowledge about country, he was well aware of the different ways in which Indigenous traditions articulated with the non‐ Aboriginal world. In offering an exhaustive account of the artefacts on dis‐ play, and composing and singing his song about the experience of seeing them in Australian institutions, Tommy George was exercising agency in



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framing the experience of colonial dominance in an intercultural form, art‐ fully conscious of the broader audience for his song outside the Aboriginal world as well as the intense interest of Aboriginal people including his Waanyi and Garawa relatives into the future. He was significantly “writ‐ ing”—or speaking—singing “back” in the manner influentially described by post‐colonial theorists (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1989). In this paper, we discuss the complex significance of this “singing back”. We argue that this act and expression of Tommy George’s agency presents a challenge to simplistic understandings of ethnographic collections, cultural property and repatriation; a challenge conveyed through the unique narrative form of traditional songs. Cultural Property, Repatriation and Rights Since the 1950s and 1960s, Indigenous assertions of ownership over artefacts and other material things like the Waanyi and Garawa collec‐ tions in the Canberra and Brisbane museums have grown stronger, as In‐ digenous people internationally have come to object to “research through imperial eyes” (Smith 2012, 44–60). Since that time, efforts to “decolonize” the theory and practice of anthropology, archaeology, heritage, and mu‐ seum studies (Smith and Wobst 2005) have led to considerable reforms, described as “massive” by an Aboriginal curator at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in connection with a 2016 exhibition at that institu‐ tion (Neill 2016, n.p.). These reforms have included the return of cultural property to Indigenous people and communities. This development is in keeping with Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which calls on states to “enable the access and/or re‐ patriation of ceremonial objects and human remains in their possession through fair, transparent and effective mechanisms developed in conjunc‐ tion with Indigenous peoples concerned” (United Nations 2007, n.p.). However, as James Clifford (1997) argues, “repatriation of tribal works is not the only proper response to contact histories, relations which cannot always be reduced to colonial oppression and appropriation”, alt‐ hough he acknowledges that “it is a possible, appropriate route” (211). As he puts it: “the situation can be complicated and ambiguous” (211–12). While calls for repatriation of Waanyi and Garawa property continue, with Tommy George’s nephew leading attempts to secure the return of a “king” plate and skull removed from the burial place of a deceased Gulf Aboriginal



106 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER leader in the 1930s, Tommy George’s song and associated commentary about the Canberra and Brisbane museums indicates an alternative re‐ sponse to the issue of Indigenous cultural property, repatriation, and rights. This response is captured in the narrative form of the song. In discussing the unique narrative form of Tommy George’s song, we engage with Slaughter (2007) and fellow contributors to this volume in interpreting the social work of narrative. As Slaughter (2007) argues, the “conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vi‐ sion” of the Bildungsroman form of the novel (which he particularly ad‐ dresses), shares a relation with international human rights law and other progressive discourses which is “consubstantial and mutually reinforcing”, arising from a “sociocultural and historical alliance” in western colonial his‐ tory (4–5). For Slaughter, “the movement of the subject from pure subjec‐ tion to self‐regulation describes the plot trajectory of the dominant transi‐ tion narrative of modernization, which both the Bildungsroman and human rights law take for granted and intensify in their progressive visions of hu‐ man personality development” (9). Aboriginal songs and other cultural genres are significantly differ‐ ent to the Bildungsroman, manifesting a tension with this universalizing discourse of rights. As Holcombe (2015) argues, “the Aboriginal logic of selfhood” is different: Human rights, as a particular type of morality, emerged from a specific constellation of philosophy, religion and politics that then defined a certain type of rationality and logic of human selfhood [. . .]. It is this logic of selfhood, defining the relationship between the ‘duty‐bearer’ (particularly the State) and the ‘rights‐holder’ (the citizen), that provides the tension in this post‐colonial polity. The Aboriginal logic of selfhood, in contrast, challenges the con‐ formity of acting as a ‘rights‐holder’ citizen. (Holcombe 2015, 429) As Holcombe describes, her attempts to translate the United Na‐ tions Declaration of Human Rights into the Central Australian “communi‐ lect” of Pintupi‐Luritja proved challenging, with concepts like “right”, “free‐ dom”, and “equality” having no clear equivalents in that language. While



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emphasizing the emergence of “new contingent forms of [Indigenous] iden‐ tity [. . .] [with] new vocabularies [. . .] required to negotiate them” including “the language of human rights”, she points to tensions between the “indi‐ viduated, mobile, outward‐looking personhood” envisaged by the United Nations Declaration and the obligations to kin and the “domestic moral economy” which continue to mark Indigenous life in Central Australia and elsewhere around the continent (Holcombe 2015, 432; see also Peterson 1993). As Merlan (2009) relatedly argues: “many of us have been steeped in a political culture that emphasizes rights [. . .which] makes us incapable of imagining kinds of arrangements in which rights do not occupy the same position or are not conceived in the way we conceive of them”. In contro‐ versially questioning “rights normativity”, Merlan presents a challenge which “goes right to the heart of liberalism with its emphases on universal‐ ity” (n.p.). In following Slaughter (2007), Holcombe (2015) and Merlan (2009), we are mindful of the danger of questioning the applicability of the discourse of human rights in Aboriginal Australia—in a context which on occasions has seen the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Commonwealth) and other human rights protections (for example in the 2007 declaration of the Commonwealth’s Northern Territory National Emergency Response, or “Intervention”). In discussing the distinctive nar‐ rative of Tommy George’s song, we are not arguing for the abandonment of rights‐based activism and reform, rather seeking to point to an alternative response to the questions of cultural property, repatriation, and rights. As foreshadowed above, we interpret Tommy George’s song as an attempt to “write back”—to sing back—to the colonial, metropolitan cultures that removed artefacts from Aboriginal people in the Gulf Country, and relo‐ cated them in the museums. As Edward Said (1993) puts it, this was an at‐ tempt to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories [. . .] disrupting [colonial] narratives [. . .] re‐ placing them with either a more playful or a more powerful new narrative style. (260; see also Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989)



108 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER This narrative style—singing—significantly emphasizes relations to kin, and to country, with an emphasis on the presence of spiritual char‐ acteristics perceived as emanating from the museum objects and general setting which connect them to people and places. The verses are permeated with the composer’s sense of spiritual forces in the world. Different from yet overlapping with ritual songs that are typically “associated with a defi‐ nite ceremonial centre and with a mythical supernatural being or a mythi‐ cal group of totemic ancestors” (Strehlow 1971, xiii; see also Bradley and Mackinlay’s 2000, 14ff discussion of “Songs from the Dreaming”), Tommy George’s narrative embraces the spiritual agency of objects he views as out of place and derived from the violent legacy of colonialism. As Sutton (1987) argues, drawing on material from western Cape York (which adjoins the Gulf Country to the northeast), even songs which depart from the “expected isomorphism” of “songs, places, myths and cere‐ monies” allow for “inevitable and desired changes in relations between in‐ dividuals, groups, natural resources and religious symbols”, that reinforce “the rights, interests and obligations which define Aboriginal social groups” (78). While songs on historical themes such as Tommy George’s composi‐ tion differ from the ritual song‐cycles discussed by Strehlow, Sutton, and other authors (Berndt 1948; Ellis 1985; Clunies Ross, Donaldson, and Wild 1987; Bradley 2010), they nevertheless share certain features with such songs, mirroring their “brief” and “recondite” form (Elkin 1968, 131) and “recurrent rhythmical patterns” (Strehlow 1971, 9), as well as their central preoccupations with kin and country, and the rights, interests and obliga‐ tions arising from them. These preoccupations in Tommy George’s museum collections song comprise the substance of our analysis. Gulf Country Cultural Heritage In discussing Tommy George’s song, we draw upon research in Australian Indigenous studies as well as post‐colonial studies, as influen‐ tially developed by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989) and other scholars (Spivak 1988). In so doing, we are encouraged by recent work seeking to bridge the gap between post‐colonial and Indigenous research (Byrd and Rothberg 2011), finding promising intersections as well as tensions be‐ tween these critical traditions. Tommy George’s song, we contend, speaks to the legacies of colonialism and their continuing impacts on Gulf Aborigi‐ nal people, asserting an “oppositional, place‐based existence” as theorized



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by prominent Indigenous scholars (Alfred and Corntassel 2005, 597). As well as the centrality of place, his song emphasizes kin relations, manifest‐ ing a distinctly Indigenous challenge to the cultural logic of settler colonial‐ ism. Yet his song’s commentary on the settler colonial appropriation of In‐ digenous objects, and his thoughts on the colonial conditions that facilitated the holding of these things in museums, cannot be understood through any one‐dimensional analysis of resistance as “oppositional”. His reflections are ambivalent, not about the impacts of colonialism, which facilitated the mu‐ seum collections and exhibitions, but as to the best way to deal now with the circumstances in which the objects find themselves. The museum exhi‐ bition objects are in Tommy George’s narrative full of spiritual agency con‐ nected with the lives of his Waanyi and Garawa forebears. The objects, in his view, were haunted by the living spirits of those who created them, who remained connected to them, manifesting a spectral Aboriginal presence within the metropolitan museums where these objects were displayed to the empathetic yet uncomprehending gaze of non‐Aboriginal people. Dur‐ ing his visits he was clearly troubled by this spectral presence. At the same time, the ambivalence of his responses offers insights into everyday kinds of post‐colonial transformation occurring in Australian society. In our dis‐ cussion of this song, we seek to identify this ambivalence: seeking less to translate between two cultures than to emphasize the excess of cultural dif‐ ference which the act of translation involves (Bhabha 1994, 102–22), wherein we identify the possibility of transformation (Ashcroft 2001). To offer further context on these experiences, which prompted Tommy George to compose his song, he explained that he composed all the verses after visiting Canberra and Brisbane and saw “no dark fellas about, nothing” yet their cultural artefacts were in the museums.1 He saw: Well, this the part when I bin come down here long Brisbane, come in la museum, I see all the old boomerang, and spear. We call ‘im, where I come from longa Waanyi, and Garawa people, Wam‐ baya, Injilarija, Warramungu, Gudanji . . . Binbin.ga—all right [among all these language groups]. . . . all the boomerang got a

1



Quotations are taken from fieldnotes and recordings connected with Tommy George’s museum visits in 1980 and 1984, as well as Richard Martin’s fieldwork and interviews with surviving members of the George family in 2016. See Trig‐ ger (1980, 1984) and Martin (2016).

110 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER mark, got a little adze mark [longitudinal fluting] . . . Little stick there [is used to make the fluting] got a little adze on the end and we call ‘im biynmala—[the two ends of it are called] jinanggliyari one side and gubija on another side, another end of that stick. We call ‘im gunda [tree, stick], but when he got them little prong [stone blades] on both side of the end we call ‘im biynmala; where he ngugujaba [i.e. literally to adze]—that’s mean he’ll adze ‘im that boomerang to make ‘im that right shape. When he got ‘im all finished, we call ‘in juguli [boomerang], and that one hook boom‐ erang (that’s the same way, you ngugujaba [to manufacture it]) . . . we call ‘im man.gaburina. And when you want that [distinctive fluting] mark there, well you can put that mark there got that jinang . . . one side [by using one end of the implement]. . . . All right, you get that coolamon tree (ranganja) well you gotta ngug‐ ujaba [in the same way] got that same little adze [to make a wooden coolamon]. Yet while seeing many artefacts Tommy George was disturbed that: “I never see’im [Blackfella], poor fella he got shot in this country, and I see’im all his thing”. That is, Tommy George viewed Canberra and Bris‐ bane as the domain of Whitefellas, seeing few Aboriginal people in these cities, and connecting this absence to the experience of frontier violence and invasion. In the Gulf Country, Tommy George’s maternal grandfather and fa‐ ther had shown him many of the items he witnessed on display in the city museums. The items were, he said, in the past looked after by custodians, junggayi, the persons with the right relationship to the country where they came from. As to their location in mainstream Australian museums, he ex‐ pressed mixed feelings. In the Gulf Country, such artefacts had been, during earlier times, appropriately stored by junggayi in caves. As Tommy George put it in March 1984: And all that stuff where everybody make’im out there, old people make’im out there, we got’im longa cave, White man call’im cave, and when he got’im [in a] house he say that he got’im na [in a] museum. But right, when we out here longa this hill country we put’im long gumayangu [cave]—that’s our museum, that’s in the



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cave where he can’t get wet. We got’im langa tea‐tree [bark], White man call’im tea tree [bark] we call’im jiba; jiba we catch’im and put’im and tie’im up, wrap’im up long jiba, keep’im from dirt or white ants. And we gotta put that gunjurr [red ochre], that little red paint, see keep’im from dirt . . . clean, . . . [so] he won’t get bendy and he won’t split—[otherwise] some of them split see, [and if] you leave ‘im without that [red ochre] painting well some‐ bella [some of them] crack. The items in museums he felt were often taken from the “museum blanta [i.e. belong to] Blackfella”, i.e. from caves, by policemen or others in the early days of colonial history. So while in Tommy George’s view, on the one hand it was good for “Whitefellas” to see how “Blackfellas” used to live, on the other hand, the whole experience of finding the displays and stored items prompted his sadness that the artefacts were not where they belong and the setting was indicative of earlier generations of violence towards his forebears. His song, sung repeatedly through an audio recorded conversa‐ tion, was emblematic of his reflections about history and European inva‐ sion. A key theme in his response was to identify spiritual agency in some of the objects, for example, a carved tree in an exhibition prompted Tommy George to remark that the tree was carved to remember someone, likely someone who had been shot during frontier conflict. Indeed, he said he could see a bullet hole in the carved tree: “that mark you can see the bullet mark in them tree, . . . the one tree with the carving, see that’s where that fella got shot in this country, or in this Australia anyway, . . . a wamba [snappy gum] tree”. In his view, the spirits of the old people connected with the objects were present during the visits. He was concerned that the spirits were not happy, not happy for Aboriginal people to come there as visitors, suggesting they would object: “what you here looking at me for”? “It’s al‐ right for Mandagi [Whitefellas]”, i.e. in his view the spirits would feel that non‐Aboriginal people could look at these objects but not Aboriginal peo‐ ple. For Tommy George, the haunting of these objects by their makers car‐ ried a risk for Aboriginal people being caught spiritually through sorcery. Someone like him had to sing to protect himself spiritually from the danger posed by the objects. While Tommy George noted that it was unclear where



112 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER some of the objects came from and to whom they could be returned, he be‐ lieved that they may not have been given freely, and those who did give them would not have wanted women and children to see some of them. His countryman Neville Ned further suggested that the objects may have been obtained after the Aboriginal people were killed by Whitefellas, and this suggestion subsequently informed Tommy George’s song, giving expres‐ sion to the kind of conversation he had with his two companion kinsmen visitors to the museum in Canberra, as well as with David Trigger as the anthropologist who facilitated the visit to the museums. There was consensus among the three visitors to the Canberra mu‐ seum that ideally many of the objects on display were better left where they belong, in situ in the cultural regions they came from, where the old people left them in caves in the bush. There was a view among the three who vis‐ ited the Canberra museum that some objects should be removed from pub‐ lic view and returned to wherever they belonged. However, they also noted positive aspects of the museum collections, namely that the objects were not lost in the wake of colonialism, and that the museum context was acknowledged as keeping the objects safe. David Trigger subsequently wrote a letter to the deputy principal of the Australian Institute of Aborigi‐ nal and Torres Strait Islander Studies giving expression to this opinion of the Doomadgee visitors; it proved to be a view contrary to that held by the deputy principal of that organization at the time, whose response was that Australians would be prevented from the opportunity to see artefacts and hence learn about Aboriginal culture. While other items have been subse‐ quently repatriated from these museums, including human remains, many of the material artefacts remain distant from Waanyi country into the time of writing this chapter in 2016. Here we present Tommy George’s song in Waanyi transcription alongside an English free translation of the verses to draw out the complex significance of Tommy George’s response to the artefact collections. In un‐ dertaking this translation, we draw on the results of ethnographic research conducted by David Trigger since 1978 (including records relating to Trig‐ ger’s museum visits with Tommy George and others in 1980 and 1984). We also draw on ethnographic research conducted by Richard Martin since 2007, including the latter’s ’s fieldwork in Doomadgee in July 2016, where our translation of Tommy George’s song was checked with living members



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of the George family including Tommy George’s surviving spouse and chil‐ dren. In presenting Tommy George’s song in transcribed form, we acknowledge with regret the loss of the musical accompaniment, in that we cannot include the audio recording of Tommy George’s singing. We are aware of a tradition of interpreting such creations as oral texts that encom‐ pass the work of Strehlow (1933), Berndt (1948) and Elkin (1949) as well as a variety of popular appropriations such as Chatwin’s (1987) widely read Songlines. As Clunies Ross (1987) argues, Aboriginal songs are generally performed, often “together with dancing and a variety of visual displays” (1) in ritual settings, although the individual composition we discuss comes from a complementary tradition not dependent on ceremonial contexts. Nevertheless, we encourage the reader to recall this performative context in reading this song. Museum Collections Song Verse 1: Synopsis: Verse one presents an interaction between Tommy George and his travelling companions from Doomadgee, including the anthropologist David Trigger, for whom Tommy George was his mother’s father or grandfather through his incorporation into the idiom of kinship in the Gulf Country. The final line portrays the Waanyi visitors’ nostalgia for their home at Doomadgee. Nimba murrigada, wanya nayinda niji barrawu? You two fella, what is the name of that house/camp [the museum we visited]? Mimi, nayinda niji barrawu Canberra Grandfather/mother’s father [David Trigger speaking], that name of the house is Canberra. Yuwaji guna Ngurdurri Thinking in their [the visitors’] mind of Ngurdurri [Doomadgee] Verse 2: Synopsis: In verse two, Tommy George again addresses his kins‐ men, including the anthropologist, evoking the visit to Brisbane and, again, the group’s nostalgia for Doomadgee. Nimba murrigada, juju ngambala wayga garru wanya nayinda bar‐ rawu?



114 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER You two fella, long way all of us are down south, what is this house/camp? Mimi, nayinda barrawu Brisbane Grandfather/mother’s father [David Trigger speaking], this place is named Brisbane Yuwaji guna Ngurdurri Thinking in their [the vistors’] mind of Ngurdurri [Doomadgee] Verse 3: Synopsis: In the third verse, Tommy George, addressing David Trigger, foreshadows the group’s return home to Doomadgee. Miminya, balbaja nungga mungana bayungu Ngurdurriyurri Grandson [i.e. addressing David Trigger], you and me are going away in the morning west to Ngurdurri [Doomadgee] Yingijba nungga nayinda barrawu Brisbane We are leaving the place named Brisbane Verse 4: Synopsis: In verse four, one of Tommy George’s kinsmen ad‐ dresses him, the singer, presenting reflections on frontier conflict and violence. Gardigardi, banjarrbayi langina wayjbelamugu ngajarr‐yudi Nephew/sister’s son, Whitefellas came from the north with rifles Rangimbiganyi ngamangimugu mura wabuli junawa ngamangi To shoot a lot of our people long time ago [before we were] babies Discussion In discussing this song, we are mindful of the danger of “focusing on the obvious” in substituting Waanyi expressions with equivalents in English (Keane 1997, 42). We are particularly concerned with the risk of misdirecting attention away from the excess that is so much a feature of this song, and the type of translation we describe. The narrative of this song is deceptively simple: the speaker asks “Nimba murrigada, wanya nayinda niji barrawu”, in other words, where are we? What is the name of this house or camp? And is answered by his com‐ panions: Canberra, and Brisbane (in the first and second verses). These in‐ troductory verses then register the visitors’ nostalgia for home: “Yuwaji guna Ngurdurri”, we are thinking of Ngurdurri, or Doomadgee. The third



ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS, INDIGENOUS NARRATIVES, AND POST‐COLONIAL RIGHTS 115

verse then foreshadows the group going away in the morning, leaving Bris‐ bane for Doomadgee. The final verse refers to frontier violence: “ban‐ jarrbayi langina wayjbelamugu ngajarryudi”, Whitefellas “swimming” from the north, invading Aboriginal country, shooting people in the old times. But this simple translation misses much. Firstly, we call attention to the complex use of social deixis, with kin terms marking shifts between speakers in the song. The term murrigada in the first line refers to a relationship classified in the idiom of kinship as between mother’s mother’s brother and sister’s daughter’s son (in the case of two males). Likewise, the second line of the verse asks “Mimi, nayinda niji barrawu Canberra”—Mimi being a kin term for mother’s father, used in this example as a term of address by David Trigger for Tommy George, indicat‐ ing a shift to “David Trigger” becoming the speaker in that line of the song. Likewise, the third and fourth verses use kin terms to introduce relation‐ ships between different speakers; this change in the deictic centre or origo of the song is thus accomplished through the use of the terms Miminya (daughter’s son) and Gardigardi (sister’s son). In verse four, interestingly, Tommy George envisions being informed by another kinsman travelling with him that people were shot rather than presenting himself as originat‐ ing that view. In addition to this use of kin terms to evoke the complex relation‐ ship between members of this group, spatial deixis in the song in relation to places is also complex. Through repetition, tension is established in the opening verses between the location of the visitors in Canberra and Bris‐ bane and their thoughts of Doomadgee. The reference to Doomadgee, Tommy George’s home town, is given as Ngurdurri, this being the place name most precisely linked to a particular location in the vicinity where a travelling Dreaming created a site. The expression “Yuwaji guna Ngurdurri” is something of a rhetorical statement foregrounding a contrast between the cities as experienced with no evidence of modern Aboriginal people and the reflected‐upon intimacies of “home” in Gulf Country with its familiar Aboriginal domain. We have translated this here as “Thinking in their mind of Ngurdurri”, although we reflect that the relationships between persons and place that are articulated here are difficult to translate into the English language.



116 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER The third verse seeks to resolve this tension between Brisbane and Canberra and Doomadgee, anticipating the group’s return home. But the fi‐ nal verse, which refers to frontier violence, shows how Doomadgee and the wider Gulf Country are likewise marked by the trauma of colonialism. Both expressive of terrible events and yet matter‐of‐fact in its emotional tone, here a new speaker addresses Tommy George, the singer, with the line: “Gardigardi, banjarrbayi langina wayjbelamugu ngajarryudi”. Relying on the composer’s translations, we present this here as “Nephew/sister’s son, Whitefellas swimming coming from the north with rifles”; Whitefellas, non‐ Aboriginal people, coming ngajarr‐yudi, “rifle‐with”. These Whitefellas, in Wild Time, wanting to shoot people: “Rangimbiganyi ngamangimugu mura wabuli junawangamangi”, with the verb "swimming" possibly reflecting Tommy George’s view that Whitefellas came across the sea to coastal areas of northern Australia then onwards to his country inland in the Gulf Coun‐ try: “come from Darwin, . . . island out from Cooktown, . . . come from Euro‐ pean that way, that’s where they bein’ come from, come across”. Agency, Ambivalence, and Transformation This song expresses Tommy George’s experiences of seeing Abo‐ riginal artefacts on museum display and in storage in the city yet seeing few, if any, Aboriginal people in Canberra or Brisbane, and being over‐ whelmingly impressed with how the cities are the domain of Whitefellas. The verses were Tommy George’s way of speaking back to the historical and present circumstances of Australia’s relationship with Aboriginal cul‐ ture. He expressed both enormous interest in the preservation of the tradi‐ tional material culture and dismay at its having been wrenched away from its autochthonous domain to the cultural world of the wider Australian so‐ ciety. After the 1980 recording with David Trigger, when revisiting Bris‐ bane in 1984 to work further on available museum collections, Tommy George commented that while most of the items could stay in the city mu‐ seums there were certain things he would like to take back to the Gulf Coun‐ try, these being items he recognized as belonging to that domain. In re‐ sponse to David Trigger’s question: “What you thinking about there, you going to leave’im there so Mandagi [White people] can learn more, or you gotta take some, or which way?”, Tommy George stated:



ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS, INDIGENOUS NARRATIVES, AND POST‐COLONIAL RIGHTS 117

Well, best thing, I’ll leave it for a while. I like to see the White man to learn all that, bit more, see they might want to learn [teach] a younger bloke bye‐m‐bye [later on] when they man age [i.e. not boys]. They’ll learn all that what the Aboriginal been do in their days, back home there [in the speaker’s area] you see. And few [items] there I like to take home, like that jaramara [shell pen‐ dants], dilly‐bag, biriji [sorcery implements], them jirijiri there, lucky‐charm they call’im [used in love magic]—I like to see them put away somewhere where no woman or kids can see’im. If I bin handle them I wouldn’t let anyone come in, not woman or young boy, he gotta be a middle‐aged fella to come in and see that sort of thing. See home there, nobody see them sort of things [their cir‐ culation is restricted to certain categories of people and certain contexts]. But significantly, for Tommy George, the non‐restricted items which could remain on display spoke to the absence and loss of their own‐ ers, powerfully communicating that ambivalence to Whitefellas. As he put it later in the same recording: “Oh better leave him there, just show the . . . see Whiteman got everything blanta Blackfella when they got shot, got eve‐ rything here”. While not referring directly to the artefacts themselves, his song expresses his feelings about them, and the sense of dislocation he felt they suffered through their display in these institutions. As his son explained during Richard Martin’s fieldwork in 2016, reflecting on the verses of Tommy George’s song: [It is a] story for them olden days, travelling lines, song. . . . That’s his own song, he made that for his travel. . . . He bin feeling sorry for his family, ‘cause that bin all his old people stuff taken away from caves, where they put all them stuff away from rain, [in] caves. . . . Think about them people from out there got shot by Whiteman. . . . He bin sing about all them tribe put in one group, he didn’t like to see them because he could see how they connect.



118 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER His song thus continued to speak powerfully to his Waanyi and Garawa relations in Doomadgee and elsewhere, continuing to communicate his ambivalent response to these museum collections. However, as we have discussed, while employing a traditional Ab‐ original genre alien to the mainstream Australian world, we interpret his song as a “voyage in” in the manner described by Said (1993, 261); his use of the Waanyi language and cultural form situating difference and even in‐ commensurability in the act of communication and anthropological trans‐ lation in order to convey the ambivalence he felt in encountering these ob‐ jects, the interplay of presence and absence they established, their haunting of these settler colonial spaces. In our discussion we have sought to draw out the complex significance of this “voyage in” while maintaining its insur‐ rectionary ambivalence: seeking less to translate between two cultures than to emphasize the excess of cultural difference which the act of trans‐ lation involves, focusing on the absence inscribed in the act of communica‐ tion in Tommy George’s travelling song. Here the social work of narrative that the song undertakes continues to travel across political and cultural domains, disclosing potentialities, and prompting transformations.

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Bradley, John, and Elizabeth Mackinlay. 2000. “Songs from a Plastic Water Rat: An Introduction to the Musical Traditions of the Yanyuwa Com‐ munity of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria.” Ngulaig Series, no.17. Brisbane: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, Univer‐ sity of Queensland. Chatwin, Bruce. 1987. The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Clunies Ross, Margaret, Tamsin Donaldson, and Stephen A. Wild, eds. 1987. Songs of Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: Oceania Monograph 32. Elkin, A. P. [1949] 1968. “A General Commentary.” In Songs of the Songmen: Aboriginal Myths Retold, 123–37. Adelaide: Rigby. Ellis, Catherine J. 1985. Aboriginal Music: Education for Living. St Lucia, Bris‐ bane: University of Queensland Press. Holcombe, Sarah. 2015. “The Contingency of ‘Rights’: Locating a Global Dis‐ course in Aboriginal Central Australia.” The Australian Journal of An‐ thropology 26 (2): 211–32. Keane, Webb. 1997. “Knowing One’s Place: National Language and the Idea of the Local in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 12 (1): 37–63. Martin, Richard. 2016. Doomadgee Fieldnotes, July 4. Held in Richard Mar‐ tin’s unpublished research materials. Merlan, Francesca. 2009. “More than Rights.” Inside Story, March 11. http://insidestory.org.au/more‐than‐rights/ Moran, Mark. 2016. Serious Whitefella Stuff: When Solutions Became the Problem in Indigenous Affairs. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Neill, Rosemary. 2016. “Repatriation of Indigenous Artefacts a Hot Topic for Museums.” The Australian, March 12. http://www.theaustralian.com.a u/arts/review/repatriation‐of‐indigenous‐artefacts‐a‐hot‐topic‐for‐ museums/news‐story/69b375d1357e828c6bb4666e73141c34 Peterson, Nicolas. 2013. “On the Persistence of Sharing: Personhood, Asym‐ metrical Reciprocity, and Demand Sharing in the Indigenous Austral‐ ian Domestic Moral Economy.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 24 (2): 166–76. Peterson, Nicolas. 1993. “Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity Among Foragers.” American Anthropologist 95 (4): 860–74.



120 RICHARD J MARTIN AND DAVID TRIGGER Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Slaughter, Joseph R. 2007. Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Smith, Claire, and H. Martin Wobst. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decol‐ onizing Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. [1999] 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed Books. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, 24–28. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Strehlow, T. G. H. 1971. Songs of Central Australia. Sydney: Angus and Rob‐ ertson. Strehlow, T. G. H. 1933. “Ankotarinja, An Aranda Myth.” Oceania 4 (2): 187– 200. Sutton, Peter. 1987. “Mystery and Change.” In Songs of Aboriginal Australia, edited by Margaret Clunies Ross, Tamsin Donaldson and Stephen A. Wild, 77–96. Sydney: Oceania Monograph 32. Trigger, David. 1980. Audio Recording with Tommy George, Brisbane and Canberra, August. Audio recording and transcription held in David Trigger’s unpublished research materials. ‐‐‐. 1984. Audio recording with Tommy George, Brisbane, March. Audio re‐ cording and transcription held in David Trigger’s unpublished re‐ search materials. ‐‐‐. 1987. “Inland, Coast and Islands: Traditional Aboriginal Society and Ma‐ terial Culture in a Region of the Southern Gulf of Carpentaria.” Records of the South Australian Museum 21 (2): 69–84. United Nations. 2007. “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” General Assembly Resolution 61/295, UN GAOR, 61st sess, 107th plen mtg, Supp No 49, UN Doc A/RES/61/295, September 13. https://www. humanrights.gov.au/publications/un‐declaration‐rights‐indigenous‐ peoples‐1



Contrary Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction Nicholas Jose 1 China’s revolution subjected its traditional culture to extreme, iconoclastic critique that reached a peak in the “criticise Confucius” cam‐ paign of 1973–76. It was a world turned upside down. Determined efforts since then have aimed to re‐establish Confucius’s foundational value and sought to affirm his significance, not merely for China but in world terms. Along the way countless lesser writers, artists and thinkers have seen their fortunes fall and rise. Chinese literature is celebrated internationally for its classics of poetry and thought, less so for its fiction and drama. Its modern literature is relatively unknown to non‐Chinese readers; its contemporary literary production has limited recognition. Differences in form, style and genre and the inaccessibility of cultural and historical references and social context—all contributing to the challenge of translation—have kept Chi‐ nese literature to itself. Even the great Lu Xun (1881–1936) is something of a stranger in the pantheon of world writers, at least as construed by the west. He said himself that he would decline a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, were it to happen, despite the fact that he was far from isolationist and formed his style in part on exogenous Russian and Japanese literary models. The Chinese text that has gone furthest into western cul‐ ture is probably The Art of War, the 5th‐century BC treatise by Sunzi (Sun Tzu), enduringly popular as a self‐help manual. For many Chinese, the prejudice perceived against Chinese litera‐ ture in the outside world is summed up by the so‐called Nobel complex— the complaint that no Chinese writer had received the prestigious literary award. The situation was made more irritating by the fact that Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth, a bestselling novel about China written by a for‐ eigner, and no friend to the Communist Party, had won the prize in 1938 and that Gao Xingjian had won it in 2000 as a French citizen, having exiled himself from China after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. And although the view from the People’s Republic is not the same in Taiwan, Hong Kong or the United States, the literary merit of Buck and Gao can be disputed even by those who are sympathetic to their politics. The Nobel complex, now 121

122 NICHOLAS JOSE thankfully eased with the award to Mo Yan in 2012, brought a further po‐ litical pressure to bear on a literary environment that was already politi‐ cized. It spoke to a sense of neglect and victimization, an insistence that, sequestered behind the great wall of its language and culture, Chinese lit‐ erature was not receiving its due. What is Chinese literature in this debate? Its great variety can be seen in the different PEN Centres that represent writers in Chinese.1 There is an official Chinese Centre of International PEN aligned with the Chinese Writers’ Association and its branches around the country, part of the Min‐ istry of Culture. In that national context Chinese literature is the literature produced by officially recognized writers in mainland China who write in any of the officially recognized languages, including minority languages such as Mongolian and Tibetan. There is a PEN Centre in Taiwan which goes diplomatically under the title Taipei Chinese PEN Centre. There’s a PEN Centre in Hong Kong, where most writers speak Cantonese and sometimes advocate for Cantonese as a language distinct from Mandarin, including as written (when Cantonese speech is written down, for example). Then there is an Independent Chinese PEN Centre, based overseas, where “Chinese” refers to the language its members use rather than their citizenship. This latter is an international association that encompasses diasporic Chinese writers as well as writers living in China. It is autonomous, non‐official and not recognized by the Chinese authorities. Its members have been harassed or detained in China for their writing and publishing, including most fa‐ mously its erstwhile president Liu Xiaobo, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, currently serving an eleven‐year jail sentence in China. There are writers in Chinese in many parts of the world. They usu‐ ally publish in China (including Hong Kong) or Taiwan or in Chinese‐lan‐ guage publications elsewhere that are affiliated with networks in Greater China. There are popular writers, scholarly writers, bloggers and writers who don’t seek publication. There are differences in language by state and region, upbringing and education, generation and medium, and different understandings of the nature and function of literature.

1



PEN International—the acronym now stands for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists—is a world association of writers that advocates for writ‐ ers’ rights, including freedom of expression. It was founded in London in 1921. By 1931 there was a PEN Centre in China.

CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 123 In all this literary variety it is hard to establish representativeness and quality. Prizes, sales and accolades don’t go very far, although enduring popularity with committed readers is hard to discount. The idea that an au‐ thor represents a larger group, such as a community, a place or a people, is easily co‐opted and distorted, but also reflects the natural pride of identifi‐ cation. People like their home‐grown writer to succeed, and they appreciate it when a writer reflects back to them their own experience in a satisfying way. Celebration, satire and critique are all part of this. If self‐expression is a human characteristic, a need and a right, then to represent and to be rep‐ resented with due sensitivity, are equally needs and rights. This can include the narrative of a group, or a nation, to which the teller and the listener feel belonging. To this extent the act of writing does not exist in isolation. If the representation it performs is approved by those to whom it belongs it has at least the merit of successful expressive communication. But there is a different kind of literary merit we recognize as read‐ ers and critics that, however shareable, is less susceptible to the dictates of external authority. That has been the dilemma for Chinese literature. What the state endorses has not necessarily been what readers appreciate, in‐ cluding foreigners reading in translation, and that has called the whole business into question, as the state’s fictions about itself seek to override and reshape the creative interaction of writer and reader. Let me narrow the focus to a consideration of fiction produced in the period after 1979. That watershed year saw the implementation, under Deng Xiaoping as leader, of the economic reforms and related “open door” policies that have brought prosperity, though not without social problems and instability, nor continuing anxiety about China’s standing in the world, in which cultural achievement matters. The People’s Republic remains a party state in which freedom of expression is circumscribed and artistic practice takes place within officially determined limits. There is room for movement and flexibility, of course, and artists can be creative. But the question remains: is it possible to have a true literature under those cir‐ cumstances? And indeed what makes a literature “true”?

* For Mao Zedong, himself a poet, in his Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art (1942) it was clear. This short document has cast a long shadow as, interpreted this way and that with the times, it dictated the role of culture



124 NICHOLAS JOSE in the New China. Mao is prescriptive in his answer to the question of “for whom” literature is needed: “all our literature and art are for the masses of the people [. . .]; they are created for the workers, peasants and soldiers and are for their use” (Mao 1967, 84). Mao has proved diabolically dialectical as a literary critic, his words open to crude and capricious interpretation over the years. The im‐ portance he placed on literature gave it prestige: “If we had no literature and art even in the broadest and most ordinary sense, we could not carry on the revolutionary movement and win victory”, he insisted (Mao 1967, 86). But this placed an extraordinary burden on the artistic practitioner to get it right: in our criticism we must [. . .] severely criticize and repudiate all works of literature and art expressing views in opposition to the nation, to science, to the masses and to the Communist Party, be‐ cause these so‐called works of literature and art proceed from the motive and produce the effect of undermining unity for resistance to Japan. (Mao 1967, 89) This was war, and a war that has continued long after the United Front period in which Mao was speaking, up to today. In the effort to internalize the dialectic, writers naturalized modes of self‐criticism, re‐education and self‐censorship. It became the writer’s job to deal with the contradiction inherent in Mao’s double conception of work that must be at once aesthetically achieved at a high level and func‐ tionally effective in serving the Party’s aims. The ideological struggle at Yan’an, in which the literature of the People’s Republic of China began, provides a lens through which more re‐ cent literature can be read. It marks this literature as separate from Chinese literature more broadly. There was nowhere else for writers to go, unless they chose silence, such as Shen Congwen (1902–88), who wrote no more fiction after 1949 or Ah Cheng (born 1949), who has published little since his admired, elliptical stories of the 1980s.2

2



For a nuanced explication of Shen Congwen’s “silence”, see David Wang (2015, 41–112).

CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 125 Mao’s approach was absolute and total, but the stubborn possibil‐ ity of alternative world views always remained. Since the 1970s, literary life in China has proceeded by a series of steps forward into expanded space. A taboo subject or style is tackled, amidst debate and controversy, becomes normalized in the process, and policy adjusts accordingly. From a privileged position the writer has correctly sensed the direction in which things are going. Writing about the predicament of middle‐aged women who had to manage work and multi‐generational family responsibilities, for example, made Shen Rong (born 1936) a widely read author with her 1980 novel At Middle Age (Ren dao zhongnian). Her candour in depicting a problematic aspect of life in New China at the time served a useful social purpose. As literature her work is not much revisited thirty years on. Being in the vanguard of a social reform is not without risk if the wind changes, but most of the Chinese writers who were hot topics for breaking new ground in the post‐Mao period have proved to be advance mouthpieces of accepted social or cultural policy shifts. The therapeutic “scar literature” of the 1970s that enabled some discussion of previous ca‐ lamitous errors, the revival of interest in peasant life through the folkloric magic realist fiction of Mo Yan and other novelists in the 1980s, the more sexually explicit and emotionally declaratory life writing of the 1990s and 2000s, often by women (Chen Ran, Sheng Keyi), and now crime and science fiction—all in various ways both push the boundaries and serve the Party’s purposes at the same time. The problem for the reader or the critic is to find a frame of refer‐ ence for assessing such work. Is it possible simply to ask: what’s it like as literature? An insight into how Chinese cultural officialdom grapples with these matters comes in the biopic The Golden Era (2014), an award‐winning Chinese/Hong Kong co‐production about the author Xiao Hong (1911–42).3 As fellow women writers committed to the revolution, Xiao Hong and Ding Ling (1904–86) are contrasted. Ding Ling adheres to the spirit of Mao’s Yan’an talks by carrying out cultural work to educate the consciousness of both cadres and masses, while Xiao Hong prioritizes her own individuality and voice as a writer. Xiao Hong’s creativity is shown as superior to Ding

3



Directed by Ann Hui, written and executive produced by Li Qiang and starring Tang Wei and Feng Shaofeng, the movie won Best Film and Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards 2014.

126 NICHOLAS JOSE Ling’s, and her tragic, short life is read as exemplifying the destructive ef‐ fects of the old society on a woman seeking self‐realization. Feminism, Mao‐ ism, the life of art and the verdicts of posterity are tangled here. As with Lu Xun, Xiao Hong’s mentor, it is unclear what form self‐realization could have taken, had she survived to experience the New China. Gao Xingjian (born 1940) comes from the cultural world of that New China. He studied at the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University, graduating with a major in French in 1962, and was assigned as editor and translator to the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. These were key insti‐ tutions for China’s international cultural contacts as well as privileged sites of intellectual ferment, often in the vanguard, including during the Cultural Revolution when Gao was swept up in Red Guard activities. He was well positioned when the post‐Maoist reforms began and travelled to France in 1979 as interpreter for an official delegation headed by veteran writer Ba Jin (Gao 2007, 3–4). As his own writing developed, informed by modernist and postmodernist practice in the “republic of letters” of which Paris was the self‐proclaimed capital, and committed to transgressing the Party’s cul‐ tural orthodoxy in China, for which he had an insider’s heightened sensitiv‐ ity, Gao became a target. By the end of the 1980s he was living in exile in France, an outcome made more compelling by the events of Tiananmen, 1989. Soul Mountain (Lingshan), written in China in the 1980s, was pub‐ lished in Taipei in 1990. Plays, essays and paintings followed, including a second major prose work, Yige ren de shengjing in 1999, again published in Taipei, translated by Mabel Lee as One Man’s Bible (2002). Lee’s translation of Soul Mountain appeared in 2000, shortly before Gao won the Nobel Prize in Literature for that year. Yet despite being formed in so many ways in the cultural world of the People’s Republic of China, Gao does not appear in the comprehensive Museum of Modern Chinese Literature in Beijing, which includes other di‐ asporic Chinese writers, nor, because of his French citizenship, is he acknowledged as a Chinese winner of a Nobel Prize. Rather than seek crea‐ tive space within the constraints of his society, Gao found it in rejection that was reciprocated. His trajectory is not dissimilar to Ai Weiwei’s, arguably China’s best‐known creative figure at present. Ai comes from cultural aristocracy in Chinese Communist terms, a family that was close and loyal to the Party’s cultural apparatus. A period abroad that brought him up to date with the



CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 127 western cultural avant‐garde, in Ai’s case through performance, installation and conceptual art in New York, enabled—indeed demanded—the radical critique of its application to China, in the same root‐and‐branch way that some of China’s May Fourth revolutionaries had advocated earlier in the 20th century. That critique extends beyond the contemporary situation into entrenched structures, habits and ideas, where the logic can become contradictory, as another version of China, with its deep contours of thought and feeling, becomes the moral source of the critique at the same time. Hence the whirling, shape‐shifting inventiveness of Gao Xingjian’s and Ai Weiwei’s work, and the frequent bewilderment and sometimes vitriol their work produces in China, where, at the most polite, it is described as not representative of the best. Gao’s One Man’s Bible is a more directly autobiographical work than its precursor, Soul Mountain. It continues the interplay of different voices and personal pronouns (I, s/he, you), settings and times as multiple narrative lines are pursued, interspersed with speculation on the work of a writer (as well as the writer’s life in the world, including his intimate life). The book goes back over the author’s experience during the Cultural Revo‐ lution and his subsequent scapegoating in later political campaigns. Chap‐ ter 24 is a remarkable essay on the question of literature that acts as a kind of response to the prescriptive platitudes that have devolved from Mao’s Yan’an talks in the institutionalized literary practice of China. In contrast to the need for literature to meet the demands of the masses’ struggle, Gao offers the even more materialistic justification of physical need: “You must have this release [. . .]. It is just like shit; if there is the need to, it is dis‐ charged” (Gao 2002, 180–181). The need does not arise from any individual superiority or external purpose, although in being discharged with aes‐ thetic power, it may reveal reality. That is paradoxical, Gao recognizes, be‐ cause writing “is separated from reality by a layer of language [. . .] cloaking naked reality with a gauze curtain” (182). The role of such artistic expres‐ sion, from ancient times, has been “to articulate pain in order to [. . .] make pain bearable” (180). Qualifying his claims, Gao writes: You know you are certainly not the embodiment of truth, and you write simply to indicate that a sort of life, worse than a quagmire, more real than an imaginary hell, more terrifying than Judgment Day, has, in fact, existed. Furthermore, it is very likely that [. . .] it



128 NICHOLAS JOSE will make a comeback, [. . .] and people who have never been op‐ pressed will oppress or be oppressed. (180) The mediation between writer and reader through literary expres‐ sion is necessary for it to work: “You articulate in language your feelings, experiences, dreams, memories, fantasies, thoughts, assessments, premo‐ nitions, sensations, as well as providing the music and rhythms for linking these to the existences of real people” (182). This moves in the direction of uniting with the masses through an engagement with the real, but for the radically opposed purpose of expos‐ ing how they have been deceived. It requires not Nietzschean superhuman‐ ity, but ordinariness: “While exposing the land of your ancestors, the Party, the leaders, the ideals, the new people, and also that modern superstition and fraud—revolution—you use literature to create a gauze curtain, so that, viewed through it, that trash can at least be looked at” (Gao 2002, 181). That, for Gao, is “the magic of literature”, its potency. At its heart it depends on the important Chinese moral/aesthetic quality of “sincerity”, which has a more complex, stronger meaning than its discredited western version. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling (1972) noted the sharp diminution of the authority [the concept of sincerity] once exercised. When we hear [the word], we are conscious of the anachronism which touches it with quaintness. [. . .] To praise a work of literature by calling it sincere is now at best a way of say‐ ing that although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual ad‐ miration, it was at least conceived in innocence of heart. (6) For Gao it could not be more different. His is a salvage operation, a return, of the utmost seriousness. Modesty, deflection and a lack of finality are part of it: “You are not a dragon, not an insect, not this, not that [. . .] ‘are not’ is a sort of reality. [. . .] At the end point, that is [. . .] you are merely an indica‐ tion of life—expression [. . .] that confronts ‘are not’” (2002, 183). Here sin‐ cerity and authenticity are closely aligned. A similar idea of literature appears more starkly in Gao’s Nobel Lecture in 2000, published in its English translation as “The Case for Liter‐ ature”. There Gao argues that the authentic voice of literature is the “inevi‐



CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 129 tably weak” voice of an individual who speaks for nothing but his own feel‐ ings (Gao 2007, 31). It begins with “talking to oneself”, with no thought of publication or any other purpose, except to preserve “human conscious‐ ness”, in secret if necessary, if there is no other way (34). Yet that expres‐ sion, shaped into art can transcend “national boundaries] to make profound revelations about the universality of human nature” (36). Gao acknowl‐ edges that “the cultural traditions of China naturally reside within” him, but provide only a starting point for “what has not been adequately articulated in that language” so far (36). It is a dialectical symbiosis that also requires artistic discipline. Gao calls this “cold detachment”, productive of a “cold lit‐ erature” that, when it achieves the necessary freedom, finds its “innate character”. Such literature is a form of “spiritual activity”, where detach‐ ment is the non‐attachment of true mindfulness, in Buddhist terms, includ‐ ing from the dust and mire of the world. The essay re‐uses key concepts teasingly as it works toward its ultimate uncompromising position, from “a frail individual’s weak voice that is hardly worth listening to” (48). “Truth in one’s writing also signifies one’s sincerity when one is not writing. [. . .] For the writer, truth in literature approximates ethics, and is the ultimate ethics of literature” (48). Gao’s “are not” is a way of declaring what literature cannot be and leads to an absolute rejection of the literature produced in compliance with the dictates of the Party and the state after 1949. That literature, defined in terms of a revolutionary break with tradition, or a re‐assessment and co‐ optation of tradition according to criteria and for purposes external to it, becomes “not” literature, in the negative sense of having no existence as literature of any worth. 2 The view that writing produced in an environment of self‐criticiz‐ ing adaptation and compromise cannot be literature of much worth takes the logic of creative autonomy to an extreme. Simon Leys (1977), for exam‐ ple, aware of the dire consequences of what he called Mao’s “cretinizing of the most intelligent people on earth” (167) asks “what if, unhappily, there is some necessary link in China between political ineptitude and cultural flowering?” He contrasts the “fertile anarchy” of the Republican period with “the sterilising totalitarianism of the People’s Republic” (138–39). After the



130 NICHOLAS JOSE destruction of so much artistic and intellectual life, can creativity begin again? How total can such repudiation be? Liu Xiaobo, focussing on the post‐1989 period of increased con‐ sumerism, nationalism and cynicism, castigates his writer colleagues “in‐ side the system” for the uncreativity to which they are condemned. “Unre‐ lenting inculcation of Chinese Communist Party ideology has created rup‐ tures in history and produced generations of people whose memories are blank”, he writes (Liu 2012, 51), denouncing an “intellectual world [. . .] that [. . .] sees advantage in playing the hypocritical language game that has be‐ come part of its culture” (144). A comprehensive accounting of the literature produced by the Peo‐ ple’s Republic would seek a balance between blanket dismissal and boosterism, both ideologically framed. Meanwhile a more selective exercise in practical criticism can offer useful pointers for reading narratives whose originality lies in the critique of norms. From a rights perspective, the achievements managed within constraint, however diminished, deserve to be better understood. The re‐invention of Chinese creativity is acknowledged as a major task for the present generation. Concern has been expressed about the in‐ adequacy of the effort, especially in terms of international literary prestige. While Mo Yan’s Nobel is balm to a degree, the evidence in translations, sales and esteem suggests that contemporary Chinese literature still hasn’t really reached the world. This provokes the question whether (apart from the quality of the translations and the unreliability of foreign consumers) there is something lacking in the literature itself. It is possible, for example, to argue that Chinese editorial practices are designed for internal needs ra‐ ther than to meet outside markets (Grundy 2015, n.p.). Still, when the layers of the onion are peeled back, the insecurity persists that there is something missing at the centre. Some would identify this as “artistic freedom”. Others would describe it as a chimera: books are written, consumed, discussed, critiqued on a large scale in a fractious way, none of it perfect perhaps, but who is to say this is not literature in the making, not much different from the Grub Street goings on that, amongst much else, hosted Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift? Yu Hua (born 1960) offers a striking contrast to Gao Xingjian in his approach to the possibilities of literature in post‐Mao China. In his paired essays in memoir, “Reading” and “Writing”, the novelist looks back on his



CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 131 literary formation, starting explicitly with the ground zero of the Cultural Revolution: “I grew up in a time and a place where there were no books” (Yu 2012, 36). Book burnings and lootings aggravated the banning of most literature: “practically all literary works were labelled ‘poisonous weeds’” (37). The exception was approved Chinese “socialist revolutionary litera‐ ture”, which “left no traces on my life”, Yu recalls. This literature was non‐ literature in effect. The paucity of material made the budding reader hungry for whatever he could get his hands on, and adept at using it in his own way. “What I liked to read in Selected Works [of Mao Zedong] was simply the foot‐ notes. [. . .] Although there was no emotion to be found in the footnotes, they did have stories [of historical events], and they did have characters [histor‐ ical figures]” (41). A few foreign novels circulated in manuscript form, sometimes “without author or title, beginning or end” (43). The young Yu Hua and his friend transcribed a translation of La dame aux camélias by Du‐ mas, where they found both emotion and erotic interest. The big‐character posters on walls during the Cultural Revolution that used “gossip, insult, and muckraking” (50) to denounce people provided much salacious story‐ telling, if read between the lines: “for me”, writes Yu Hua, “the big‐character posters functioned primarily as a form of erotica” (52). Then with the be‐ ginnings of liberalization after 1976, translations of western classics by Tol‐ stoy, Balzac and Dickens arrived, providing a feast after famine. In this peculiar literary formation, extreme limitation acts as a powerful stimulus to interpretative ingenuity and imagination. The politi‐ cization of the reading space works against its avowed purpose as people unearth the contrary pleasures of storytelling, including sensation, curios‐ ity and the idiosyncrasy of human desires. Looking back, Yu Hua reflects on the change his generation experienced “from an age without books” to a situation where “there are so many that we don’t know which ones to buy” and literature is paradoxically devalued: “For what it costs to buy wastepa‐ per you can get yourself a bundle of classics”, a book vendor cries in a recent Beijing market (Yu 2012, 57). In famine or in superfluity, however, Yu Hua, like Gao Xingjian, recognizes a transcendent potential, only for Yu Hua it is more random, mysterious and individual. When he reads great books, he writes, “they carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it’s only on my return that I realize they will always be part of me” (58). The example he gives is a line from the poet Heine that, decades later,



132 NICHOLAS JOSE prompts him to remember sneaking into the nearby local morgue as a child to keep cool on hot summer days: If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a differ‐ ent time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. (61) Well‐served by his translators, Yu Hua, so popular at home, is also admired outside China. He is able to publish work in different jurisdictions as necessary. China in Ten Words, for example, appeared first in French translation, parts were opinion pieces in English in The New York Times, and the Chinese edition was published in Taiwan. The relaxed, humorous candour of “Reading” and “Writing” is strik‐ ing as a way of dealing with the violently destructive experience the author lived through as a child. Rather than anger or denunciation, that tone is a form of counter‐narrative. He admits that, with his interest in writing, he wrote big‐character posters too. He acknowledges his luck in becoming a writer in the early 1980s when “supply and demand” in the literary field “were so out of synch” and his apprentice efforts were avidly welcomed by editors (Yu 2012, 81). He is wry about his opportunistic preference for work as a state‐salaried writer as against being the state‐salaried dentist for which he trained. His disrupted schooling during the Cultural Revolu‐ tion meant that he knew “only a limited stock of Chinese characters” and hence wrote plainly, which appealed to critics as a stripped‐down style— like Hemingway. In assessing his literary formation in those grim years, Yu Hua refers mordantly to Mao: “Good things can become bad, and bad things can become good” (80). Reliving in dreams the violent world he experi‐ enced as a child, especially the many public sentencing rallies and immedi‐ ate executions, he describes an experience of his own annihilation which resulted in a partial release from those terrifying “lost” memories: “what‐ ever you accomplish can only partially revise that most basic image; it will never be entirely transformed” (59). In this way Yu Hua writes from his Chinese experience, not oppositionally, but carrying the burden of damage and the impetus to recover. He writes his way out.



CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 133 The fiction of this sardonically observant, audaciously inventive novelist is driven by a life force that thrives on outlandish tales. His novel, The Seventh Day (Yu 2014; Diqi tian, 2013), is a good example, told by a dead man concerning his bond with an adoptive father who found him on the tracks after his mother lost him while giving birth in the toilet of a pass‐ ing train. Like the boy who peeps into the women’s section of the public toilet in the opening of his sprawling novel Brothers (Yu 2009; Xiong di, 2005–06), suspended above the pit in order to glimpse female pudenda, Yu Hua is compelled by Eros against Thanatos, which takes the form of a dark and threatening cess that underlies the present. 3 Other contemporary Chinese novelists offer similarly far‐fetched narratives, at once corporeal (often erotic) and otherworldly, as a way of suturing the remembered or repressed past to a surprising present and its projection into a dream future. Mo Yan’s epic novel Life and Death are Wear‐ ing Me Out (Mo 2008; Shengsi pilao, 2006) works like this. Like most of Mo Yan’s work, it offers an earthy, highly coloured evocation of the author’s country hometown world, in this case charting the transmigrations of vil‐ lage landlord Ximen Nao through a half‐century of animal existences as he is “executed and reincarnated as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey” and finally the boy who is one of the novel’s narrators. “My story begins on January 1, 1950” it opens, in a voice that has experienced “the bowels of hell” (Mo 2008, 3). It ends, 500 pages later, “in the waning days of the year 2000” (537), with fireworks and the birth of a “millennium boy” in a section called “An End and a Beginning”. Between these bookends unfolds the his‐ tory of the People’s Republic as experienced through the transformations of an agricultural community: land reforms, political campaigns, class and community struggle, generational and personal entanglements, lust, greed, ambition, envy and rancour carried forward through time, with an irre‐ pressible carnal vigour, under the capricious, self‐serving management of low level officialdom. Mo Yan’s storytelling is as exuberant as it is informed. This is a world to which he is umbilically tied as a writer and which he is committed to celebrating. The artistic challenge is to make it plausible, pal‐ atable and pardonable. The long third part, “Pig Frolics”, is central to this undertaking, given the centrality of the beneficent pig in Chinese life. In the



134 NICHOLAS JOSE Cultural Revolution improved pig‐raising targets are envisaged with ludi‐ crous enthusiasm: “Every pig is a bomb flung into the midst of the imperi‐ alists, revisionists, and reactionaries” (224). But a disease afflicts the pigs that end up being thrown into the river, “a corps of floating dead [. . .] drift‐ ing downstream [. . .] swallowed up, dismembered, and turned into all sorts of materials to join the transforming cycle of material objects” (339). Mo Yan, who appears as a figure in his own novel, growing from boyhood to maturity, is quoting himself there, and the pig narrator protests, demanding praise not lament: “I am the power of life, I am passion, freedom, and love” (339). In this vision, animality amounts to survival. Further along, the pig saves itself from being shot during a massacre by diving beneath the sur‐ face of that dark flowing water: “I dove to the bottom, leaving all sound above and behind me, just like a certain first‐rate novelist” (376). Life and Death are Wearing Me Out can be read as a metanarrative for Mo Yan’s own survival as a novelist in communist China. His immersion in the material circumstances of his formation, about which he spoke in his Nobel Lecture, including storytelling in its cycles of production and repro‐ duction in a world of endless change, is a means of turning a pitiless actual‐ ity into something fantastical, bestial and entertaining (Mo, 2012, n.p.). He escapes the surface reality most of his readers know in an overflow of con‐ tinuing story. Sheng Keyi (born 1973) is even more inventive in Death Fugue (Si‐ wang Fugue) (2014). While remaining engaged with a version of politics, including sexual and literary politics, she offers a more radical imaginative response. The tower of excrement that occupies the Round Square at the centre of the capital of her fictionalized state is a satirical sidestepping of direct discussion of Tiananmen 1989 and sets the scene for the novel’s in‐ vestigation into the failure of the humanist ideals of that historical moment and their substitution by the triumphalist, eugenic aspirations imaged as Swan Valley, something like an alpine health resort, a speculative version of the “wealth and power” on which China is set. “People in shackles only write shackled poetry”, comments one of Sheng’s characters, voicing the anxiety that afflicts so much contemporary Chinese writing (Sheng 2014, 213). In this contrary narrative, resolutely unsusceptible to simple inter‐ pretation, she shows how to be untrammelled.



CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 135 The late Wang Xiaobo (1952–97) is another example of the fic‐ tional possibilities of internalizing the structures of power into an explora‐ tion of abjection that is at once critical and exultant. The story, filmed as East Palace, West Palace by Zhang Yuan (1996), depicts a relationship be‐ tween a policeman and the gay man he detains, who becomes his “teacher”. Discipline and punishment, in a Foucauldian sense, are enfolded here with writing and with what can be imagined but not expressed. Respect is con‐ ferred on the outlawed by storytelling that binds one to the other: “Without any punishment, it can’t be called love. [. . .] to be loved by someone in des‐ pair is best” (Wang 2007, 134, 138). The intimate embrace of a system of total surveillance is a subject in Wang Xiaobo’s The Golden Age (Huangjin shidai) published in Chinese in 1994 and reissued in English in the collec‐ tion Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novels by Wang Xiaobo (2007). It charts the illicit sexual relationship between two young people sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The confessions they are forced to write acquire the character of literature with their affective detail. In its enforced fidelity to fact, self‐criticism becomes creative expression, in which the narrator’s friend, a literature major, finds “the charm of Victorian underground novels”: The first thing I confessed was what happened the night we ran away. After a few drafts, I finally wrote that [she] looked like a ko‐ ala bear. She admitted that she was very excited that night and really felt like a koala bear. She finally had a chance to fulfil her great friendship. So she locked her legs around my waist, grabbed my shoulder with her hands, and imagining that I was a tall tree, tried to climb up several times. (Wang Xiaobo 2007, 90) Frankness and euphemism combine suggestively. Erotic politics— power, surrender, abjection and reversal—is the subject of Wang Xiaobo’s fiction, as a vehicle for a wider, more psychologically probing social cri‐ tique. As Liu Xiaobo says, “Of all the possible methods of castrating the hu‐ man spirit, to feel fully satisfied by performance of fake intimacy must be the cruellest” (Liu 2012, 163). In Wang Xiaobo’s story “Mister Lover” (Jiujiu qingren) the setting is historical, faux Tang, but the theme is the same sad‐ omasochistic nexus of pain and pleasure, in which love wells up from terror and in which submission is a more compelling experience than release or



136 NICHOLAS JOSE renewal. Such narratives, in their contrariness, offer no way out except through writing itself. Hence the sharp, dirty, sweet, funny buoyancy in the new Chinese writing, never easily translatable. With a determined informality, it’s writ‐ ten for those in the know. Xu Zechen’s Running in Beijing (2014; Paobu guo Zhongguancun, 2008) is a beat novel, a nouvelle vague tale of existence be‐ tween the cracks in the totalitarian metropolis. The English translation of the title adapts the more localised original reference to Zhongguancun, the university district. It also picks up on Run Lola Run, a favourite movie of the protagonist whose unlikely name is Dunhuang, site of China’s greatest Bud‐ dhist cave paintings. Another movie he likes is Bicycle Thieves, and Breath‐ less would not be out of place on the list. He sells pirated DVDs for a living, porn being the most popular. Desire is opportunistic, survival precarious, until, in a farcical climax, systemic collapse finally occurs—an image of something larger. Xu’s style is cool, anti‐heroic, pulsing with patter and how to get by. What survives at the end is a code of honour—loyalty to mates in a disloyal world. Such wuxia (knight errant) chivalry seems anachronistic and anarchic, a declaration of sincerity with no place to go. Yet it’s a way of finding existential meaning in a city in which 300,000 tons of dust can fall in a single night. At one point Dunhuang remembers practising calligraphy at school, using brush and water on concrete: By the time he got to the end [. . .] the beginning had begun to dry, and he would trace over the disappearing characters. There were crowds of kids out there on the sidewalk at noon, their rear ends all raised high—quite a sight. Writing “But of course” wasn’t enough, though, so he went around to the trunk of the car and wrote: I didn’t write this. (Xu 2014, 84) Disappearing writing, writing that retraces itself, writing that is not written: this describes the contrary narrative that Xu Zechen has produced. The fundamental human right it asserts is its right to exist: an unauthorized text for life. To conclude, then, recent Chinese literature needs to be under‐ stood in the peculiar context of the corpus of literature that the People’s Republic has produced through struggle and the literary habitus that writ‐ ers there have been forced to dwell in. Only in the Bourdieusian field of that



CONTRARY NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION 137 context can the strategies of authors be identified, exposed and interpreted for what they are. In that context it becomes possible to follow the contrary narratives that are offered, the écriture féminine, if you like, the writing against the grain, and to appreciate its import or its mere reflexivity. To that context should be brought the context of other writers who have developed their approaches in a politics of oppression, fracture or distortion, such as Musil and Kafka, Camus, Duras, Plath, Naipaul, even Patrick White and J. M. Coetzee. It makes less sense to assimilate contemporary Chinese fiction to the international space of lauded contemporary western literature. The rights narrative requires us to work on our responses, to follow the running thread, to answer the text as responsibly as we can.

BIbliography Gao, Xingjian. 2002. One Man’s Bible. Translated by Mabel Lee. Sydney: HarperCollins. ‐‐‐. 2007. The Case for Literature. Translated by Mabel Lee. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Grundy, Alice. 2015. “Three Easy Steps to Understanding Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Sydney Review of Books, September 11. http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/11‐september‐2015‐un‐ derstanding‐chinese‐literature/ Hui, Ann, dir. 2014. The Golden Era (Huangjin shidai). China/Hong Kong. Film. 177 minutes. Leys, Simon. 1977. Chinese Shadows. Translated from the French. New York: Viking. ‐‐‐. 1979. Broken Images: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics. Translated by Steve Cox. London: Allison & Busby. Liu, Xiaobo. 2012. No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin‐Liao, and Liu Xia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lovell, Julia. 2006. The Politics of Cultural Capital: China”s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Mao, Zedong. 1967. “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.” Se‐ lected Works of Mao Tse‐Tung, vol. 3 Peking: Foreign Languages Press.



138 NICHOLAS JOSE Mo, Yan. 2008. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing. ‐‐‐. 2012. “Storytellers.” Nobel Lecture. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. De‐ cember 7. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/la ureates/2012/yan‐lecture_en.html Sheng, Keyi, 2014. Death Fugue. Translated by Shelly Bryant. Sydney: Gira‐ mondo. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wang, David Der‐wei. 2015. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intel‐ lectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Wang, Xiaobo. 2007. Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novels by Wang Xiaobo. Translated and with an introduction by Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ‐‐‐. 2015. “Mister Lover.” Translated by Eric Abrahamsen. Paper Republic, July https://paper‐republic.org/works/mister‐lover/Xu, Zechen. 2014. Running through Beijing. Translated by Eric Abrahamsen. San Francisco: Two Lines Press. Yu, Hua. 2009. Brothers. Translated by Eileen Cheng‐yin Chow and Carlos Rojas. London: Picador. ‐‐‐. 2012. China in Ten Words. Translated by Allan H. Barr. London: Duck‐ worth Overlook. ‐‐‐. 2015. The Seventh Day. Translated by Allan H. Barr. Melbourne: Text Publishing.



How to Kick Ass when Life’s a Bitch:1 A Human Rights Bulletin from India Asha Varadharajan For my father, who loved the women in his life without pity or rancour 1 A poster appeared on city walls across Bangalore in December 2015 with the following words: “She is a women/A sister, a daughter/A wife, a mother/Save her dignity”. For my sins as a Professor of English, the erro‐ neous plural form of “woman” caught my attention first. But then I found the slippage between “woman” and “women” instructive: if human rights signify “one’s basic entitlements simply by virtue of being human” (Bunch 2004, 31), then “woman” is “women”, and the plight of one signifies the suf‐ fering and gestures towards the aspiration of all. As many scholars have ar‐ gued, however, “the status of women was central to the self‐conscious pro‐ ject of modernizing nationalism” (Narain 2013, 96); thus, the slippage also raises the question of how the normative reach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) would “contextualize and situate violations of equality” (Narain 2013, 92–93) and suture the gap between “formal rights and the actual status of women” (2013, 92) in different parts of the world. The woman question, in short, can only be addressed despite, not because, of laws, policies, and mechanisms that may have been instituted to mark human rights as both premise and promise (to borrow Joseph Slaughter’s nicely alliterative phrasing) of a brave new world. Next, my gaze alighted on the multiple and ambiguous connota‐ tions of the word “save” on the poster: protect, preserve, redeem, rescue, respect, salvage from inevitable ruin. If, as Slaughter (1997) explains, hu‐ man rights law conceives of dignity “as universal and fundamental” (408),

1

My title is a modification of Maya Angelou’s words: “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass” (Angelou 2014).

139

140 ASHA VARADHARAJAN the appearance of this poster in response to the growing litany of examples of violence against women in India suggests that female dignity is always under threat rather than the source of one’s integrity as a woman and as human. In the spirit of Charlotte Bunch’s landmark intervention in the dis‐ course of human rights, therefore, I reflect on the concept of human rights “to address the problem of women’s subordination” and to include in the discussion of human rights abuses “the degradation and violation of women” (Bunch 1990, 487). Because rights depend upon inviolability, and operate in circumstances that produce a constant negotiation of “compet‐ ing conceptions of human subjectivity—a subjectivity based in inherent hu‐ man traits and one that resides in a determinative process” (Slaughter 1997, 407)—the force of Bunch’s declaration “sexism kills” (1990, 488) be‐ comes immediately apparent. Both conceptions of subjectivity (as inherent and as determined) conspire to produce violence against women as viola‐ bility, leading to the realization that “being female is life‐threatening” (488). In the context of the familiar distinction between civil and political rights and economic and social rights, thinking female subjectivity as a conse‐ quence only of discrimination becomes inadequate because violence rather than dignity is inherent in the lives of women. The extremity of this claim is deliberate because, as even a cursory perusal of the reports submitted by nation‐states to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which monitors the imple‐ mentation of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Dis‐ crimination against Women), between the years 2013 and 2016, Amnesty International’s submission on India in June 2014, and the July 2014 HRLN (Human Rights Law Network) Report on the National Consultation on The Law and Legal Strategies to Combat Violence Against Women reveals, Geor‐ gina Ashworth’s 1986 contention still rings true: violence against the female sex, on a scale which far exceeds the list of Amnesty International victims, is tolerated publicly; indeed some acts of violation are not crimes in law, others are legitimized in custom or court opinion, and most are blamed on the victims themselves. (quoted in Bunch 1990, 490)



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 141 This situation explains the emphasis of much feminist human rights work on depletion, deprivation, and disappearance, on telling ab‐ sences rather than enduring presences, and on what never was rather than what might have been or will be. The preponderance of advocacy and anal‐ ysis in the field of women’s rights privileges “freedom from fear and want” rather than “freedom of speech and belief” (Universal Declaration of Hu‐ man Rights) or freedom to aspire and become. Like Bunch, I want to expand the meaning of the “moral vision” of human rights as women “reconceive of their needs and hopes in relation to it” (Bunch 1990, 487). While Bunch understandably seeks the inclusion of women’s rights as human rights, her desire to introduce a reciprocity in the equation so that human rights discourse becomes responsive to the needs of women rather than simply accommodates their presence in its obeisance to the human and the universal and to the principle of accretion, is in accord with the argument I make for the integration of women’s rights on their terms. I want to make it possible to imagine, if not define, what woman is or could be before she becomes a victim of discrimination, to describe her as something other than always already lack and impossibility. More to the point, I want to take seriously Bunch’s essay’s opening contention that “the dominant image of the political actor in our world is male” (486) in order to consider the potential for conceiving of women as fearless, if not always hopeful, actors rather than only despairing victims in the terrain of violence and discrimination. I want to propose a scenario in which action, struggle, or resistance is born simply of necessity rather than of recognizing even “the moral priority of human survival” (Riley 2013, 73) to avoid, at the very outset, a lingering sentimentality or paean to poignancy that infects the dis‐ course of human rights. Bunch’s more recent intervention demands that victimization and agency, protection and empowerment, be thought simultaneously such that rights “are about the voice and agency of citizens who are not just passive objects with needs” (Bunch 2004, 31). Equally, however, thinking entitle‐ ments and obligations together means that “someone is responsible for re‐ alizing people’s rights in the political, economic, and social spheres” (31). I acknowledge that this multi‐faceted approach to women’s rights that in‐ cludes the protection of civil liberties and bodily integrity as well as advo‐ cating economic and cultural empowerment and stressing the simultaneity



142 ASHA VARADHARAJAN of rights and duties, is crucial; nevertheless, I remain struck by Bunch’s ear‐ lier discussion of the perceived illegitimacy and impropriety of women’s rights, of how women’s rights are not simply a matter of access to the law but of a radical transformation of “society’s traditional perception of what is proper or not proper for women” (Ninotchka Rosca, quoted in Bunch 1990, 496). For her, violence against women “is profoundly political”, cen‐ tral to maintaining “structural relationships of power, domination, and privilege between men and women in society”, and contingent upon the dis‐ tinction between private and public spheres, a distinction that simultane‐ ously asserts women’s formal equality before the law while countenancing the pervasive indignities to which they are routinely subject. Bunch’s arguments are of course no longer novel, but they allow me to indicate why Slaughter’s illustration of “juridical subjectivity” (1997, 406) through the case of Djamila Boupacha is not merely fortuitous or co‐ incidental. Slaughter treats Boupacha’s predicament as exemplary of the twist he wishes to offer to the conception of subjectivity that lies at the heart of the discourse of human rights. In deploying Elaine Scarry’s under‐ standing of the contradiction between the body as the locus of pain and the voice as the locus of power, Slaughter writes that “torture directly attacks the victims’ ability to narrate (or even think) a coherent self image” (1997, 427) and “forces the voice to acknowledge its own destruction” (430). This instantiation of the destruction of the psychic and structural integrity (the inviolable dignity) of the individual as the destruction of voice makes it pos‐ sible for Slaughter to “evaluate entitlements and prohibitions for their ef‐ fectiveness in guaranteeing the ability to self‐narrate” and to make interna‐ tional human rights law a matter of “the right to control representation” (430). This stark contradiction between conditions of narratability and self‐consciousness or articulation defines women’s struggle for voice as the embodiment of power. Slaughter argues that “human rights abuses exist on a continuum of narratability, with oppressive voicelessness on one end and bellicose vo‐ ciferousness on the other” (1997, 413). I trace this continuum by examining the significance and aftermath of the gang rape and death of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012 and the extraordinary life of Sampat Pal Devi, the erstwhile leader of The Gulabi Gang. Singh’s absence and silence became catalysts for controversial attempts, such as Leslee Udwin’s film India’s Daughter, to nar‐ rate on behalf of a voice that could no longer find itself or speak itself



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 143 (Slaughter 1997, 419), while Sampat Pal Devi’s dominant presence and stri‐ dent and irrepressible voice have provoked both “authentic” and “foreign” representations of which I shall focus selectively on Kim Longinotto’s (2010) Pink Saris, Nishtha Jain’s (2012) The Gulabi Gang, and Amana Fon‐ tanella‐Khan’s (2013) Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India. My choice of women who have been in the public eye both locally and globally is intentional. Rather than multiply narratives about stifled voices and invisible lives, even as I acknowledge that such efforts are indispensa‐ ble, I want to consider the implications of voice and distinctness (Slaugh‐ ter’s preferred categories) for those who have seemingly both galvanized the law and provoked it, awakened both moral compassion and political outrage, and embodied both the consciousness of self and its communica‐ tion to others in the very moments of violation and retribution.2 I point out the imperceptible shift in Slaughter’s thought from Ed‐ ward Said’s emphasis on the “permission to narrate” to “the right to tell one’s story” (Slaughter 1997, 430) to demonstrate the logical continuity be‐ tween this early essay and his later influential account of the hegemonic triumph of the Bildungsroman as an “unacknowledged legislator of the world” (Slaughter 2006, 1411). Slaughter exposes how the legacy of the civ‐ ilizing mission places “the ‘burden’ of the dissemination” (1997, 415) of hu‐ man rights on former imperial powers, and illuminates the corrosive irony that these very imperial powers, who were responsible for pre‐empting, abnegating, indeed perverting the consciousness of the self he wishes to promote, “publicly prided” themselves on their “codification” of and “dedi‐ cation” to human rights norms (408). Slaughter is also careful to note the double‐bind in which any challenge to the putative hegemony or repudia‐ tion of this irony finds itself: “the projection of a normative egalitarian im‐ aginary not only sets the terms and limits of universality’s coverage; it be‐ comes the discursive condition of possibility for non‐hegemonic re‐articu‐

2



My analysis of the films relies on Documentary: A History of the Non‐fiction Film by Barnouw (1993) as well Nichols (2010; 2016). I use their “classic” contribu‐ tions to the analysis of cinema as catalysts for my interpretations; that is, their lucid comments on cinematic form suggested frames within which to compre‐ hend the difference my chosen films make to thinking women’s rights as human rights.

144 ASHA VARADHARAJAN lations of universality’s compass” (2006, 1408). In other words, the disen‐ franchised become legible within the very framework that is responsible for their exclusion and which they exceed and elude, by definition. Slaughter uncovers a hidden discursive genealogy for the UDHR in the Bildungsroman, which means that his effort is descriptive rather than transformative. He is aware that the technology of the Bildungsroman can‐ not account for the shape and trajectory of all versions of the development of human personality but does not explore those other possibilities. I rec‐ ognize Slaughter’s ingenuity and sophistication as well as his idealism but his own elegant narrative grammar, replete with paradox, chiasmus, sus‐ pension and simultaneity, and subversion and containment, leaves me with a nagging dissatisfaction because all the holes through which a revolution rather than a reformism might leak are plugged; there is no room for sur‐ prises, and there are no discernible side effects. Instead of following Slaugh‐ ter’s lead, therefore, I want to experiment once again with the “humanist desire to find signs of life in signs of narrative” (Slaughter 2010, 210), to discover moments when the normative might part company with the hege‐ monic in the name of the universal, and to fashion counter‐narratives that alter or re‐articulate, rather than merely repeat or mimic with uncanny menace, the human rights plot. My hope is that the borders between “dis‐ cursive justice” (Frow 2001, 331) and social justice shall continue to dis‐ solve even as the relations between narrative closure and political desire remain unresolved. 2 My choice of Leslee Udwin’s (2015a) India’s Daughter is inevitable because it is the only documentary (I am distinguishing the documentary from media documentation) on the Jyoti Singh case thus far. Moreover, the controversy the film generated among charges of contravening journalistic ethics and Indian law, of “demonising the Indian man”, intending “to show a growing India in a bad light” (Lekhi 2015, n.p.), and of the BBC hypocriti‐ cally holding up a mirror to Indian society rather than its own where Jimmy Savilles and Rotherhams abound (Lekhi 2015, n.p.), make it ripe for re‐ newed investigation. Udwin’s credentials include the film version of Ayub Khan‐Din’s East is East and Who Bombed Birmingham?—the latter resulted in the re‐



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 145 lease of the Birmingham Six. I loved both films but didn’t know Udwin pro‐ duced them. I thought immediately that she was unlikely to have made a film as egregious as her detractors deemed it to be. I was also attracted to her candour and unapologetic demeanour in interviews (Udwin 2015b, 2015c), eschewing mealy‐mouthed compassion in favour of rage and criti‐ cal solidarity, her insistence that she was attracted to the hope and opti‐ mism displayed by the protestors in the aftermath of Jyoti Singh’s rape, that she wanted to “lend my energies to amplify their voice”—not help the voice‐ less find their voice or represent those who cannot represent themselves— and intrigued by her assertion, in response to voices such as Lekhi’s, that criticism does not mean shame. Udwin indicates that her film was not about “those people over there” but the result of her desire to film both the “bla‐ tant breach” of any “kind of civilized” principles and the inspiration of a so‐ ciety in the throes of change. I will return to the recurrence of the word “civilized” in her vocabulary and the hubris implicit in her desire and ability to go anywhere to monitor uncivilized behaviour bearing the sanction of the BBC—Barnouw, I recall, indicates that the leading film‐producing coun‐ tries in the early days of the documentary, indeed of cinema, were “nations with colonial empires” (1993, 23) and that the documentary had its roots in ethnography and travelogue. For now, however, these broad strokes de‐ lineating the nature of my curiosity about her film suffice. Barnouw describes the “bugle‐call film” as a “weapon of war [. . .] to stir the blood [and]chill the marrow” (1993, 139). He is of course speak‐ ing of propaganda as an adjunct to military action (139), but the aims of this type of film could well be attributed to Udwin’s, which she certainly consid‐ ers a manifesto of sorts, an “instrument for struggle” (Barnouw’s phrase 1993, 81), an advocate for change and a call to action. The unique feature of her film, and the source of the controversy it generated, is her interview with Mukesh Singh, one of the rapists, that is designed to “chill the marrow” of the viewer rather than the enemy in a standard war film. He is the enemy, in other words. Udwin, along with the protestors and experts that she in‐ terviews, sees sexual violence as a war on women, and despite her empha‐ sis on understanding rather than accusation (I will return to this issue), the voice of the documentary (again, an aspect to which I will return) functions as a prosecutor of the pervasive misogyny she encounters. In many ways, Udwin belongs to the grand tradition of the Griersonian documentary in which cinema was looked on “as a pulpit” with a mission not only to explain,



146 ASHA VARADHARAJAN but also to inspire (Barnouw 1993, 85). The eye of the camera is the “citi‐ zen’s eye”, trained not “on the ends of the earth” but on “the drama of the doorstep” (85). Of course, Udwin travels to the ends of the earth to witness the drama on its doorstep, but the observation about the style of cinema she inhabits and reinvents remains valid. The result is a film that treads a fine line between inquiry and protest, art as a hammer and art as a mirror (Grierson’s terms), while relying on “the democratizing effect” (Barnouw 1993, 262) of cinema vérité to help “the lowly become articulate partici‐ pants in society” (262). Her interviews continually return to the question of what makes a “strong and mature democracy”, suggesting, therefore, the traces of the Griersonian emphasis on education for citizenship that remain in a film that is ostensibly focused on the violation of women’s right to life and dignity. For Udwin, the treatment of women lies at the heart of any claim to the freedoms democracies uphold. Her exploration of the palimp‐ sest of contradiction and overdetermination within which Jyoti Singh’s rape acquired resonance and “‘shocked the collective conscience’ of the nation” (Judge Yogesh Khanna, quoted in Lodhia 2015, 91) turns her film into a “guerrilla operation [. . .] against everything that is fixed, defined, estab‐ lished, dogmatic, eternal” (Barnouw 1993, 266). It should be stated, how‐ ever, that by her own admission, Udwin is not the sole agent of this disman‐ tling of shibboleths; she chronicles public outrage and protest but as the accomplice to revolution, not its author. It is tempting to treat India’s Daughter as an observational film, characterized by the intimacy of watching and listening and by the portraits it paints of people whose speech proves revelatory of hidden truths or in‐ tensifies what is already visible. Udwin moves easily between the vulnera‐ ble and the privileged in Delhi society and the figures who consume most of the screen time are so riveting that one can almost forget that these frag‐ ments of actuality (Dziga Vertov’s phrase) are orchestrated to create cine‐ matic truth. The camera, that is, solicits and elicits as much as it records. Barnouw describes the reaction to Louis Malle’s 1968 film Phantom India in which India appears as “a staggering pageant”, a “vast canvas” of “con‐ tradictions” (1993, 249); I believe Udwin’s film is similar because she looks at a nation, or at least a city, under stress. Her juxtaposition, for instance, of Mukesh Singh’s description of the rapist, who was still a minor, reaching inside Jyoti Singh to remove her intestines that he subsequently callously discarded, with Asha Singh’s (Jyoti’s mother) face ravaged by grief, makes



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 147 her film’s affect oscillate, like Malle’s, between “love and horror” (Barnouw 1993, 249). This effect is reinforced by the interplay of light and texture in her film. The scenes with Mukesh Singh have him emerging from the shad‐ ows; they exude a grainy texture, and the spotlight on him paradoxically fails to illuminate—the light seems to waver instead. The final scenes of the film occur against the backdrop of a funeral pyre, signifying Jyoti’s crema‐ tion, where again the light and fire of the flames seem obscured by smoke and the onset of darkness. Badri Singh (Jyoti’s father) says: “I wish that whatever darkness there is in the world should be dispelled by this light”, attesting to the meaning of her name—light—but also exacerbating the contradiction that the film’s images confirm: “In death she has lit a torch”. In these moments, Udwin’s film stimulates what Barnouw calls questioning and inference to foreground a crisis in signification that accompanies the social crisis (1993). Unlike reporting that consumes rather than generates crisis, Udwin’s overlapping patterns of love and horror, light and darkness, generate uncertainty rather than compel belief. Two features, in my view, set Udwin’s documentary apart from run of the mill works of dissidence. Love manifests in the faces that stay with the viewer—the studied neutrality of Mukesh Singh, the hard‐won calm and careworn determination of Badri Singh, Asha Singh’s dignity in dis‐ tress, the portrait of Jyoti as a baby, all wonder and innocence, the anguish and resentment of the rapists’ families, the venality of the defence lawyers. Udwin describes her encounter with Jyoti Singh’s parents, their “forbear‐ ance” in the face of “palpable pain”, as an “incredibly humbling” experience and her vision of documentary cinema as the capacity to “see things from the point of view of another”. This emphasis on the humbling effects of en‐ counter shifts from the cultivation of empathy, always in danger of lapsing into a redemptive narcissism, towards the “curative labor” of Julie Ellison’s imagining (1996, 370) and towards understanding, even those who pro‐ voke revulsion rather than identification, or repudiation rather than desire. Udwin’s camera caresses (I’m using Barnouw’s word out of context) even what she disdains or finds puzzling in homage to documentary as not only indexical and affective but also epistephilic (see Nichols 2016, 59). This latter quality brings me to the second innovative feature in Udwin’s documentary. Human rights narratives often focus on the suffering of victims at the expense of examining the exercise of power in society (see



148 ASHA VARADHARAJAN Barnouw 1993, 244). Udwin, on the contrary, interviews both the law‐abid‐ ing and the lawless to show how misogyny propagates itself, how the insti‐ tutional aspect of law exacerbates rather than heals social tensions. Docu‐ mentary cinema usually deploys the perspective of the outsider to illumi‐ nate the workings of society (Barnouw 1993, 234); in India’s Daughter the brutal rapist appears as merely an extension of his defence lawyers’ blatant misogyny. M.L. Sharma describes women as flowers and men as thorns or women as diamonds and men as dogs: “If you put your diamond on the street, certainly the dog will take it out. You can’t stop it”. The fate of the flower depends on where it is: spoilt in the gutter and worshipped in the temple. A.P. Singh declares that he would burn alive any female member of his family who “disgraced” herself. Equality before the law acquires dis‐ turbing connotations under circumstances where insiders and outsiders are equally hostile to women. Indeed, Sharma’s opinions are misandric ra‐ ther than only misogynist—men emerge as no more than instruments of libidinal necessity. Critical reaction to the interview with Mukesh Singh focuses on his deadpan iteration of predictable misogyny, but I was more struck by the manner in which the moral continuum that law‐abiding and lawless citi‐ zens occupy became uncomfortably narrow and alarmingly precarious. Mukesh Singh is hardly flattering about his fellow‐accused, deeming them capable of anything, accustomed to breaking all limits, having nothing good in them, and adept at tricking people on to the bus while describing himself as routinely subject to beatings and electric shocks. He seems to character‐ ize their actions as simultaneously knowing and fated while recognizing what lies beyond the pale even as he exempts himself from such reckless‐ ness. The complex of fecklessness, despair, violence, and impunity that emerges makes the construction of masculinity in the film more ambiguous and thought‐provoking than a simple criminalization of the poor. Udwin ex‐ plores “the structural processes (both regional and global) that underlie” incidents of sexual violence presumed to be characteristic of certain cul‐ tures (Lodhia 2015, 90) when she visits the rapists’ families in slum dwell‐ ings and discovers the consequences of India’s neoliberal urbanization in the displacement of the rural poor, the increase of numbers of women in the workforce (Jyoti Singh worked in a call centre to finance her education), and the abandonment of many men to poverty in slums. The rapists are the mainstays of their families—as Jyoti perceived was the fact in her own case



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 149 —and these families are now even more destitute because Ram Singh, one of the rapists, died in custody while the others, except for the minor, are awaiting the verdict on their appeals of their death sentences. The wife of Akshay Thakur, one of the rapists, who refuses to believe him capable of such an act, announces that she will strangle her child since the man who is supposed to protect and provide for her is gone. Thus both protectionism and violence betray women. Because Udwin also portrays men like Jyoti’s tutor and her father, the men who joined the protests in solidarity with women, and Gopal Subramanium, the co‐author of the Verma Committee Report which boldly redraws “the boundaries of actionable violence merit‐ ing redress under the law” (Lodhia 2015, 97–98; italics in original) and painstakingly delineates the social factors that hinder the efficacy of laws (98), she cannot be accused of representing Jyoti Singh’s ordeal as “death by culture” (Uma Narayan, quoted by Visweswaran 2004, 486). Moreover, both perpetrators and victim are heroes of a thwarted Bildungsroman—one abandoned by its progressivist telos and the other betrayed by it. Without in any way diluting the enormity of the rapists’ crime, Udwin’s approach, by situating the case of Jyoti Singh within the cultural fractures produced by social mobility and economic transformation, resists rendering the rap‐ ists pathological and Jyoti exceptional. Dr. Govil, the psychiatrist who at‐ tends in Tihar Jail to rapists who have committed at least 200 rapes that they can remember, and Subramanium refuse to believe in their monstros‐ ity or exclude them from society. They prompt Udwin’s analysis of the so‐ cial circumstances that engender violence as well as her consideration of holding society accountable for its excesses but, as her depiction of the de‐ fence lawyers reveals, the opposite of monstrosity may only be restraint rather than the perception of equality. The atrocity at the centre of the film and the moral double‐binds the cinematic juxtapositions produce do not, however, cause Udwin, Jyoti Singh’s parents, or the authors of the Verma Committee Report to throw up their hands; instead, the film is itself an at‐ tempt to rewrite the past and to imagine an “open, undecided future, where the die has not yet been cast” (Sartre, quoted in Jameson 2013, 18) as well as to register both a condition of extremity and a moment of revolutionary intensity. To conclude my discussion of India’s Daughter, I want to return to the question of voice, of the right to tell one’s story as signifying both the interpellative force of social relations and the possibilities for self‐narration



150 ASHA VARADHARAJAN that transcend and challenge that force. The fate of Jyoti Singh poses a co‐ nundrum for human rights narratives invested in victims breaking their si‐ lence because she did not survive to tell her tale even though it’s clear she resisted her attackers, cooperated with law enforcement in identifying them and determining their punishment, and miraculously survived the trauma to her body and psyche for 13 days. Jyoti’s abjection was not only a consequence of the violent penetration she suffered (an iron rod was also inserted into her) and of being thrown from the bus naked and shivering but also of being rendered indistinct—her intestines were torn out of her and discarded making it impossible for doctors to recognize the nature of the damage done to her or how to begin to repair it. Identity and embodi‐ ment split from each other in a scenario in which Jyoti’s speech (for as long as she survived) emanated from a body she could no longer call her own or that was no longer visibly or recognizably her own. Victims in human rights documentaries engage in testimony while the film‐maker serves as com‐ passionate witness. While the courage she displayed during and after the gang rape suggests that she may well have fulfilled our desire for a trauma‐ tized victim coming to terms with her suffering while turning herself into an object lesson in the inviolability of dignity and the triumph of the spirit, her death ensures that Udwin is presented with no such luck. Instead, the voices in the film are those of Jyoti Singh’s parents, who occupy the position of survivor usually accorded victims in human rights narratives and, as I have suggested, of one of her rapists, whom Udwin controversially sought to understand rather than condemn. Besides, as observer‐documentarist, or peddler of direct cinema, Udwin has no access to the catastrophic event around which her narrative circles and must rely on a dramatized recon‐ struction of evidence rather than take refuge in documented fact. I want to deploy Bill Nichols’s insightful analysis of “the experience of temporality and the presence of fantasy” (2016, 35) to analyze a docu‐ mentary haunted by “the ghost of the absent subject” (35). Nichols argues that the “re‐enacted event introduces a fantasmatic element” (35); I want to suggest that more than the re‐enacted event, the “mediated transfor‐ mations” to which memory, representation, and fantasy subject the figure of Jyoti Singh alter the potential for the articulation and retrieval of voice in human rights fictions. As Nichols observes, the documentary image draws its fantasmatic power from the forfeit of the indexical bond to both subject and event (35). I find the re‐enactment of the event less interesting for my



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 151 purposes, despite the fact that it allows Udwin to avoid turning the rape into a voyeuristic spectacle and to emphasize what Nichols calls “iterabil‐ ity” (42)—the repetition of the event signifies its ritualistic quality and that Jyoti’s tribulation is neither unique nor likely to end the rape of other women. It has a certain affective power in that we imagine Jyoti before the die was cast and remain suspended between what might have been and what did happen. The fantasmatic reconstitution of Jyoti in the memory of her par‐ ents and tutors as dutiful daughter, as willing recruit to the work ethic, as a modern young woman sacrificing her dowry for an education, as remarka‐ bly fluent in English, and as her family’s ticket to prosperity does conspire to create “the ‘perfect’ rape victim” (Sen 2013, n.p.), but in reacting ad‐ versely to the perceived sentimentality of this portrait, critics fail to see that her parents’ fond memories of Jyoti also enable the dismantling of the stock opposition between tradition and modernity. The young woman who showed consideration and respect for her parents and sought their permis‐ sion to stay out later than usual could exist in the same body as the one whose intelligence, ambition, and enterprise transgressed boundaries of class and gender. In revealing her parents’ own defeat of social expectations in selling ancestral lands to finance their daughter’s education, Udwin is able to paint a society in the throes of change as well as represent the com‐ plexities of social stasis and mobility, urban poverty and rural wealth rather than rest content with reifying culture, family, or community in the name of modernity and as prisons from which she needed to escape. Even as memory seeks to make good Jyoti’s loss, the desire she provokes as lost ob‐ ject and the pleasure she induces as fantasmatic subject become political rather than personal. The love her parents exhibit coils around (see Nichols 2016, 35) their commitment to justice and equality; celebrating rather than bemoaning her birth is already a mark of their vision of equality and accom‐ plished with joy but without fuss. Udwin’s sensitivity in the film can occa‐ sionally be undermined by her comments in interviews when she exclaims that Badri and Asha Singh are “intelligent, enlightened, civilized or extraor‐ dinary people” and goes some way towards explaining why her film has been perceived as colonial benevolence at best and imperial arrogance at worst. My interest here, however, is to indicate that human rights narra‐ tives can divest themselves of the white man’s burden when the “civilized”



152 ASHA VARADHARAJAN behaviour of people like the Singhs appears both unremarkable and unsur‐ prising; indeed, logical. When her father loses his composure in recounting how the same hands that guided her first steps were responsible for lighting her funeral pyre, the film records the shift from Jyoti as lost object of desire to object as signifier. Feminist ire at the symbolic transfiguration of Jyoti into fearless‐ ness and enlightenment, into the property of the nation, misses the import of fantasmatic rather than “real” subjects. The consolation available to her parents is marked by their desire to make her name signify as the light that will dispel the world’s darkness, to make her experience typical rather than singular, and, as Asha Singh continues to do, to make Jyoti’s the experience that grounds the law. Indeed, Badri Singh suggests that Jyoti is an empty signifier, posing the question “what is the meaning of a woman”, and trans‐ posing her to the realm of the universal rather than the singular or the typ‐ ical. Reenactments are always in danger of lapsing into fakery but reconsti‐ tutions mediated by memory and imagination, grief and hope, can serve as “vivifications in which past and present coexist in the impossible space of a fantasmatic” (Nichols 2016, 49–50). It is this “fold in time” (49) that makes the relationship between telling stories and existing—or “being made not to exist” (Frow 2001, 333) less implacable while illuminating the “distance between what is and what ought to be. This distance designates a space where we have something to do” (De Certeau, quoted in Frow 2001, 345). Rather than only “a reference to a pre‐existing reality”, memory and desire become “also a way of instituting a reality in and for the present” (Frow 2001, 339; italics in original). Voice in human rights narratives is generally conceived as redemptive and cathartic for both reader and viewer—the means by which the past is rendered intelligible and the present bearable. The “psychic intensity” (Nichols 2016, 50) with which the memory of and desire for Jyoti haunt the cinematic present of India’s Daughter is a demand, rather, for a “form of ethical responsiveness” (Frow 2001, 344) to an other who will remain forever silent. 3 The storm of protest that ensued after the gang rape of Jyoti Singh has been attributed by many commentators to urban identification with her presumed middle‐class identity and values and with her youth and ambi‐ tion as signifiers of the dynamism of modernity. The routine rape of Dalit



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 153 women and of women in zones of conflict has not provoked a comparable shock to the conscience of the nation. The intersections between caste and gender in the context of rural destitution requires serious consideration if women’s rights are to be seen to be responsive to the needs of women whom democracy continues to fail and for whom failures of governance are so ubiquitous as to be banal rather than theatrical. Because representa‐ tional agency and visibility are tied to voice and literacy in human rights discourse, Dalit women are also more likely to be perceived as objects of pity and recipients of moral obligation, as instrumental to what Richard Rorty (1998) calls the “progress of sentiments” (185), or as prerequisites for the “moral education” (183) of their “betters”. Jameson argues that “the modern (bourgeois) taste in events tends towards violence and the atroc‐ ity” (2013, 269), “the effacement of everyday life” in the pressure of what Sartre “called extreme situations” (quoted in Jameson 2013, 19). In my dis‐ cussion of temporality in India’s Daughter, I showed how the emphasis on extremity and catastrophe represents the gang rape as “this shock of a marked time brutally differentiating itself from ordinary existence” (Jame‐ son 2013, 20). I have also discussed how Slaughter draws his conceptions of subjectivity and narration from his analysis of the significance of torture. I want to suggest that, for Dalit women, both violence and temporality are not experienced as “historical convulsions” (271) or as the pressure of ex‐ treme situations such as torture; instead, violence against them is everyday life. Rampyari, one of the women in Kim Longinotto’s film Pink Saris, de‐ scribes being raped by her father‐in‐law as a matter of course and of having chillies shoved up inside her by her mother‐in‐law (who colludes in her sex‐ ual exploitation) whenever the fancy strikes the latter. I want to propose that women’s rights discourse think in bodily and economic rather than only sexual terms, and in terms of cruelty rather than only of violence and violation. Violence and violation are often displacements and symptoms of other forms of dispossession and hierarchy, prejudice and impunity, and despair and futility. The assumption of juridical subjectivity in human rights law seems inappropriate, even limiting, in relation to Dalit women (and men) because formal equality before the law is meaningless for those denied the bare minimum for survival, self‐respect, and sexual integrity. Caste, rather than dignity, is inalienable. I point these difficulties out as a preliminary attempt to be cautious about (bourgeois and liberal) assump‐ tions in framing the human rights of Dalit women.



154 ASHA VARADHARAJAN In Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India, Amana Fontanella‐Khan describes her heroine, Sampat Pal Devi’s, induction into “social consciousness” (2013, 32) when “she was around seven or eight” (32). Her friend, Chand Pal, had been slapped by the landlord’s daughter, Gayatri, for going to the toilet in the latter’s field. Khan explains that “chil‐ dren were expected to defecate on the edges of roads, where the land be‐ longed to no one” but many were killed by traffic. If “they relieved them‐ selves on the property where they were working, they were beaten” (33). Sampat gathered her friends, convinced them to defecate together when Gayatri would be watching, and then pulled Gayatri’s long hair, “pinned her on the ground and rubbed her in shit” (34). Her struggle against “the of‐ fence of injustice” (32), for Fontanella‐Khan, immediately sets her apart from the other villagers. This transformation of Sampat into the moral pro‐ tagonist and focalizer of a tale replete with drama and suspense enables Fontanella‐Khan to avoid a mere “ethnological account of customs and mentalities” (Jameson 2013, 285) and to treat her instead as the “‘world‐ historical individual’” with “authority over the course of the world” (282) and “‘laws of human life” (Jameson 2013, 282, quoting Tolstoy). If “Sampat has a way of making exceptions to all the rules that normally apply” (Fon‐ tanella‐Khan 2013, 11), representations of her life and times have no choice but to resort to biography or hagiography to encompass the anomalous ap‐ pearance of a dissident among victims. My own attraction to Sampat’s fearlessness and to her brand of re‐ tributive justice made me think about how easily the fact that Sampat’s chutzpah appears on behalf of others is forgotten in the lure of her larger‐ than‐life personality. As Jameson explains, the presence of the “world‐his‐ torical” individual entails “the concomitant presence, however shadowy, of the collectivity itself—nation, people or multitude—whose ‘history’ is here in question” (2013, 280). I want to suggest that “the problem of the repre‐ sentation of collectivity” (280) remains unresolved in human rights dis‐ course that affirms relentlessly the universality of the individual rather than the historicity of collectivity. In films such as Pink Saris and Gulabi Gang and in works such as Pink Sari Revolution, communities appear in the guise of the women who implore Sampat Pal to intercede on their behalf, members of the families from which these women want to escape, friends and neighbours who serve as witnesses and arbiters, men who lend their



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 155 money or literacy or support to the cause, or law enforcement and politi‐ cians whose corruption and impunity are the targets of Sampat’s brand of vigilante justice. Pal dominates the scene because the emphasis is on how she negotiates the fate of the women whose futures have been placed in her hands and because the cases themselves are distinguished only by their re‐ inforcement of Pal’s own aphorism: “women have nothing but their tears”. Longinotto (2011) comments on the intertitles she was forced to insert to ensure her audiences in other parts of the world would not be bewildered by the goings‐on, and her worries that they would think she was “saying something definitive about a culture” (31). Fontanella‐Khan creates paral‐ lel narratives—one about Sampat and the other the story of the abduction and rape of a young girl by a politician—but her emphasis on character ra‐ ther than destiny, so to speak, means that what should be a historical de‐ scription about the intersection of hierarchies, the failures of governance despite ameliorative efforts, the indifference of law enforcement, and the risk of displacement in search of employment becomes instead a statement of anthropological fact. The films, because they belong to the genre of direct cinema, communicate both the poetry of the rhythms of daily existence (the beauties of the landscape against dilapidated interiors) and the sense that Sampat’s identity derives from her community despite her exile from its norms and practices. The difference between Pink Saris and Gulabi Gang is instructive in this regard. Both films depict the flaws in Sampat’s personal‐ ity (I’ll return to these) and the painful moments when she returns women to the very homes where they are at risk. Nishtha Jain, however, is inter‐ ested in the slow transformation of Sampat from outsider to citizen, from vigilante to harnessing the law on behalf of victims, and in tracing her pains‐ taking efforts to find evidence of crimes that family won’t acknowledge and that police punish in order to dismantle the distinction between private and public, to depict, not the movement from “zero to hero” (Fontanella‐Khan 2013, 10) in the manner of a Bildungsroman, but a personality formed in the crucible of a community composed of (predominantly female) victims of injustice. There is no Sampat, in other words, outside of the ties that bind her to those abandoned by the system and those who support her cause and invigorate her commitment. Jain concentrates on a bride who has been burned by her husband, on an absent victim, so that she can witness the process by which Sampat vindicates her and indicts her husband rather than dwelling on her litany of woes. This is a film about a community in the



156 ASHA VARADHARAJAN making, the tensions and contradictions that threaten the unity of “the gang”, the sclerosis that infects the world Sampat inhabits, and “the cyclical process of powerlessness, empowerment and abuse of power which keeps going on in that space” (Jain 2014, n.p.). Jain tackles a problem, not a per‐ son—a brave move. Longinotto describes her film as a journey during which she dis‐ covered “that being a woman isn’t all that counts” (2011, 29). This is her way of indicating her disaffection with Pal but her comment is symptomatic of documentaries that are exemplary of the sympathetic moral sense, that are invested in desire for and identification with their subjects. She de‐ scribes the process of making documentaries as one in which “prejudices unravel” and one begins “to be infused with love” (2011, 32). I don’t have a quarrel with that aim but “love” doesn’t require one to like or admire the subject of one’s film and why should one expect Pal to be a heroic individual when her cause is just? Longinotto conflates making “the lives of others come alive” with wanting “people to really feel for these girls” (2011, 32). That transition may well happen but it might not too. She says the girls who came to Sampat for help “were the ones we fell in love with. And I’m pleased because I genuinely adore them” (2011, 29). I find this comment revealing (I don’t doubt its sincerity) because it returns representation to the realm of the sentiments and makes ethical responsibility contingent upon the awakening of love rather than the growth of understanding. She wonders “how are you still so full of beauty and joy and humour and resilience” (30) which strikes me as surprisingly naïve: suffering such as theirs would have no choice but to resort to its opposite. Only those for whom suffering is re‐ markable would find these qualities surprising, if admirable, in these girls. Besides, do those women who suffer while demonstrating none of these up‐ lifting qualities not deserve equal consideration? Longinotto’s biography suggests that she is no stranger to suffering; my point here is to show how her stance is symptomatic of human rights narratives that can encounter the other only on the terms of pity and obligation. Pal exclaims “I’m the Messiah for women”, tells gods to “go to hell”, claims to be “more powerful than the police”, and retorts “if you think I’m arrogant, so what? God knows I’m a good woman”. These are not the words of a shrinking violet, and it is true that Pal’s flirtations with the Congress Party and alleged misuse of funds, her pleasure in her celebrity, and her occasional misguided belief that she has shamed families to change their ways and welcome back into



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 157 the fold the daughter‐in‐law they have abused might give one pause, but it remains astonishing that she has spent nearly 40 years of her life in the ser‐ vice of others and that the members of her “gang” are in it not only to re‐ solve their own problems but to transform the lives of others whose pre‐ dicaments they share. Finally, to return briefly to Longinotto’s interview where she declares that the women she genuinely adores “have such low self‐esteem and they’ve always been told they’re worthless. And they al‐ ways, all of them, every single one of them, see the only way out is to kill themselves, they don’t see there’s any possibility of any manoeuvring” (2011, 35). The occasion for her comment is her being so touched by Rampyari’s pride in being featured in the film that “it made me cry” (35). Longinotto may not have had access to the Hindi/Urdu that Rampyari speaks because in fact she speaks quite eloquently about the significance of two words, izzat and taaqat. The first is “honour” and Rampyari speaks bit‐ terly about how it is her father‐in‐law who does not know the meaning of the word but that she has always been in possession of her honour and she and the other women emphasize their taaqat (strength). They may not have power but they do have strength. This subtle distinction from an illiterate young woman who is also believed to be “slow”, and whose father threatens to drag her home like a pig if she makes trouble with her in‐laws, is both poignant and ironic because Longinotto claims “the fact we were filming her gave her that little extra bit of power” (34). The torture Rampyari suf‐ fers and the brief moment when she inhabits a like‐minded community of women enable her to testify for rather than against herself. These women’s caste and gender make them outcasts in the political system—democracy has failed them—but do not preclude their imagination, judgement, and un‐ derstanding. What they have to go on, as Isaiah Berlin would say, is their recognition of indecency as the obstacle to survival and respect. This com‐ mon sense is given to them by virtue of their being human but it is also ag‐ onistic rather than hegemonic and constitutes the basis for alternative forms of enfranchisement and incorporation (Slaughter’s terms). More than imaginative seeing, these works and figures lay claim to dissidence, because they tell the story of a culture from individual (female) perspectives without replicating the logic of individualism or turning cul‐ ture into “a caricature of its worst patriarchal tendencies” (Visweswaran 2004, 498). Rather, they create opportunities for illuminating “the interface between culture and the political system” (483) by depicting communities



158 ASHA VARADHARAJAN that foster struggle and resistance at least as much as they quell dissent. I have no desire to sentimentalize suffering or romanticize resistance, but I do want to conclude with the possibility that “woman” exists before dis‐ crimination even if she does not always survive it. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Kris Singh for his invaluable research and tech‐ nical assistance. Andrew Elfenbein and Tim Wyman‐McCarthy are my most empathetic interlocutors and sternest critics. Justin Sully and Tricia Taormina provided thoughtful answers on the fly.

Bibliography Angelou, Maya. 2014. “Maya Angelou Quotes: 15 of the Best.” The Guardian, May 29. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/28/ma ya‐angelou‐in‐fifteen‐quotes Armstrong, Nancy. 2005. How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individual‐ ism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia University Press. Barnouw, Erik. 1993. Documentary: A History of the Non‐fiction Film. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bunch, Charlotte. 1990. “Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re‐ Vision of Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 12 (4): 486–98. ‐‐‐. 2004. “A Feminist Human Rights Lens.” Peace Review 16 (1): 29–34. Ellison, Julie. 1996. “A Short History of Liberal Guilt.” Critical Inquiry 22 (2): 344–71. Fontanella‐Khan, Amana. 2013. Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India. New York: Norton. Frow, John. 2001. “Discursive Justice.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2): 331–48. “India: Submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimina‐ tion against Women.” 2014. Amnesty International. June. http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CEDAW/Shared%20Docum ents/Ind/INT_CEDAW_NGO_Ind_17515_E.pdf Jain, Nishtha, dir. 2012. Gulabi Gang. Stavanger: Piraya Film. ‐‐‐. 2014. “Battle of the Roses: Gulabi Gang vs Gulaab Gang.” Interview by Yogesh Pawar, dna, February 7.



HOW TO KICK ASS WHEN LIFE’S A BITCH 159 Jameson, Fredric. 2013. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso. Lekhi, Meenakshi. 2015. “Rape is a Global Issue, Then Why is Only India in the Spotlight?” The Times of India, March 10. Lodhia, Sharmila. 2015. “From ‘Living Corpse’ to India’s Daughter: Explor‐ ing the Social, Political and Legal Landscape of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape.” Women’s Studies International Forum 50: 89–101. Longinotto, Kim, dir. 2010. Pink Saris. London: Prod. Ambir Latif, Ed Stobart and Garjashanker Vohra. ‐‐‐. 2011. “An Interview with Kim Longinotto.” Interview by Lizzie Thynne and Nadje Al‐Ali. Feminist Review 99: 25–38. Narain, Vrinda. 2013. “Muslim Women’s Equality in India: Applying a Hu‐ man Rights Framework.” Human Rights Quarterly 35 (1): 91–115. Nichols, Bill. [2010] 2010. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ‐‐‐. 2016. Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documen‐ tary. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. “Report on the National Consultation on the Law and Legal Strategies to Combat Violence Against Women.” 2014. Human Rights Law Net‐ work. July. http://www.hrln.org/hrln/womens‐justice‐/reports/1 693‐national‐consultation‐on‐law‐and‐legal‐strategies‐to‐combat ‐violence‐against‐women.html Riley, Jonathan. 2013. “Isaiah Berlin's ‘Minimum of Common Moral Ground.’” Political Theory 41 (1): 61–89. Rorty, Richard. 1998. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, 167–185. Cam‐ bridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Rukmini. 2013. "The Need for an Everyday Culture of Protest." Eco‐ nomic and Political Weekly 48 (2), January 12. Slaughter, Joseph. 1997. “A Question of Narration: The Voice in Interna‐ tional Human Rights Law.” Human Rights Quarterly 19 (2): 406–30. ‐‐‐. 2006. “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The ‘Bildungsroman’ and International Human Rights Law.” PMLA 121 (5): 1405–23. ‐‐‐. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and Interna‐ tional Law. New York: Fordham University Press.



160 ASHA VARADHARAJAN ‐‐‐. 2010. “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There.” Journal of Human Rights 9 (2): 207–223. Udwin, Leslee. 2015a. dir. India’s Daughter. London: Assassin Films. ‐‐‐. 2015b. “India’s Daughter Filmmaker Refutes Modi’s Claims about Banned Film.” The New York Times, May 12. ‐‐‐. 2015c. Interview by Gurdeep Pandher, YouTube, April 15 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XIzWhZykUo Visweswaran, Kamala. 2004. “Gendered States: Rethinking Culture as a Site of South Asian Human Rights Work.” Human Rights Quarterly 26 (2): 483–511.



Bringing Literature to Rights: Asylum Seekers as Subjects of English Gillian Whitlock Unspeakable Subjects This essay moves across scenes of reading Australian children’s lit‐ erature that are inspired by social activism and rights discourse on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees. The interdiscipline of literature and human rights focuses on “unspeakable subjects”, argues Marjorie Agosín (2015, xi) in the foreword to a collection of essays that explores teaching human rights in literary and cultural studies (Schultheis Moore and Swanson Gold‐ berg 2015). The “unspeakable subjects” in this essay are asylum seekers and, in particular, children in detention. By reading across a variety of texts—a human rights report on children in detention, a curriculum for Subject English in Australian primary and secondary schools, and picture books and memoirs on the subject of forced migration widely used in Aus‐ tralian schools—we can map scenes of reading where the English class‐ room and Australian children’s literature are a focus of human rights activ‐ ism and campaigns for social justice and the rights of the child. These scenes of reading focus on literary encounters, the “infinitely diverse yet also quite specific sets of institutional, personal and geopolitical frames that deter‐ mine the reception of a work of literature by individual readers at a partic‐ ular time and place” (Dixon and Rooney 2013, ix). Here the child is both subject and object of human rights activism, and the reception is through transactions that occur between pupils and literary texts in classrooms, and the pedagogies that shape them. Questions of how texts are put to work in the moral and ethical frameworks of humanitarian campaigns and human rights activism recur here, in a specific place and time. The events of 9/11 and the war on terror have led to “a much sharper consideration of why reading human rights and literature matters” (McClennen and Schultheis Moore 2015, 3). They galva‐ nize the scenes of reading in this essay, although “9/11” plays out with a distinctive antipodean turn here in the southern hemisphere. Late in 2001,

161

162 GILLIAN WHITLOCK as the United States government established the notorious camp at Guan‐ tánamo Bay where enemy aliens were held in indefinite detention offshore, the Australian government was also hastily constructing remote offshore camps in the Pacific to detain asylum seekers in an aggressive campaign of border control, “the Pacific Solution”. Militarized security operations fo‐ cused on asylum seekers, principally Afghan and Iraqi people in forced mi‐ gration from their homelands. The child recurs as a subject of concern in a series of spectacular events that shaped the course of the Pacific Solution in 2001 within the space of a few weeks. First, the Australian government halted the cargo ship Tampa, preventing asylum seekers rescued at sea, some of them children, from gaining access to the Australian migration zone and consigning them to hastily constructed offshore Pacific camps on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea. This event left “an immediate imprint on the national psyche, shaking its sense of identity, bringing to the surface previously unacknowledged tensions and anxieties” (Ommundsen quoted in Dudek 2011, 16). Second, in early October, SIEV IV1 was intercepted by the Australian navy and then sank, 100 nautical miles north of Christmas Island, with 223 asylum seekers on board. Senior government ministers, including the Prime Minister, alleged the passengers had threatened to throw children overboard, evidence of the apparent inhumanity of asylum seekers towards their own children. Later, a senate inquiry into “a Certain Maritime Incident” found that no children had been thrown overboard from SIEV IV, that the evidence did not support the Children Overboard claim, and that photographs of children in the sea had been taken after the boat sank. Third, on October 19, 353 asylum seekers drowned just south of Java in the SIEV X tragedy, many of them women and children. The inquiry into “a Certain Maritime Incident” also investigated the SIEV X tragedy, con‐ cluding it was extraordinary that a major human disaster could occur un‐ detected in the vicinity of a theatre of intensive Australian maritime opera‐ tions and remain undetected for three days. Fourth, in September 2001 the Australian government negotiated with the government of the South Pacific island of Nauru to establish a regional processing centre to detain asylum seekers. Beginning with those removed from the MV Tampa, the camps on

1



“SIEV” refers to “Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel”, the acronym used by the sur‐ veillance authority for any boat that has entered Australian waters without au‐ thorization, and the numeral is the tracking number assigned to it.

BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 163 Nauru were populated by passengers on subsequent SIEVs, including chil‐ dren. Their welfare in detention was an immediate concern for rights activ‐ ists and the focus of an Inquiry by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in 2003–04. The child in detention became a concern for Australian children in the primary and secondary classrooms of Subject English, and a children’s literature that engages with asylum seekers emerged rapidly after these events of 2001 and found a place on the English syllabus in the years that followed. Offshore asylum seekers were out of sight, and humanizing rep‐ resentations of them carefully controlled. They were not, however, out of mind, and the conscience of a significant minority of Australian citizens was deeply troubled by what was being done in their name and the “vicious and consequential relationship between the suffering of some and the well‐be‐ ing of others” (Slaughter 2015, 117). A Last Resort? The Australian Human Rights Commission (then known as HREOC) National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention tabled its report to parliament, A Last Resort? in 2004 after a series of public hearings the year before. The focus of the inquiry was the mandatory immigration de‐ tention system as it applied to children classified as unauthorized arrivals over the period 1999–2002. In February 2003, according to Department of Immigration and Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) reports, there were 336 children in Australian immigration detention centres, and 169 of these were on Nauru (Hutchison and Martin 2004, 532). Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), promulgated in 1989 and signed by Australia in 1990, children have a particular range of rights: to be with their parents; to be provided with the highest attainable standard of health; to be afforded protection from all forms of physical and mental violence and abuse; to rest, play and practice their culture, language and religion; to access education; and to be provided with a standard of liv‐ ing adequate for physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development, among others. It is widely accepted that detention is the most serious con‐ travention of these rights, and policies of mandatory and indefinite offshore detention by Australia are identified as particularly egregious in this regard (Bhabha 2014, 220). It is also widely understood that the promulgation of a specific convention, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the



164 GILLIAN WHITLOCK Child (CRC) is a sign of the limitations of the Declaration of Human Rights to protect the rights of these most vulnerable subjects in the name of the “human”. A Last Resort? presents evidence that the emotional wellbeing of parents, and their psychological health more generally, impacts on the psy‐ chological health of the child. It also details the effects on children of trauma and suffering that they witness in the camp, even when they themselves are not directly affected. The fact that immigration detention undermines the parental role and leaves the child without necessary protection and com‐ fort in surroundings where basic needs for safe play and education are not met puts children at high risk of exposure to violence (Mares et al. quoted in Hutchison and Martin 2004, 535).2 The methodology of the HREOC in‐ quiry gathered evidence through public hearings and submissions, visits to detention facilities, focus groups and interviews, and presentations from DIMIA and Australian Correctional Management (ACM).3 Appendices to the report include a list of 346 submissions made to the inquiry that record the extensive network of individuals, organizations, professions and govern‐ ment agencies concerned with immigration and child detention. The in‐ quiry tabled a set of recommendations and three major findings that as‐ serted Commonwealth policy was fundamentally inconsistent with the CRC; that children in detention were at high risk of serious mental harm and subjected to “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment”; and that there were numerous and repeated breaches of the rights of the child to protec‐ tion, education and physical and mental health (AHRC 2004). These findings and recommendations were summarily dismissed by the Australian government, which rejected the view that Australia’s sys‐ tem of immigration detention is inconsistent with its obligations under the CRC. The government released a media statement that reiterated the claim

2

3



Many of these concerns of the 2004 report were raised again a decade later in a second HREOC inquiry that produced The Forgotten Children, a report on the welfare of children in immigration detention in Australia published in 2014. This later inquiry, which draws extensively on interviews with asylum seekers, records the presence of 186 children detained on Nauru and reports that chil‐ dren held there indefinitely are suffering from extreme levels of physical, emo‐ tional, psychological and developmental distress. ACM was responsible for the operation of the detention centres until February 2004.

BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 165 that child detention is both lawful and necessary: its right under interna‐ tional law to determine who it admits to its territory and under what con‐ ditions. This response draws on rights discourse and humanitarian ethics to justify child detention: it preserves family unity (a major concern of the CRC), it reduces the people‐smuggling trade and the numbers of children undertaking a hazardous journey that places lives in jeopardy, and it sus‐ tains “the level of border integrity that ensures the safety and protection of all Australians” (DIMIA and Attorney General’s Department 2004). Other responses to the report indicate the vigorous resistance to this appropria‐ tion of rights discourse from citizen activist groups, religious organizations, political parties, and NGOs, both national and transnational. The dissemi‐ nation of the report sets out to inform and develop a community that will bear witness to asylum seekers. For example, the Teaching Resources pre‐ sented with A Last Resort? draw on rights discourses to inform public de‐ bate about the detention of children and violations of human rights occur‐ ring offshore. This report did not introduce the topic of child detention to the Australian classroom, but it further resourced one of the most active sites where national belonging and citizenship were interrogated, and where the child is both the subject and the object of attention: scenes of reading (and writing) in schools. Student Activism and Cultural Citizenship In the wake of the events of 2001, three school‐based projects in‐ corporated Australian schoolchildren in the formation of a witnessing pub‐ lic. These projects deployed different cultural forms—the letter, the short story, and the memorial—to generate empathic engagement and produce public expressions of compassion and recognition of asylum seekers in de‐ tention. These campaigns focused on English and Creative Arts classrooms. The first of these was inspired by “design activism”—the creation of appro‐ priate rituals and memorials to acknowledge and mourn—drawing on “anti‐memorials” that remember undocumented workers who died when crossing the borders into the United States (Gibbings 2010, 22). The project names and remembers those lost at sea in the SIEV X tragedy, and it began with a nation‐wide student artwork collaboration where Australian sec‐ ondary schools and community groups were invited to participate in a pro‐ ject to create a national memorial. The site selected was the lakeshore at



166 GILLIAN WHITLOCK Weston Park in Canberra. This location where water meets land in the na‐ tional capital is symbolic: it recognizes that this story would be commemo‐ rated in the national landscape and memorializes an event that had not taken hold on the collective conscience, where the national role was re‐ garded by many as a shameful one (Gibbings 2010, 21). On the third anni‐ versary of the sinking of the SIEV X, hundreds of the designs for memorials submitted by schoolchildren were on public display. The memorial con‐ structed on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin marks an outline of the vessel, with the real dimensions of the boat, formed from poles designed to re‐ member each individual who died. The work of this memorial project was both commemorative and educative. As Steve Biddulph, one of the organiz‐ ers of this campaign, comments in an article in the Canberra Times on the future of the memorial on February 3, 2012: The winning design symbolised the deceased parents and chil‐ dren on SIEV X arriving on our shores and representing each indi‐ vidual since they had only been numbers, a dehumanising aspect of the refugee crisis [. . .]. I could not believe that so many women and children had died with so little acknowledgement. (Doherty 2012, 2)4 The affective work of the memorial was to bring into the national imaginary an appropriate grieving and compassion for the victims of the tragedy in the community of the nation, a collective recognition that draws on the imaginative response of Australian schoolchildren. Two other school‐based projects generated individual acts of recognition and compassionate response focused on juvenile creative writ‐ ing and the English classroom. Again, the objective was to cultivate compas‐ sion and empathy for asylum seekers. An organized letter‐writing cam‐ paign established correspondence between detainees on Nauru and Aus‐ tralian schoolchildren—mediated by the activist Elaine Smith, among oth‐

4



See “SIEV X National Memorial Project”. Weston Park, the site of the Siev X me‐ morial, is currently ranked #21 of 139 things to do in Canberra at the Tripadvi‐ sor site. Many accounts make no mention of the presence of the memorial, and others offer personal testimonies to the enduring effective power of this as a site of conscience (Tripadvisor Australia 2013).

BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 167 ers. This campaign drew on long associations between humanitarian activ‐ ism and letter writing—through Amnesty International and PEN Interna‐ tional, for example. The third project focused on a writing task to promote engagement with refugee stories, incorporating asylum seekers into a re‐ vised and inclusive national history. A selection of entries from this project was published in the edited collection Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Sto‐ ries by Young Writers Aged 8–21 Years. Published under the auspices of Aus‐ tralians Against Racism Inc. in 2004 as a book for schools, these stories were selected from an essay competition called “Australia IS Refugees!” that ran in 2002 in primary and secondary schools around Australia. This project focused on witnessing refugee testimony and creating opportuni‐ ties for humanitarian storytelling about forced migration. These essays and stories were written on the basis of contact with earlier generations of ref‐ ugees, in the family and the community. Although these story subjects were not necessarily asylum seekers, the dehumanization of asylum seekers and associated humanitarian sentiment on their behalf energized and moti‐ vated the project. These stories connect the contemporary phenomenon of boats and arrival with a long history of Australian settlement, directed to a juvenile authorship and readership. Sissy Helff (2007) reads Dark Dreams as part of a larger transna‐ tional turn: the enormous popularity of the topos of mass migration in chil‐ dren’s literature, which engages with social exclusion and discrimination and draws on (auto)biographical writing by and about refugees. Alterna‐ tively, Debra Dudek (2006b) incorporates Dark Dreams into a specific Aus‐ tralian sub‐genre of multicultural children’s literature that focuses on de‐ tention‐centre narratives, generated by the political activism and advocacy on behalf of asylum seekers in the aftermath of 2001 (17).5 Dudek is one of the most insightful critics of this sub‐genre, and she draws on “cultural cit‐ izenship” as a key concept, a “recognition of difference under conditions of tolerance and mutual respect” (Stevenson quoted in Dudek 2006b, 17; em‐ phasis in original). 6 She argues an ethics of compassion does not go far

5

6



Other activist anthologies include From Nothing to Zero (Austin 2003) and No Place Like Home: Australian Stories by Young Writers Aged 8–21 Years (Dechian 2005). This concept of “cultural citizenship” was the focus of an ARC‐funded project entitled “Building Cultural Citizenship: Multiculturalism and Children’s Litera‐ ture”, which drew on the expertise of Clare Bradford, a critic of children’s liter‐ ature, and Wenche Ommundsen, a critic of multicultural writing in Australia.

168 GILLIAN WHITLOCK enough towards creating a multicultural space in which difference is re‐ spected under conditions of tolerance. Rather, an ethics of responsibility produces recognition of difference that opens into “responsibility for the other”. This ethical practice draws on Habermas and Levinas, and it pro‐ motes a literary activism and reading practice that conceives of citizenship in the national community in terms of difference rather than assimilation. One sign of the public impact of the engagement with asylum seekers in Australian children’s literature and the English classroom in this period is the concerns expressed by both the Minister of Immigration and Multicul‐ tural Affairs, Amanda Vanstone, and the Prime Minister John Howard in 2005, questioning children’s understanding of the federal government’s policy of mandatory detention, and the risk of “compromising their experi‐ ence of childhood” (Dudek 2006a, 21).7 Dudek reviews ten books published between 2004 and 2006, a “newly emerging body of Australian literature” that resists the assimilation agenda of the Howard government and the par‐ anoid nationalism of the Pacific Solution and “actively dissents against this policy of mandatory detention. This literature is written for and by chil‐ dren, including young adults, who represent the next generation with the ability to reverse these current wrongs” (Dudek 2006b, 38). For example, in Morris Gleitzman’s Girl Underground (2004) the two main characters go to the national parliament in Canberra and ask the Prime Minister to re‐ lease asylum seekers in detention. Although there are ideological differ‐ ences on questions of radical difference and assimilation in this literature, this sub‐genre and the English classroom are key sites in the articulation of the dissenting voices of children on the subject of refugees and asylum seekers.

7



See Dudek (2006b, 21) and Bantick (2005). One of the key differences between federal policy and this notion of “cultural citizenship” is the commitment to multiculturalism and its recognition of difference as opposed to a citizenship understood in terms of assimilation. The series of changes in the names of the federal department responsible for immigration indicates the changing associ‐ ation of multiculturalism and citizenship across this period: DIMA, Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (1996–2001), DIMIA, Department of Immi‐ gration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (2001–6), DIMA, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (2006–07), DIAC, Department of Im‐ migration and Citizenship (2007–13), DIBP, Department of Immigration and Border Protection (2013–).

BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 169 Subject English These scenes of reading (and writing) that bear witness to refugees and asylum seekers in the English classroom are informed by an extensive collection of resources. Examples include the “Teaching Suggestions” series of study notes published online by publisher Allen and Unwin; materials from NGOs (Amnesty International, World Vision Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the Refugee Council); the Curriculum Cor‐ poration, which provided author profiles, activities and focus questions keyed to specific texts for teachers and students; and the Association of In‐ dependent Schools (AIS), which produced in‐depth study modules keyed to specific texts. State‐based authorities also produced teaching materials that keyed this literature into specific curricula in their jurisdiction—for exam‐ ple, the Curriculum Materials Information Services (CMIS) in Western Aus‐ tralia reviewed key texts for classroom use, and so did journals for the pro‐ fession, such as English in Australia. This focus on refugees and detention‐centre narratives in Austral‐ ian children’s literature appealed to an ethical turn in teaching Subject Eng‐ lish that was already well established. As Annette Patterson (2008) points out, the expansion of the study of Australian literature in schools and uni‐ versities that emerged in the 1970s followed a number of paths—a concern with building a national identity, as well as critiquing or problematizing as‐ pects of Australian society, values and beliefs (322). Debates about multi‐ culturalism and assimilation mesh with the pedagogical emphasis on en‐ gagement with “real‐world” social issues in the English classroom, which connects reading practice to the development of “sensitive”, “reflective” cit‐ izenship (311). In 2008, federal, state and territory governments mandated the drafting of a national school curriculum for primary and secondary schools by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). The submissions and draft syllabus for this national curriculum sustained the emphasis on developing general capabilities of critical and creative thinking, ethical behaviour and intercultural understanding in the literature classroom. In a submission to ACARA, the AHRC argued this was a unique opportunity to incorporate the Convention on the Rights of the Child into the planning, practice and ethos of the curriculum, empowering children to become “active citizens” through a “values education” that nur‐ tures tolerance, empathy and respect (AHRC 2011, 6–7). The rhetoric of the submission places the child centre‐stage in fostering a rights‐respecting



170 GILLIAN WHITLOCK culture as a national ethos: although this integration of human rights and Australian values is envisaged as a cross‐cutting element embedded across the new curriculum, the role of English in understanding ethical concepts; engaging in reasoned moral decision‐making on issues where violation of human rights principles occurs; and understanding needs, wants and rights in terms of the CRC is clear.8 The topic of migration and refugees was iden‐ tified as a case study in early drafts for the new K‐10 syllabus, for example. In an important essay on the emergence of “the sympathetic teacher in the English classroom”, Patterson (2011) historicizes this asso‐ ciation of the good English student and the good citizen, drawing on Ian Hunter’s work on child‐centred, whole‐class modes of teaching that emerged in Britain in the 19th century. She focuses on the performance of sympathy and empathy in the English classroom, “a constructed capacity to link to students’ lives through a combination of personality and narrative deployed in the interests of moral training” that is a pedagogical technique essential “for inculcating moral norms and developing the capacities of the self‐regulating citizen who is at the heart of the modern state” (Patterson 2011, 330). This analysis complicates thinking about scenes of reading nur‐ tured in the English classroom, which is, in Patterson’s view, not a site of dissent or human‐rights activism per se; rather, it activates a process of moral training in the course of the English lesson through pastoral guidance and practices of self‐reflexivity. The cultivation of reflexive citizenship in the classroom engages with volatile emotions in its engagement with social justice and the situa‐ tion of asylum seekers and refugees. The American feminist critic Lauren Berlant (2004) has written extensively on the role of compassion, affective identification and empathy, and she points out that these feelings of con‐ nection with others co‐exist recto to verso with their opposite: feelings of aversion, contamination, repulsion. Compassion, Berlant reminds us, is fragile:

8



“Human rights is about fostering a rights respecting culture—where human rights become integrated in society at many levels, both personal and institu‐ tional. It is also about embedding an understanding of human rights and Aus‐ tralian values as a cornerstone of our social fabric and national ethos that in‐ forms all aspects of our nation as well as our attitudes and behaviours” (AHRC 2011, 7).

BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 171 the aesthetics and political spectacle of suffering vulnerability seems to bring out something terrible, a drive not to feel compas‐ sion or sympathy, an aversion on the moral claim on the spectator to engage, when all the spectator wants to do is to turn away. (10) These cautionary remarks on compassion and aversion are partic‐ ularly relevant to the topic of human rights and asylum‐seeking child mi‐ grants, and to the fear and loathing that drives the course of events such as the Pacific Solution. Jacqueline Bhabha (2014) argues that the failure to protect children at our borders is not a problem of invisibility; rather, it is an expression of unresolved ambivalence about difference and “otherness”, and an active aversion: Migrant children are caught between an identification of the other as “human like me” and a hostility or indifference toward the other as separate or dispensable or threatening. This is particu‐ larly so for migrant children, where perceptions of vulnerability (“poor and innocent” children) and otherness (“not really like our children”) coalesce. (13) Ambivalence suggests why exposés and rights‐based activism that address the failure to see these people are insufficient, because “invisibility is not the fundamental problem, these injustices are not self‐correcting once they come to light” and they cannot be addressed by the abstract prin‐ ciples of human rights law for they fail to address and resolve the problem of recognition, the ethical reluctance to recognize this child not as an alien but as a “human like me” (Bhabha 2014, 13). Biocular Reading There are other reasons why children’s literature is uniquely placed to address the ambivalence that awaits child migrants and refugees. Aesthetic and rhetorical techniques in children’s literature can open expan‐ sive thinking on alienation and liminality given its openness to fantasy, al‐ legory and estrangement. For example, perceptions of self and other that are open to the proximity of humans and things are animated in picture books and graphic narratives. Marianne Hirsch (2004) argues that in the



172 GILLIAN WHITLOCK wake of 9/11 it is necessary to reconsider visuality and visual‐verbal con‐ junctions in literature and the visual arts more generally. The proscriptions on sight/seeing in the war on terror carefully control what can be seen—in the dissemination of images from the Iraq war, for example, and from Ground Zero and Abu Ghraib. The proscription on humanizing images of asylum seekers in the mass media in the course of the Pacific Solution is another example of this restriction on lines of sight. Hirsch argues for the particular importance of comics and graphic narrative in mediating the conjunction of verbal and visual texts post 9/11, introducing the term “bi‐ ocularity” to grasp distinctive visual/verbal conjunctions of graphic narra‐ tives, revealing “the visuality and thus the materiality of words and the dis‐ cursivity and narrativity of images” (1213). Graphic narrative creates scenes of reading that open onto “unspeakable subjects” and make unique demands on the reader, commanding visual and verbal literacy to interpret the spatial grammar of frames and gutters, words and images. Uncannily, Shaun Tan’s picture book The Lost Thing (2000) antici‐ pates the paranoid nationalism of the Pacific Solution and the control of hu‐ manizing images of asylum seekers. Graffiti on the page deliberately asso‐ ciates this dystopian bureaucratic society with Prime Minister Howard’s Australia, and recognizes the incipient fear and loathing that found expres‐ sion in the Pacific Solution in 2001. This whimsical story of the boy who finds a strange creature on the beach that nobody else sees is a fable, open to liminality and otherness, and thinking on hospitality. The failure to see the “thing”, and the indifference and fear of contamination it provokes, speaks directly to what Jacqueline Bhabha identifies as the ambivalence that is an abiding ethical issue in perceptions of the child at the border as “other”, an alien thing. The Lost Thing begins with percepticide—a deliber‐ ate refusal to bear witness, a turning away and blindness to the fate of those who are vulnerable (see Taylor 1997, 123). Tan’s graphic art transforms the act of reading, and intimately so. The reader must move and rotate the book to become open to the scene where this creature (an assemblage of the organic and inorganic, mechanical and animal, human and nonhuman) finds its place of belonging, in a brilliant enclave where strangeness flour‐ ishes sequestered from the world the boy inhabits. Tan’s uncanny worlds of vibrant matter draw deeply on the gift of children’s picture books: an openness to things and creatures, to speculative worlds and ways of know‐ ing that unsettle anthropocentric thinking. This animates things of all kinds,



BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 173 approaching alienation and the ethics of recognition other‐wise: “the lost thing is rescued by a reader’s attention and imagination and by their thoughtful questions” (Tan 2011, 7). Forced migration and belonging are explicitly centre‐stage in Tan’s later graphic narrative The Arrival (2006). Like The Lost Thing, this is a beautiful book, which summons slow reading, an openness to the aesthetics of the page and the work of the frames and gutters in calibrating the tempo of reading. Here we find “unspeakable subjects” in the absence of words, beyond speech: “picture books”, Shaun Tan suggests, “tell stories that are about silent subjects” (2011, 5). The endpapers—always an important threshold in Tan’s texts—are multiple portraits of migrants, carefully indi‐ vidualized drawings of men, women and children that draw on Tan’s own family history, captured as in old sepia photographs, and “borrowing the ‘language’ of old pictorial archives I’d been looking at, which have both doc‐ umentary clarity and an enigmatic, sepia‐toned silence” (Tan 2012, n.p.). These loving and reverent hand‐drawn portraits seem very different to the posthuman imaginary of The Lost Thing. But The Arrival’s time and space is no less open to spectres and strange creatures that invite multiple interpre‐ tations but refuse any singular psychological, allegorical, or autobiograph‐ ical association. Tan sets out to place the reader “in the shoes” of the mi‐ grant, in an embodied process of recognition: We might do well to think of ourselves as possible strangers in our own strange land. What conclusions we draw from this are un‐ likely to be easily summarised, all the more reason to think fur‐ ther on the connection between people and places, and what we might mean when we talk about “belonging”. (2012, n.p.) These books are promoted to the young adult market and educa‐ tional institutions very deliberately: Shaun Tan frequently appears at occa‐ sions to speak to schoolteachers, and he designed the “Freedom from Fear” poster for Refugee Week in 2011. He sustains a website that is designed to be useful in the classroom, and the DVD of the animated adaptation of The Lost Thing (2010) includes new and extensive resources with specific ad‐ vice on its relevance to Australian Key Learning Areas of “Arts and Drama” and “Design and Creative Technology” in the new national curriculum. There are numerous teacher’s guides to his work online, and his work was



174 GILLIAN WHITLOCK profiled on “Right Now”, the Human Rights in Australia website (“Shaun Tan: A Small Collection” 2011). There is a copious secondary literature on scenes of reading The Arrival in classrooms globally that considers what happens to reading in encounters with picture books and graphic narra‐ tives. For example, a pilot study in Glasgow uses Tan’s books in an experi‐ ential, interpersonal, compositional, and interpretive study in a multi‐eth‐ nic primary classroom (Farrell, Arizpe and McAdam 2010). A Spanish study explores reading processes in The Arrival in a class of native and immigrant children in Catalonia (Bellorín and Silva‐Díaz 2011). A Canadian study ex‐ plores Grade 7 students’ responses to The Arrival (Pantaleo and Momphray 2011). As Pam Macintyre (2011) argues, picture books actively interrupt efferent reading and interrogate processes of denotation, exemplification and interpretation in the classroom; through the interplay of word and im‐ age, “there are spaces for experiences and subjectivities to be expressed and valued” (367). Shaun Tan takes this opportunity to picture spaces that are, Macintyre suggests, “heterotopic”, counter‐sites of visual pleasure and filled with wonder where acts of generosity, kindness, and friendship coun‐ ter alienation and a mechanistic bureaucratic order of things. Slow Reading In a perceptive essay on the future of Australian children’s litera‐ ture in “new times”, where issues of globalization, migration, and environ‐ mental degradation are necessary concerns, Kerry Mallan (2006) questions the ethical and ideological work of children’s books in the classroom: I think we need to consider the overt and covert ideological as‐ sumptions of children’s and YA texts particularly as they relate to aspects of ethnicity, race, gender, class, religion and sexuality in a world that is characterized by fear, and by globalizing forces which attempt to standardize culture, suppress difference, and homogenize identity. (9) Questions on reading literature and human rights become acute on the issue of forced migration and scenes of reading in the classroom. In the new national curriculum a key text on the subject of refugees is Anh Do’s The Happiest Refugee (2010), which is marketed with extensive teaching



BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 175 resources available online.9 Blurbs profile this memoir as a “page turner”, the “extraordinary true story of a boy’s journey from starvation at sea to becoming one of Australia’s best‐loved comedians”. Paratexts emphasize its suitability for the mandated cross‐curriculum field of “Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia” in the new curriculum. It has the authenticity of memoir, and a picture book version, The Little Refugee, extends the range of readers in the primary classroom. There is little of the explicit social ac‐ tivism of Gleitzman’s Boy Overboard or the anthologies that address the plight of asylum seekers in detention here.10 Arguably The Happiest Refugee invites a more positive approach to Australian citizenship, a story of suc‐ cessful assimilation and individual resilience: feel‐good, funny, and “brim‐ ming with against‐all‐odds triumphs” (Tumarkin 2011, n.p.). As Maria Tumarkin remarks: The public knows from the cover—where Anh Do smiles his wide smile while the boat in the background bathes in soft sunset, straight from some fairytale franchise—that the book in front of us won’t be a downer. It won’t be divisive. It won’t be angry. It won’t slap us around while we are reading it. But if we properly read The Happiest Refugee, and not squeeze it for easy tears, not rummage through it for jokes, or shake it up and down for life‐affirming lessons, if instead we read it straining to imagine and to understand, then perhaps the book’s success can become not yet another confirmation of our multicultural lar‐ gesse but the start of something else, something real. It takes a monumental and ongoing work of moral imagination to under‐ stand why people are prepared to starve, become terribly ill, get lost at sea, watch their children suffer, die—all to be able to come to Australia. (Tumarkin, 2011 n.p.).

9

See, for example, the “Global Worlds” materials on refugees and migration for Junior Secondary English jointly developed by World Vision Australia and the Primary English Teaching Association Australia, and the Identity Unit for Year 9 developed by the Association for Independent Schools (AIS) of NSW. 10 Suggested texts for developing “Asia Literacy” in the English curriculum in 2012 include Gleitzman, Doh and Tan. See Hamston (2012).



176 GILLIAN WHITLOCK It doesn’t do to underestimate the ambivalence that awaits refugee life narratives, the desire to look away in denial, even from amiable ones like this. Nevertheless, Doh’s memoir is not an account of an illegal immi‐ grant; he is chosen. The voyage of the Doh family from Vietnam ends up at the refugee camp in Pulau Bidong, an island in the Malaysian archipelago, and the family is selected by Australia as part of its annual refugee quota. There is nothing here that troubles the mantra of the Australian federal election campaign of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific Solu‐ tion: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” (Howard 2001). What is the work of the classroom and the sympathetic teacher here and now? Picture books teach us to be suspicious of “page turners” and the efferent reading this suggests, even as we become open to Doh’s memoir with compassion. One imagines the sympathetic teacher in the classroom that Patterson evokes begins a conversation with pupils, explor‐ ing how picture books and memoir elicit empathy and why the subject of asylum seekers requires Australian citizens to engage with the most diffi‐ cult ethical issues of self and other. Now this discussion would almost inev‐ itably include students’ perceptions of the mass exodus and forced migra‐ tions of 2015, and the haunting scenes on the beaches of southern Europe in the mass media, most notably the photographs of the child Aylan Kurdi that stirred both compassion and rage. The class might return to those opening pages of The Lost Thing and slow reading to wonder, again, at its uncanny insights: on the beach as both geographical and existential space; on percepticide; on that “consequential relationship” between the suffering of some and the wellbeing of others; and the brief glimpse of hospitality to strangers as we rotate the book and open its utopian scene of vibrant mat‐ ter of all kinds. This return and the desire to keep speculating on the lost thing is “what we might mean when we talk about ‘belonging’”, Tan reminds us (2012, n.p.) As aversion arises, both in this classroom and around and about it, as we know it will, the sympathetic teacher will create scenes of reading “full of imaginary and creative potential”, where pupils encounter narratives of the migrant child, engage with ambivalence, and learn the “conduct” of the good English student who is also the good citizen, “capable of regulating him or herself, [and] respond[ing] sensitively to others” (Pat‐ terson 2011, 329).



BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 177 Acknowledgements Thanks to Joan Holloway for the diligent research assistance that gathered the resources needed for this essay, and the extensive classroom experience that has been an invaluable source of advice for thinking on Aus‐ tralian literature for children. Versions of this essay were presented as a keynote at the International Research Society for Children’s Literature con‐ ference in Brisbane in July 2011, and as a paper at the English Teachers As‐ sociation of New South Wales conference in Sydney, 2011. Thanks to Kerry Mallan and Mel Dixon for these opportunities to discuss asylum seekers and Australian children’s literature. This essay is in memory of Annette Patterson, who has the last word here, and whose work inspires thinking on English and the im‐ portance of the classroom.

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BRINGING LITERATURE TO RIGHTS 181 ‐‐‐. 2012. “Comments on The Arrival.” Accessed September 19, 2016. http://www.shauntan.net/books/the‐arrival.html, ‐‐‐. 2011. “The Accidental Graphic Novelist.” Bookbird: A Journal of Interna‐ tional Children’s Literature 49 (4): 1–9. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and National‐ ism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tumarkin, Maria. 2011. “Stories Without Borders.” Meanjin 70 (2). Ac‐ cessed April 14, 2016. https://meanjin.com.au/essays/stories‐ without‐borders/ Tripadvisor Australia. 2013 “‘If You Visit Nothing Else, Visit the SIEV X Me‐ morial’: Review of Weston Park.” September 22. https://www.trip advisor.com.au/ShowUserReviews‐g255057‐d3377852‐r178121 902‐Weston_Park‐Canberra_Greater_Canberra_Australian_Capital _Territory.html



Part 2: Imaginative Representation and Human Rights





The Universal and the Local in Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Human Rights Novel Nairobi Heat Russell West-Pavlov In one of the more bizarre episodes of Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s (2011) Eastern African detective novel Nairobi Heat his investigator duo, African American Ishmael Fofona and Kenyan David “O” Odhiambo, interrogate a white landowner who has stayed on after independence. Seclusion and dis‐ cretion, “O” claims, are the conditions with which the former colonial mas‐ ter is permitted to maintain his privileged enclave in the postcolonial polity that officially disavows such residual power (Mũkoma 2011, 54). His privi‐ lege extends to virtual legal impunity before the courts despite the cold‐ blooded murder of two of his employees on his estate (58). This is scandal‐ ous enough, but the more bizarre aspect of Lord Thompson, as he is known, resides in his life‐style. He lives on a gigantic secluded estate not far from Nairobi. In a huge mansion in the bush, surrounded by luxury, protected by security guards and South African mercenaries, Lord Thompson wallows in a self‐imposed and artificial poverty: “The slave‐master lives like a slave but in his mansion. He had converted his bedroom into slave quarters” (56). The strangeness of the episode does not consist merely in the fact that at the heart of the putatively postcolonial polity, there persists a space of residual colonial impunity. More grotesquely, while boasting of his abil‐ ity to take life in a manner whose template is the commodifying, thing‐ify‐ ing reduction of humanity to “bare life” in the slave‐trade (Mbembe 2013), the erstwhile colonial master obscenely takes on the identity of the slave, the predecessor and model of the colonial labour upon which his wealth depends. Outside the house, Lord Thompson takes the lives of postcolonial subjects who have long since ceased to be slaves or their avatars, while in‐ side the house he masquerades as the slave he has never been and never will be, but whose economic condition is somehow “internal” to his own being, its very condition of possibility. Mũkoma’s narrative thus inter‐ twines, or even invaginates, the apparently separated spaces of the planta‐ tion, the colony, the postcolony and the metropolis, and the seemingly dis‐ crete temporalities of the colonial and postcolonial epochs. Human rights abuses are thus dispersed across a global expanse and an extended histor‐ ical continuum.   185

186 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV The sequence is one of many apparently unmotivated episodes of interrogation, tip‐offs, violence and death that litter the novel. Lord Thomp‐ son does indeed give the detectives a clue before being killed by the two investigators (Mũkoma 2011, 72), but this connection is tenuous in the ex‐ treme, its very late revelation (123) doing little to motivate the episode. Yet the loose plotting may be a stylistic device which itself is highly motivated. The looseness of plotting, which may suggest a lack of causal connection, instead implies absence of historical dynamism. Despite the semblance of temporal sequence, no fundamental shift between before and after, no de‐ finitive establishment of the rule of law at the inauguration of so‐called “flag independence”, i.e. political independence, has taken place. We are in an eternal colonial present. There is, under this ongoing colonial dispensation within the guise of independence, no syntax of salvation or plot liberation to drive the novel’s plot. As “O” says at one point to Ishmael, in a self‐negating parody of the plot of enlightenment knowledge, “We are making progress, no?”— “sounding”, the narrator adds, “a little like Joshua Hakizimana” (Mũkoma 2011, 73), the Rwandan genocide‐perpetrator at the centre of the novel, and as it transpires, the villain of its generic murder plot. Both investigators and criminals believe and do not believe in progress. In the larger view of things, there is no progress towards the resolution of the murder, the par‐ adigmatic form of the abuse of the human right to life, of the human right to “self‐fulfillment” and “personal development”. Instead, violence repeats it‐ self, sometimes at the hands of Kenyan petty criminals, sometimes at the hands of American hired killers, sometimes by order of national police forces, sometimes at the behest of transnational finance. The abuse of hu‐ man rights is multiply temporally situated and multiply spatially located to the point of becoming, it would seem, eternal and ubiquitous. Mũkoma’s novel is an anti‐novel of human rights. If, as Joseph Slaughter (2007) has posited, the plot of individual development and self‐ fulfillment is common to both the Bildungsroman and the modern paradigm of human rights (7–9), then Nairobi Heat’s affiliation as an African detective novel is doubly significant. Whereas “the novel does not just reflect on or intervene in the current state of human rights but is foundational to this very system” (Bystrom 2008, 395), Mũkoma’s detective fiction ostenta‐ tiously eschews a too‐easy assimilation to an enlightenment paradigm of human rights ostensibly originating in Euro‐America, and poses, against



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 187 that paradigm, albeit in a discrete, almost self‐deprecating way, an alterna‐ tive Global South paradigm of human rights. It does this work via its deploy‐ ment of genre and its use of geography. Mũkoma opts for the detective genre with its preference for stere‐ otypical figures inhabiting a cyclical macro‐plot that assumes that once the crime is solved, another mystery will inevitably follow (to be resolved, in its turn, in a sequel). Detectives do not develop; they simply deal with new cases. This temporal paradigm shift in the novel is matched by a geopolitical one, consummated in Ishmael’s decision at the close of the novel to emi‐ grate from Wisconsin to Nairobi (where the sequel, Black Star Nairobi [Mũkoma 2013], is set). This (anti‐)human rights novel thus eschews both the genre and the geopolitical location of the Bildungsroman, positing in‐ stead another literary form for another paradigm of human rights grounded in another cultural and geopolitical domain—akin, for instance, to the West African (Malian) Manden charter of human rights dating from the early 1200s (Amselle 2013; Nesbitt 2013, 45, 215n9; UNESCO 2009) and thus predating by far Euro‐American enlightenment paradigms. In what follows, I posit that Mũkoma’s novel sketches an aporetic interwovenness of human rights abuses and human rights defence, drawi‐ ing on on both geopolitical and historical entanglements. If the detective novel lays bare these entanglements, this is not to dismiss any ultimate pos‐ sibility of genuinely defending human rights and prosecuting their abuse, but rather, to gesture towards a more complex, and thus ultimately more genuine ground for the defence of human dignity. Unlike his Kenyan sidekick, “O”, who has a penchant for philoso‐ phizing, Ishmael poses for much of the novel as a simple man with simple morals. A white girl is found dead on the doorstep of a Rwandan American university professor, Joshua Hakizimana, who teaches at a college in Madi‐ son, Wisconsin. It is only at the very end of the novel that we discover how exactly the Rwandan genocide of 1994, where the majority Hutu ethnic group killed perhaps as many as a million Tutsi, connects the professor and the white girl. Joshua, it is revealed, has indeed murdered her in order to conceal his true—and highly ambivalent—role in the genocide; the girl knows about this because her missionary family was killed alongside the Tutsis they sought to protect. Ishmael’s motivation cuts through these com‐ plexities: “My reason was simple but immutable—it was wrong that some‐ one had killed her and even more wrong for the killer to go free” (Mũkoma



188 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV 2011, 22). Ishmael appeals to a simple notion of justice and an immutable law of human rights, thereby ignoring the complicated histories and fu‐ tures, and the manifold complicities, of pragmatic “applied” human rights. Similarly, en route to the Nairobi of the title, Ishmael claims to be “travelling to Africa in search of Joshua’s past. What I found there would either con‐ demn or save him” (1). The binary of saving and condemning, saving and killing, between law and lawlessness, however, is blurred by the multiple geographical locations and the transnational financial flows that link them. Programmatically, Mũkoma dedicates his novel to the masters of modern Kenyan popular fiction, “Meja Mwangi and David Maillu for blurring the margins” (ii), presumably not only between high and pop literature (a bor‐ der that Mũkoma as poet [2006; 2016] and essayist [2002], shares with them), but also between good and bad, help and harm, and ultimately, here and there. Instead of simple binaries and immutable laws, the novel opts for complexity (see also West‐Pavlov 2015). Joshua, until his true past is re‐ vealed, is the hero of the genocide who is the public face of the novel’s Never Again Foundation, which supports a centre for Rwandan refugees in Nai‐ robi. Joshua teaches “Genocide and Testimony” at his Wisconsin college (Mũkoma 2011, 9), an ironic combination once we know his true past. As both a genocide‐rescuer and a genocide‐perpetrator, he has an ambivalent attitude to genocide, possessing a wealth of practical experience, and is not overly keen to hear too much accurate testimony: “The black Schindler, as the media had called him, had saved a few in order to use them as bait and reel in whole villages searching for refuge” (124). Paradoxically, Joshua and the detectives Ishmael and “O” have more in common than one might think. Both display, albeit in chiastic form, an ambivalent relationship between taking and saving of life. Joshua saved some Tutsi lives in order to take many, while Ishmael and “O” take (criminal) lives in order to save some. Likewise, Ishmael’s Rwandan lover Madeline is nicknamed “Muddy”, con‐ veying the opacity of the genocide survivor who, as a member of the Tutsi‐ affiliated Rwandan Patriotic Army that reoccupied the country and termi‐ nated the genocide, has also killed many people (98). The novel constantly operates with the frequent “thematic overlap of harm and care” to be found in human rights fiction (Dawes 2007, 212). By the end of the novel, Ishmael has learnt that these “blurred margins” between killing and caring can best be accommodated in the “peripheral” Kenyan postcolony: “In Africa I could



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 189 live out my contradictions, or at least my contradictions would be recon‐ ciled by the extremes of life there” (Mũkoma 2011, 203). What we find in the novel, in this not untypical “satisfying ending that does not satisfy … this ending that must not end” (Dawes 2007, 192, 202), is in no way a resolution. Rather, the conclusion underscores the per‐ sistent exposure of a mass of unresolvable contradictions and aporia, his‐ torical, ethical, axiological. In what follows, in a purely heuristic effort to tease out entanglements whose inextricable intertwining is susceptible of no genuine reduction, I will divide this convoluted argument into three main complexes: the conceptual, the ethical‐historical, and the financial. At successive conjunctures, however, I will suspend my own heuristic project, seeking to show how these complexes are in fact conjoined with each other in Mũkoma’s text. The conceptual, the ethical historical and the financial complexes The first complex is a conceptual one. When Ishmael interrogates Joshua, asking “Did you kill the girl?” he receives the peremptory response, “Wrong question. Start from beginning” (Mũkoma 2011, 25). But which be‐ ginning? The underlying “epistemological” drive of the detective novel sup‐ plants the “proaetric” code of plot‐progression, triggering a disturbance of temporalities, in which the “story” and “discourse” vectors run in counter‐ vailing directions (Barthes 1970, 25; Todorov 1980, 12–13); in order to ex‐ plain the historical sequence whose forward momentum culminates in the murder, we need to follow the narration of the detective’s efforts to retrace, in reverse order, the chain of events stretching back beyond and before the murder. Joshua’s riposte is rude but to the point: it identifies the “convo‐ luted temporality” and the “peculiar narrative grammar” (Slaughter 2007, 26) that the detective novel, despite its patent deviation from many salient aspects of the Bildungsroman, appears to share with human rights. The modern discourse of human rights contains a “premise” and a “promise” (26). Human rights discourse presupposes a human being as a person who is constituted, retrospectively, by that discourse itself. Correspondingly, just as human rights discourse projects its own pre‐conditions backward towards an origin, so too it projects an ideal of human rights forward into the future as an impossible ideal. This culminates in “a transitive grammar [. . .] that situates the human personality both before and after the process of [. . .] becoming what one already is by right” (26).



190 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV This does not add up, of course, to an argument for dismissing the validity of human rights as a temporal projection. Ishmael, confused by “O”’s quixotic confidence that the two detectives will uncover the story of the white girl’s murder, admits, “I felt too exhausted to question his logic or interrogate what he was calling progress” (Mũkoma 2011, 73). And, despite Ishmael’s tone of resignation, “O”’s optimism may be justified. The detective novel, with its own “convoluted temporality that manifests itself in a [. . .] narrative grammar”, also common to “the Bildungsroman and human rights” (Slaughter 2007, 26), may be exactly the genre to encapsulate the aporetic temporal modes of human rights. For, just as Derrida (1999, 66) has argued that one can only truly make a decision about issues that are undecidable (otherwise the decision would always already be predeter‐ mined and thus not a true decision) it may well be that one can only truly commit oneself to pursuing an ethical principle which is unattainable. The second complex, however, renders the issue of human rights more problematic. If, as Slaughter claims, this ”tropological gamble” de‐ pends on the strategy of “personification” (2007, 22–23), it participates in a process of violent repression endemic to metaphor, which always sup‐ presses the terms elided by its fundamental operation of condensation (Emig 2001, 48–71). The core imaginative process at the heart of the dis‐ course of human rights, the tropological (metaphorical) move of assuming personhood, which in turn is transposed onto the temporal axis of presup‐ position and anticipation, may concur with Jakobson’s (1960) description of the poetic function, which “projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (358). But the history of human rights as a putative history of “equiva‐ lence”, that is, of universally equal rights, has historically been contami‐ nated and countermanded by the no less historical process entailed by the very notion of the “human”. Many thinkers have stressed the “exclusions that are constitutive of the ‘neutral’ universality of human rights” (Žižek quoted in Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, 101; emphasis in original). For many critics from the Global South for whom Africa “was or is the land of my ancestors” (Mũkoma 2011, 1) slavery is the grotesquely horrific under‐ side of European enlightenment values, its material and economic condi‐ tion of possibility, an historical phenomenon that puts paid to any credibil‐ ity in the notion of “humanism”; “humanism” assumed a set of ethical limits and barriers which were always contravened within the slave economy that



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 191 enabled the civilization, both material and conceptual, of the enlightenment (Baucom 2005; Mbembe 2014). Even the notion of the person that under‐ pins human rights is destabilized by its constitutive repressions. In terms of legal history dating as far back as Roman law, the very definition of the person is born negatively from its pre‐ sumed difference from men and women who are not persons, or who are only partially or temporarily persons and as such always at risk of falling into the status of thing. (Esposito 2013, 115) Slaughter notes that positing the citizen‐subject as the paradigmatic subject of human rights implies a border between citizen and alien (2007, 184); “residual nationalism and historically narrow universalism” (30) disqualify many claimants to human rights by assuming a narrow bourgeois‐national profile of the “person”. More radically, the discourse of human rights may be contami‐ nated not only by its constitutive repressions, but by its own mode of self‐ constitution. If the structure of human rights is one of retroactive self‐con‐ stitution by the assumption of prior, pre‐existing humanity and person‐ hood constituted in the discursive act of presupposing, then human rights participate in the nature of sovereignty as identified by Agamben (1998): namely, the capacity to call itself into being, to found its own authority by its own act of self‐declaration—which also implies the capacity to abolish itself, to exercise itself as law in the suspension of law (28). Human rights, then, share the same constitutive structure of sovereignty as their suspen‐ sion and their abuse: that is, the self‐authorizing capacity to ascribe human‐ ity and personhood in the crediting of human rights, and to abolish human rights in discrediting and refusing to recognize personhood. Human rights and the negation of humanity, which means the reduction of the human to “bare life” (8) or to the status of “animated thing” (Mbembe 2013, 16), share the same essentially rhetorical origins. Human rights, at any rate as defined by such paradigms as the subject of the Bildungsroman, are thus “enabling fictions” and “disabling fictions” (Slaughter 2007, 183) for those not inter‐ pellated by its paradigmatic terms of reference, or worse, negatively inter‐ pellated by the shadowy dehumanizing “other” of human rights. The first and second complexes I have identified here can only be artificially held apart. They converge at many junctures in Mũkoma’s novel,



192 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV for instance at the moment when Ishmael and “O” exchange their stories of why they became detectives. “O”’s story is about the endemic lawlessness that affects the postcolony, where the complicity of the police and the courts can be purchased by anyone with enough cash: So, after that I started believing in justice I could see. We live in anarchy; life is cheap and the rich and the criminals can buy a whole lot of it. Meantime, someone has to be on the side of justice. (Mũkoma 2011, 67) The postcolony effectively consists of a zone where lawlessness be‐ comes the law, where global sovereignty agrees to suspend its own opera‐ tions. Ishmael is not entirely convinced of “O”’s account of this formative experience: ”His story made sense and it didn’t, just like my Random Killer story—at some point it broke down” (Mũkoma 2011, 68). In a self‐reflexive gesture, Mũkoma makes fun of his own loose, almost picaresque plot‐con‐ struction, but by the same token, takes a pot‐shot at the teleological enlight‐ enment plot of individual development (Slaughter 2007, 97) that underpins human rights but also provides the template for Euro‐American progress. The same teleology of progressive knowledge, of course, underpins the de‐ tective‐novel genre, although it becomes successively more aporetic and di‐ lapidated as it undergoes its respective transformations in its hardboiled and postcolonial avatars. Thus, this narrative of progress also makes sense and it doesn’t—at some point it breaks down. The syntactic linearity of en‐ lightenment only works because, on the paradigmatic axis, it relies upon exclusions and elisions, and these make for performative contradictions. The narrative of enlightenment progress displays a syntax of development that relies upon paradigmatic process of aggressively prosecuted “under‐ development” (Rodney 1972). The economic growth of the colonial me‐ tropolis, then, which gave rise to a narrative of linear development, was predicated upon the economic plundering and impoverishment of the col‐ onies, the repressed truth of Euro‐American progress, which, in this puta‐ tively postcolonial age, is being repeated, and thus coming to light in blatant forms of contemporary “primitive accumulation” (Sassen 2014, 80–116). If the first and second complexes I have delineated above lead in‐ evitably towards the economic basis for the global “humanity” and “inhu‐ manity” with which human rights are concerned (Cheah 2006, 1–2), then the third complex concerns the way economics has developed in the new



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 193 century. Slaughter points up how human rights seek to incorporate the marginalized and vulnerable individual into the body politic or the public sphere, thus affording her or him the protection of (inter)national law, thereby laying bare similarities with the emergence of Euro‐American civil society in the wake of merchant, industrial, and corporate capitalism. Mũkoma is entirely cognisant of such processes. Departing from a mere narrative of genocide and the revelation of the genocide‐perpetrator’s iden‐ tity (Joshua murders the white girl to prevent her revealing that he has killed her missionary family for helping Tutsis to escape) Mũkoma spins a secondary tale in which the genocide becomes a money‐maker. One of the characters explains: Say there is a genocide in which a million or so people die while the world watches. And say the country in which this genocide happens ends up owning the guilt of that world, because it stood by and did nothing. How much do you think that guilt is worth? (2011, 107–108) Ishmael answers, “Millions, it would seem. [. . .] Anybody and eve‐ rybody was in the game. This was the world trying to clear its conscience, and to do that it was prepared to pay close to seventy million dollars a year” (112). Mũkoma’s detective novel is not simply about the murder, but also about the financial scam run by the Never Again Foundation that launders the donated millions, which the murder is designed to cover up. The “noble Joshua is the stirrer of the world’s guilt” (108) and his identity as a gen‐ ocide‐rescuer rather than a genocide‐perpetrator is crucial to the function‐ ing of the Foundation. Mũkoma traces the historical transition from commodity capital to speculative capital with rigorous accuracy. In a moment of honesty, Joshua says to Ishmael, “Genocide no game. . . . I . . . I traded lives, Ishmael” (Mũkoma 2011, 24). Trade perfectly describes the various sectors of Joshua’s business as saviour and mass murderer. On the one hand, he smug‐ gles a small number of Tutsi refugees out of Rwanda to safety in neighbour‐ ing Kenya, leaving the safe haven of the school with two Tutsi fugitives on board, disguised as his driver and a bodyguard. Returning, he picks up two more fugitives from the surrounding area, who, once again disguised as driver and bodyguard, are then ferried back to the safe compound ready for



194 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV the next journey to freedom (17). This exchange is equitable, but as a lure for the fleeing thousands, it is embedded in an inequitable exchange where a few are saved so as to condemn the many. Joshua invests in a small num‐ ber of lives to reap a huge profit in death. If Joshua’s trade in lives becomes a “merchandizing” of “human suffering” (Slaughter 2007, 34) that is a per‐ verse mirror image of the way “human rights movements organize them‐ selves in the image of markets” (Baxi 2002, 121). More disturbingly, however, the Foundation creates its profit at further and further distance from the genocide itself, first trading on the guilt of the global bystanders, and then on the profit to be made from that guilt. The Foundation gives a part of the donations, which have already gen‐ erated large tax exemptions for the donors, back to them: “it was such a neat cycle, that each year generated so many millions for CEOs and wealthy philanthropists, that it might as well have been legal. The rich had found a way of giving back to themselves” (Mũkoma 2011, 113). This sounds like the stuff of fantasy, but it is merely a fictionalized (or not so fictionalized) version of the commodification, then the financialization, of everything (in‐ cluding human rights) tracked by Saskia Sassen (2014) in her recent work on global expropriation. The profits to be made from speculative finance capital far outstrip any wealth to be earned from mere commodities, but as the limits of financialization are reached, capital must search for new do‐ mains to invent via ever more complex financial instruments (Harvey [1982] 2007; 2010); Mũkoma’s novel imagines human rights as one more niche for investment. His novel imagines how human rights [. . .] have been commodified and marketized—incorporated—in the era of multinational capitalist globalization” (Slaughter 2007, 34) in a particularly perverse, grotesquely ironic fashion. This ironic reading of Slaughter’s statement is possible because human rights in their intended sense (that is, the protec‐ tion of human dignity) have been left behind in the “financialization” and “virtualization” they undergo at the hands of the criminals. But the same goes for the detectives, who are in no way immune to this creeping finan‐ cialization of human rights. Seeking finally to outwit their opponents, Ish‐ mael and “O” buy into the asymmetrical system of global human dignity when they cynically decide to play the race card: the Never Again Foundation and Refugee Centre would tumble down once the face of their victim was the white girl’s. Were we



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 195 manipulating race? The calculation was simple: one million lives did not move the world, African countries included, to intervene, but the death of one beautiful blonde girl would. We did not create that equation—we found it as it was. And we would use it to get justice. (Mũkoma 2011, 115) The two detectives, it becomes obvious, also indulge in a pernicious mathematization of human rights that depends upon the North‐South asymmetries and the commodification and thing‐ification of lives they are seeking to combat. But perhaps they have no choice. It is possible that their cynicism is merely a pragmatic response to an invidious tendency to regard all life, whether that in the Global South, or increasingly in the Global North, as quantifiable, commodifiable, and finally disposable (Mbembe 2013, 16). In one sense, the cheapness of life and the ease with which it is wasted belongs to the generic field of hard‐boiled crime fiction. At another level, it reveals the way in which cheap (or “bare”) life as a paradigmatic tenor in the post‐ colony spills across the borders of time and space. What happens in Kenya is simply a less acute version of what happened in Rwanda during the pe‐ riod of genocide. And it is closely keyed into what happens in the metropo‐ lis, for at a larger scale and with the safety of distance, the Global North continues to callously treat the Global South population as collective “bare life”, to be killed with impunity. In Rwanda, structural adjustment pro‐ grammes put the (largely Hutu‐dominated) government under intense eco‐ nomic political pressure, which in turn undermined the government’s pub‐ lic legitimacy. In turn the government sought to offload its legitimation problems onto the ethnic Tutsi community by using it as a scapegoat for collective ills. Responsibility for the genocide was thus partly shared by the international community, not only for the much‐publicized manner in which it failed to intervene in the genocide at the moment of its perpetra‐ tion; the international community was also instrumental in creating the conditions which allowed chronic inter‐ethnic conflict, already exacerbated by colonial divide‐and‐rule policy, to escalate into full‐blown genocide (Mamdani 2001, 24–34; Veney 2007, 41–55). Closer to home, our own responses as readers may reveal the in‐ sidious global thing‐ification of life. If apparently random violence is a ge‐ neric feature of the detective novel, it also belongs, in this African detective novel, to a mode that Elze (2012) has called the “postcolonial picaresque”:



196 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV “The picaresque is certainly neither the novel of human rights nor of human rights abuse (which are effectively the same), but of (economic) precarity, that however constantly threatens human rights, as they may be consid‐ ered an inconvenient obstacle” (81). However, to the extent that a mode such as the picaresque must be activated by reader comprehension, its very generic operation shows up the complicity of western readers in the global capitalist system which produces these aporia, thus jeopardizing the appar‐ ently external and stable reading position from which human rights can be assumed as a coherent narrative (83). Similarly, as Bystrom (2009) sug‐ gests, “we as readers of fiction play a role in creating and sustaining a global demand for the “Third World” success stories that can be seen to naturalize an ambiguous process of incorporation” (395). In sum, Mũkoma’s novel lays bare and critiques a process by which: human rights discourse becomes commodified, professionalized by technocrats, and sometimes hijacked by powerful groups, [thereby] losing touch with the experience of suffering and the needs of those who should be the main beneficiaries—the poor and the oppressed. (Twining 2009, 2) If the novel does activate this sort of critique, however, it does so ambivalently, because its own position mediates between that of writers, readers, characters and subjects in different geopolitical sites and widely discrepant positions of power and privilege. Significantly, Mũkoma chose what he has called “an insurgent path” (email to author on February 10, 2015) in the publication strategy employed to put Nairobi Heat into global circulation: it appeared successively with Spear/Penguin Books in Kenya, and Penguin/Random House in South Africa in 2009, with Melville House in the USA in 2011, and the small independent press Cassava Republic in Nigeria 2013. In this way, the text seeks to create a readership that is vari‐ ously positioned geographically, and by extension, with regard to the global politics of human rights, though of course there is no strict or predictable correlation between the two variables.



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 197 Autochthonous human rights It is this various positioning of human rights discourses and their intended reception/activation in the act of reading (Iser 1993, 248) which points to an alternative paradigm that is sketched out, ever so discreetly, in Mũkoma’s novel. In one crucial moment in the text when Ishmael demands to know whether Muddy has killed people, she replies, “Never ask me if I have killed. You have no right. I only forgive you because you are a foreigner here” (Mũkoma 2011, 99). This interdiction upon judgement from outside the specific context does not render invalid the universal aspirations of hu‐ man rights discourse or deliver us up to utter contextual relativism (the lat‐ ter can often become a smoke screen for authoritarian regimes appealing to “tradition” as a legitimization of autocracy and human rights abuses [see Mkandawire 2005, 18]). Rather, it demands that we consider each case within a larger, international context of human rights discourse and human rights policy and implementation, weighing up words and deeds in one place against words and deeds in another: this often proves fatal to the credibility of those who speak in the name of human rights (or, at strategic moments, fail to do so), undermining the moral high ground seized by the claim to represent the victims. This is the ambivalent ground that Mũkoma’s text occupies. It is all the more significant, then, that the text does refer to one specific local instance of human rights prosecution. Towards the end of the narrative, Ishmael makes a journey to rural Rwanda. In a remote village he witnesses one of the traditional gacaca courts that became a significant way of dealing with genocide guilt in a polity where the majority of citizens have been perpetrators (Clarke 2014; Wielenga and Harris 2011): These people were resettled refugees, and with them had come some of their killers. After the killing ended where were they to go, if not back to their communities and hope no one remem‐ bered? But people remembered and that was why that young man was on trial. (Mũkoma 2011, 184) The brief vignette displays all the structural characteristics of the other complexes dealt with by Mũkoma’s fiction: the entangled continuity of past and present, of a micro‐politics of habitation and subsistence, and



198 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV above all, the shockingly intimate intertwining of neighbourliness and mas‐ sacre that was one central feature of the Rwanda genocide. In particular, are the specific exigencies of living‐on‐together that complicate and ground human rights and demand other, more complex, locally‐embedded, forms of human rights prosecution (see Mamdani 2013, 33). This a‐universal form of human rights (universal exclusively by virtue of being grounded in a mul‐ tiplicity of local contexts) would effectively confront the “danger of losing touch with the experience of suffering and the needs of those who should be the main beneficiaries—the poor and the oppressed … the main authors of human rights” (Twining 2009, 2). Mũkoma’s novel points precisely to‐ wards this possibility of respecting and defending the local, Indigenous and autochthonous “authorship of human rights” (Baxi 2002, 101) that “may open up a way forward, a way to take into account the failures of the current order without giving up on the ideal of human rights as an essential tool in the larger project of human emancipation” (Bystrom 2008, 394).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans‐ lated by Daniel Heller‐Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Amselle, Jean‐Loup. 2013. “Did Africa Invent Human Rights?” Anthropoetics 19 (1). http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1901/1901Amselle .htm#ed Barthes, Roland. 1970. S/Z. Paris: Seuil. Baucom, Ian. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, and the Philos‐ ophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baxi, Upendra. 2002. The Future of Human Rights. New Delhi: Oxford Uni‐ versity Press. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegem‐ ony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. London: Verso. Bystrom, Kerry. 2008. ”The Novel and Human Rights: Review Essay.” Jour‐ nal of Human Rights 7 (4): 388–96. Cheah, Pheng. 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL IN NAIROBI HEAT 199 Clarke, Phil. 2014. “Bringing the Peasants Back In, Again: State Power and Local Agency in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts.” Journal of Eastern Afri‐ can Studies 8 (2): 193–213. Dawes, James. 2007. That The World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility.” In Ques‐ tioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by Rich‐ ard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 65–83. London: Routledge. Elze, Jens. 2012. “The Picaresque: Literatures of Precarity—Precarious Lit‐ eratures.” PhD Dissertation, Free University of Berlin. Emig, Rainer. 2001. Metapher des Krieges im 20. Jahrhundert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Esposito, Roberto. 2013. Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Bi‐ politics. Translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch. New York: Fordham University Press. Harvey, David. [1982] 2007. The Limits to Capital. 2nd ed. London: Verso. ‐‐‐. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile. Iser, Wolfgang. 1993. “Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa.” In Rezeptionsästhetik: Theorie und Praxis, edited by Rainer Warning, 228–52. München: Fink/UTB. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Na‐ tivism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni‐ versity Press. ‐‐‐. 2013. “The Logic of Nuremberg.” London Review of Books 35 (21): 33– 34. Mbembe, Achille. 2013. Critique de la raison nègre. Paris: La Découverte. ‐‐‐. 2014. “Afrofuturisme et devenir‐nègre du monde.” Politique africaine 136 (December): 121–33. Mkandawire, Thandika. 2005. “African Intellectuals and Nationalism.” In Af‐ rican Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Devel‐ opment, edited by Thandika Mkandawire, 10–55. Dakar and Lon‐ don: CODESRIA/Zed.



200 RUSSELL WEST‐PAVLOV Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ. 2002. Conversing with Africa: The Politics of Change. Ha‐ rare: Kimaathi. ‐‐‐. 2006. Hurling Words at Consciousness: Poems. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ‐‐‐. 2011. Nairobi Heat. New York: Melville House. ‐‐‐. 2013. Black Star Nairobi. New York: Melville House. ‐‐‐. 2016. Logotherapy: Poems. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Nesbitt, Nick. 2013. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle‐ L’Ouverture. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1980. Poétique de la prose suivi de Nouvelles recherches sur le récit. Paris: Seuil/Points. Twining, William. 2009. “Introduction.” In Human Rights, Southern Voices: Francis Deng, Abdullahi An‐Na’im, Yash Ghai, Upendra Baxi, edited by William Twining, 1–3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNESCO. 2009. “Manden Charter, Proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga (Mali).” UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Hu‐ manity. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/manden‐cha rter‐proclaimed‐in‐kurukan‐fuga‐00290 Veney, Cassandra. 2007. Forced Migration in Eastern Africa: Democratiza‐ tion, Structural Adjustment, and Refugees. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. West‐Pavlov, Russell. 2015. “Reading African Complexities Today: Generic Folding in Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali.” Research in African Literatures 46 (1): 142–59. Wielenga, Cori, and Geoff Harris. 2011. “Building Peace and Security after Genocide: The Contribution of the Gacaca Courts of Rwanda.” Afri‐ can Security Review 20 (1): 15–25.



The Politics of Representation in Joe Sacco’s Palestine Ned Curthoys and Golnar Nabizadeh In his chapter on “Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Post‐ colonial Studies”, Patrick Williams (2015) observes that "to the extent that the situation in Palestine represents arguably the great ethical scandal of the last half century, then the near‐total silence of postcolonial studies on the subject is indeed shameful” (87).1 What distinguishes the multiple si‐ lences of postcolonial theorists on the Palestinian question, Williams ar‐ gues, is both inattention to the materiality of Palestinian suffering and a specific silence about Zionism itself as a colonial project, an ensemble of discourses that derives its chauvinistic, genocidal aggression towards the Indigenous people of Palestine, and its utopian ideals of collective regener‐ ation for a “land without a people for a people without a land” from the more perdurable elements of the western settler‐colonial imagination. Postcolonial studies draws Williams’s ire, moreover, when it timidly con‐ solidates an historiographical disregard for Palestinian perspectives. In ad‐ dition to Israel’s transformative colonial occupation of Palestinian lands which has worked towards the dismantling of the Palestinians as a self‐de‐ termining national culture, Israel and the west’s disregard for Palestinian cultural archives and collective memory is “doubly silencing” for the Pales‐ tinians, since “what remains as the possible basis for the construction of a historical narrative–the use of oral history, witness testimony and the like– may not count as acceptable evidence for 'proper’ historians” (91). Wil‐ liams argues, fruitfully, that a post‐structuralist and Holocaust‐centric model of trauma studies that privileges the fragmentation of the individual psyche, the insufficiency of representation, and the deferral of meaning, has worked to obscure the “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians as an ongoing, eminently narratable [. . .] colonially induced trauma in urgent need of post‐ colonial analysis” (101).

1

Williams is highly critical of the (non)‐recognition of the Palestinian people in postcolonial studies, and understandably so. He does, however, helpfully refer to significant projects that have placed this debate at their centre, such as spe‐ cial issues of the journals Interventions 14 (1) 2012 on Mahmood Darwish and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (2) 2014 on “Palestine and the Postcolo‐ nial: Culture, Creativity, Theory”, as well as Anna Bernard’s work (2013).

201

202 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH The active silencing of Palestinian perspectives and narratives about not only their own history but the specificity of their political antago‐ nist, places Palestinians in a double‐bind. Inevitably, strategies of resistance are necessary in order to remind the world that Palestinians under occupa‐ tion remain candidates for human‐rights oriented interventions by the in‐ ternational community. Yet attempts to discuss the modalities of Zionism as it shapes strategies of resistance seems doomed from the start. As Wil‐ liams points out, Zionist ideology, which desires to dispossess Palestinians of their ancestral lands and negate their claims for statehood, is blatant as a form of colonial praxis in its crude instrumentalism, yet protected by a western consensus which pretends such an ideology “is not there” (88). It might even be said that sanguine references to a ‘peace process’ predicated on a two‐state solution, tempered at times by liberal hand‐wringing over the challenges to Israel’s eventual normalisation in international affairs generated by the religious extremism of its settler fringe, is imbricated in the fantasy of Zionism itself. As Edward Said (1992) points out, Zionism has always sought to “cancel and transcend an actual reality”, an existing Pales‐ tinian Arab population, by references to the developmental aspirations of a more deserving people, an internationally recognized, normalized Jewish polity to come (9). Beholden to a teleology that will redeem its anti‐Semitic history, western political discourse is profoundly reluctant to infer political Zionism’s hostile intentions towards Palestinians from a manifold of ag‐ gressive and expropriative actions that exceed any defensive rationale. Another disenchanting historical irony is the disjuncture between postcolonial theory’s interest in the Said who has provided its theoretical imprimatur and Said the Palestinian political activist, political essayist, and courageous public‐intellectual. We will argue that Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine responds vigorously to some of the questions posed, in the spirit of Said’s powerful critiques of the US/Israeli symbiosis, by Williams, such as “how might we speak appropriately about Palestine in a postcolonial context? What is currently said? What could be said?” (Williams 2015, 91). How would such an enunciation seek to demonstrate, while jettisoning anti‐colonial pieties, that the Palestinians are indeed “interlocutors” in any future process towards peace and coexistence? While the corporate west‐ ern media has generally either ignored the daily cruelties of the Occupation or cast Palestinians as actual or potential terrorists who reject coexistence



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 203 with the state of Israel, Sacco’s work can be identified as a counter‐hege‐ monic project that seeks to address the marginalisation of Palestinian peo‐ ple. Sacco’s graphic journalism draws attention to their often abject exis‐ tential plight but also illustrates the determination of the Palestinians to reconstitute themselves as a politically mature polity, a people unified in their dispersion, who are ready to reclaim individual and political rights. Charting Joe Sacco’s experiences in the Occupied Territories be‐ tween 1991 and 1992, Sacco’s Palestine was originally serialized between 1992–95, before its publication as a collected edition in 2001. As its author has explained, his sustained attention to the plight of the Palestinian people was motivated by his two‐month stay within the Occupied Territories in 1991–92, and describes the events of the first intifada (1987–92) against Israeli occupation (Sacco 2002, vi). Palestine not only draws attention to the plight of the Palestinian people by illuminating individual Palestinian sto‐ ries in their unbearable sadness and Kafkaesque experience of arbitrary vi‐ olence, but it also reconstructs Palestinian communal existence through the material inscription of the images from Sacco’s pen in a form that invokes an intimate form of mediation. It is a highly textural work in the way that it knits together multiple accounts of harassment, beatings, torture, humilia‐ tion, and subjugation, each of them diverse in the specificity of the lived ex‐ periences they describe, while utilising graphic artistry to convey the bleak and claustrophobic settings that shape Palestinian experiences and strate‐ gies of resistance under Occupation. In John Berger’s (2006) affecting chronicle of his time in the Occupied Territories, “Undefeated Despair”, he describes “cramped spaces”, narrow alleyways, a now‐destroyed “room that was the size of two bathtubs”, before returning to a living room where life histories are shared (604). Like Sacco’s drawings, Berger’s evocative depictions of the ramshackle but defiantly hospitable living spaces of Occu‐ pation provide the reader with some feeling of the complexities of colo‐ nized spatiality, in which both resignation and improvised resistance to poverty and squalor articulates a stance of “undefeated despair” (605). Like Williams and Berger, Sacco is indebted to the work of Edward Said, who sought to ensure that the Palestinians as a community in the pro‐ cess of becoming prepare themselves adroitly and imaginatively for future political autonomy rather than succumbing to nationalist mythologies. In an interview about the Israel‐Palestine conflict and the time he spent in the



204 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH Occupied Territories, Sacco asks how the Palestinians can respond con‐ structively to an ongoing trauma that is barely acknowledged: “How can [Palestinians] think about their history? How can they actually think about what happened to them, and understand it, and digest it?” (Groth 2011, 392–93). Thus Palestine is multifunctional in its genre. It offers an exuber‐ ant, memorably attentive travelogue of Sacco’s journey to Palestine, and the several months he spends there, moving between locations such as the Gaza Strip, Ramallah and Hebron. Palestine also helps to constitute a missing Pal‐ estinian testimonial archive that offsets the Zionist and pro‐Zionist desire to deny Palestinians political rights by effacing the narratives of Palestinian existence and struggle that underline their claims for recognition as a self‐ determining people. It is a text that responds to the still appalling degree of international silence over Israeli crimes towards the Palestinians, a silence that belies some of the headier sociological theories that suggest that global Holocaust memory has ensured that “human rights have become a kind of universal currency in politics” (Levy and Sznaider 2010, 2). In the first part of this chapter we explore the comically emascu‐ lated avatar of Joe Sacco, who is on a quest to understand why Palestinian complaints about human rights violations do not arouse the west or the in‐ ternational community to sustained action. Sacco is mindful that Israel/Pal‐ estine is often interpreted as a seemingly aporetic conflict between differ‐ ent narratives of victimisation. Within this falsely symmetrical dyad, the Palestinian situation is only sporadically depicted as an urgent human rights question and more often misleadingly portrayed as a baffling reli‐ gious conflict between rejectionist parties requiring mediation by western experts. Sacco’s bespectacled avatar is the antithesis to the “objective” western observer who assumes s/he must report on both sides (with the Israeli position as normative) of an intractable conflict, and to the intrepid colonial explorer, as tourist and consumer of exotic otherness. Rather, the befuddled yet materially privileged avatar of Joe Sacco is a continual re‐ minder that the Palestinian narrative has been consistently elided by a his‐ tory of Orientalist ignorance, wilful Islamophobic denigration, and dis‐ placed from sustained attention by contemporary journalistic practices that refuse to testify to the relative powerlessness of the Palestinians in re‐ sponding to constant incursions into their lands. Sacco’s graphic novel also simultaneously denies Israel its usual talking points about terrorist threats and national security by remaining



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 205 attentive, in the minutest detail, to the Israeli Occupation’s quotidian effi‐ cacy as a matrix of control constituted by violent repression, arbitrary in‐ tervention, humiliation, and harassment, often targeted at Palestinian youth and children, a praxis of invasive surveillance whose real objective is to “make life for Palestinians difficult and deliberately unbearable” (Sacco 2002, iv). It is worthwhile recalling that while Zionism’s denial of Palestin‐ ian territorial and cultural rights found clear ideological expression in Golda Meir’s statement, “Palestine does not exist”, that ideology continues to be realized through material incursions on Palestinian lives and repres‐ sive challenges to popular self‐expression. In this chapter we explore the significance of the reader’s exposure to the spatial dynamics of Occupation in Sacco’s patiently cumulative graphic reportage. The reader’s exposure to the lifeworld of Palestinian refugees involves complex processes of identi‐ fication and alienation where for example, the perspective shifts from eye‐ level conversations in homes and on streets, to rooftop and crane‐shot per‐ spectives to convey the ways in which the ability of Palestinians to exercise physical autonomy and social movement is inhibited and regulated on a near daily basis. In the final section of this chapter, we conclude by arguing that Sacco is interested in intervening in these constitutive silences of Occupa‐ tion by reconstructing not only the density of Palestinian experience under Occupation but also by illustrating a sanguine observation by Said on the collective self‐fashioning of Palestinians in his now classic essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” (1979). There, Said praises the struggle of Palestinians for national maturity and political effectiveness through a process of communal self‐reflection (50). Joe Sacco’s Avatar Palestine complicates its status as travel narrative or investigative reporting by refashioning Sacco’s presence in Palestine as an ingenuous, self‐mocking, intellectually curious avatar. Early in Palestine, Sacco draws the reader into an embarrassing romantic episode from two years earlier as he talks earnestly with a character called Claudia, who is half Iraqi and has previously dated a Palestinian. Their interaction is characterized by Sacco’s emphatic critique of the American news media in creating sympa‐ thy for Israelis and dehumanizing Palestinians as savage terrorists. Sacco’s avatar uses the example of Leon Klinghoffer, who was murdered by the PLO



206 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH after being abducted from a holiday cruise. Despite Sacco’s best intentions, Claudia remains unimpressed by his ideas (“hot air” [Sacco 2002, 6] as the recitative notes), and their evening ends with “A peck on the cheek and—I went home alone” (7). In his anger, Sacco sheds his liberal façade and an‐ grily denounces Claudia as a “terrorist groupie”. The recitative then acknowledges the history of distorted and generalized representation of Palestinians as terrorists, Sacco complaining that “terrorism is the bread Palestinians get buttered on” (7). Sacco himself is not immune to this dis‐ tortion (and by extension, neither is the reader), and this early episode shows the way in which Sacco’s critique of representations of Palestinians is diffusely figured in his persona, part naïve and ignorant American, part “dark tourism” voyeur, and part progressive liberal for whom Palestinians are a fetishized Other. Visually, Sacco represents himself as a “blinded” vis‐ itor, wearing glasses that are opaque. This iconic appearance of myopia and opacity, of a prophetic combination of blindness and insight, allows Sacco to jest at his own ignorance while drawing attention to its regenerative im‐ plications given the parti pris positions on this particular conflict. Sacco burlesques his own behaviour in Palestine, exaggerating his inconsistencies and fears to offer a parody of journalistic objectivity. He uti‐ lises the exaggerated visuality of the comics medium to illuminate his posi‐ tion as at least partially complicit with the normative expectations of a western traveller in the Middle East. As Rose Brister (2014) notes, Sacco imagines himself as an intrepid explorer, “I am Lawrence of Arabia . . . Tim Page . . . Dan Rather and his Afghanistan stubble . . . the first white man into Jenin . . . ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume!’” (27). Sacco ironizes the role of the intrepid explorer by way of an ironic Bildungsroman in which the metro‐ politan reporter becomes aware of his ignorance and parochialism. His av‐ atar is subjected to a painful process of “unlearning” (Brister 2014, 123) and self‐interrogation that satirizes his journalistic pretensions and offers, in Rose Brister’s words, a “metacommentary” (110), on the conflicting frameworks of interpretation that bedevil any attempt to offer meaningful solutions to the current geopolitical gridlock. Sacco must unlearn his Amer‐ ican bias against the Palestinians by reading Edward Said’s criticism of the US and its unjust use of imperial power, mock his journalistic desire for the spectacle of suffering, and cast doubt on his touristic interest in banking authentic experiences of Indigenous people, as Palestinians prove more po‐ litically aware, indeed better global citizens, than he could have imagined.



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 207 Soon Sacco’s avatar will continually question whether erstwhile reporting of Israel/Palestine beholden to official discourses only obscures the merci‐ less reality of the Occupation as transformative settler‐colonialism. While not idealizing gender relationships amongst an impoverished and occupied people, Sacco will analyse his assumptions about the monolithic oppression of women in Islamic countries. Frequently disarmed by his encounters with Palestinians, his avatar’s mission to access representative Palestinian sto‐ ries is frequently complicated by awkward social interactions and harrow‐ ing narratives of gratuitous violence that offer no form of redress, often re‐ ducing the narrator to silence or incoherence. The reader is aware that Sacco holds himself up for critique from early on in the narrative. For example, chapter two is entitled “Blind Dates”, and commences with Sacco greeting a man in Nablus with Salaam Aleekum to which the man is obliged to reply Aleekum es‐salaam. The speech bubbles holding this call and reply are intercepted by Sacco’s thoughts, distin‐ guished through the use of rectangular frames. After their initial exchange, Sacco thinks, “Now I’ve got him!” (2002, 4), signalling his journalistic entry into conversation with a potential native informant. By highlighting his gauche enthusiasm, awkwardness and embarrassment in cross‐cultural en‐ counters and sometimes his visceral fear and hyper‐vigilance throughout the text, Sacco illuminates the complex emotions that attend his journey from Cairo, to Jerusalem and Jenin. Far from presenting himself as an im‐ partial, dispassionate, and self‐assured observer who gradually approaches the truth of the matter, Sacco takes pains to draw himself as all too human, frequently quaking in public spaces, where his anxious vigilance takes hold. In another episode, Sacco and his translator, Sameh, carry bootleg videos of Israeli violence on their way home from visiting Sameh’s friend. They undertake their journey by foot as they are breaking the 8 p.m. curfew. Sameh passes the video to Sacco, explaining that Sacco would be in less trouble if they encounter soldiers. As Sacco hunches with fear, he thinks “I’ll tell you what happens if soldiers find us! the video gets the toss! the nearest puddle! . . . one could be mistaken for a Palestinian here” (Sacco 2002, 212). Referring to this episode, Wendy Kozol (2012) makes the observation that: “mocking this 'inadequate’ masculine response to fear [. . .] self‐referen‐ tially critiques the gender, racial and national privileges typically accorded the western war correspondent” (169). By depicting his vulnerability and reluctance to risk exposure, Sacco implicitly requires the reader to view his



208 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH Palestinian counterparts through a more complicated lens that acknowl‐ edges the quotidian and non‐violent dimensions of Palestinian struggle or intifada; to understand that simply living and reconstituting themselves day after day as a community is a feat in itself for the Palestinians. In Palestine, Sacco interposes himself as a detective figure and cul‐ tural intermediary to explore many Israelis’ tragically ironic disregard for a refugee population. Sacco’s fearful avatar is by no means a condescending critic of the desire of Israelis to lead secure lives in a well‐defended nation state. As he records his conversations with many Palestinians, the comics format allows him to intersperse those conversations with his unspoken thoughts (indicated through stand‐alone rectangular text boxes) that be‐ speak relief at arriving back in a prosperous westernized country, as well as his continuing ambivalence about the meaning of his presence in the Oc‐ cupied Territories. Nevertheless Sacco’s slow meanderings through occu‐ pied Palestine have changed his perspectives on the conflict. Towards the end of Palestine, Sacco explains to two Israeli women that he’s “heard noth‐ ing but the Israeli side most all [his] life” (Sacco 2002, 256). Sacco’s meet‐ ings with Israeli characters are confronting in terms of the attitudes articu‐ lated. His avatar stumbles into an Israeli “bubble” of insulated public opin‐ ion in which secular Israelis are not entirely unsympathetic to Palestinian suffering but, in their deep, historically understandable desire for the secu‐ rity promised by ethno‐political sovereignty, cannot imaginatively engage with the ongoing and insufferable reality of the Occupation or the relation‐ ship between that Occupation and the colonial origins of Israel. As Sacco visits Tel Aviv, delighted to be out of the territories, he relaxes in the sun‐ shine chatting with two Israeli women, Naomi and Paula. Soon, their con‐ versation turns to the Palestinian “question” and as Sacco queries the women’s assumptions, the conversation conveys the hardening of their in‐ itial sympathies for Palestinians in the abstract into resistance towards a more meaningful understanding of their circumstances. Frustrated, Naomi states, “I’m not saying there’s not a moral problem with the Occupation . . . but what about Palestinians who kill Palestinians they accuse of collaborat‐ ing with Israel?" When Sacco pushes the question of whether Palestinians have the right to take military action against the Occupation forces, she snaps “We just want to live our lives, okay? We have our lives! . . . we don’t think about this stuff all the time, and we get a bit tired of hearing about it!” (264; emphasis in original). Naomi’s insistence on wanting to live “our



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 209 lives” highlights the emotional resistance to the Palestinian narrative that prevents the conversation from engaging more deeply with the problems that equally prevent Palestinians from living “their” lives. It is not only in encountering relatively progressive Israelis that Sacco’s character meets intractable problems. The Palestinians he encoun‐ ters are not simply meek victims, who will accept any “help” that is offered. Sacco draws his avatar standing in front of an elderly woman who demands to know how he will help her, explaining that she has already told her story to visiting journalists. The woman’s well‐rehearsed account of her suffering has not, it seems, changed her circumstances—Sacco learns, as we do, that she has told her story before, in an Israeli television interview, and confronts the question of whether the iteration of suffering, particularly when incon‐ venient to interested parties, generates meaningful political outcomes. One of her sons explains, “she wants to know how talking to you is going to help her. We don’t want money, she says, we want our land, our humanity”. The reader is then placed in Sacco’s position, as the family turns to break the fourth wall and asks, “Aren’t we people, too?” (Sacco 2002, 242).

Figure 1, “Aren’t we people, too?” from Palestine by Joe Sacco. © Joe Sacco, 2001, by permission of Fantagraphics Books, Inc and The Random House Group Ltd.



210 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH Sacco replies, somewhat ineffectually, that he knows America’s policies are unjust, and that he knows people in other countries, like Ger‐ many, support the Palestinian cause. The woman challenges his words, and explains that “she wants to see action”, to which Sacco responds, “Well . . . tell her I don’t know what to say” (Sacco 2002, 243). As words have failed, the woman calls out for her eldest son and points out scars on his head where Israeli soldiers beat him, looking out to the reader as she holds his head. The narrative then cuts to an elevated long‐shot depicting Sacco walk‐ ing to the car that will transport him to his next destination. Accompanying this image are Sacco’s abrupt, and garbled, thoughts, “scars? I’ve seen scars! and scabs! what’s next? The Egyptian frontier? The home whose family’s been demolished?” (243). Sacco confuses subject and object in the final statement, swapping “home” with “family”, perhaps a surrealistic indica‐ tion of his inability to make sense of such relentless collective punishment. Indeed, the family from whom Sacco is taking leave have been “demolished” through their ongoing suffering, Sacco’s focalization of an impasse in sym‐ pathetic attention, which no would‐be cultural intermediary can ade‐ quately account for, asks the reader to contemplate the woman’s question, and underscores the impotence of empathetic gestures alone. Repeatedly, Sacco’s avatar must “unlearn” his training in journal‐ ism as an “objective” field of inquiry. His foray into Palestine also requires him to shift his journalistic agenda from a sensational‐spectacular orienta‐ tion (a news “scoop” or a shocking photograph) to a more considered one. This relearning is frequently outside Sacco’s control—and the narrative privileges the non‐linearity of his avatar’s movements, shuttling back and forth between different locations, waiting for opportunities for communi‐ cation to arise. Sacco’s flâneurie, his slow, melancholic ambulations around the back streets of Palestinian urban centres awaiting chance encounters is in stark contrast to the many travel narratives to the Holy Land more inter‐ ested in its Judeo‐Christian heritage rather than contemporary political in‐ equalities. The story is concerned with slow time, that is, an unfolding of events according to a logic that frequently defies Sacco’s journalistic agenda. As Said (2002) describes in his Homage to Joe Sacco, “the unhurried pace and the absence of a goal in his wanderings emphasizes that he is nei‐ ther a journalist in search of a story nor an expert trying to nail down the facts in order to produce a policy”, a technique that “unostentatiously trans‐ mits a great deal of information” (iv).



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 211 Palestine also registers Sacco’s interest in Said as an activist public‐ intellectual speaking truth to power rather than a “postcolonial theorist”. Significantly, Palestine portrays its bespectacled author reading Said at var‐ ious moments in the text that forms part of the oscillation of Sacco’s role as a spectator and critical interpreter in Palestine. That the Maltese‐born and partly Australian‐raised Sacco, a sort of non‐American American, draws on Said makes sense when we consider Said’s exilic and diasporic sensibility, his affinities with Palestinians who are often critical of, or marginalized by, militant nationalism. As a vocal critic of the disavowal of Palestinian iden‐ tity, Said wrote extensively about the imposition of Zionism as an ideology that seeks to elide Palestine, and its memory, from social consciousness. Sacco’s graphic novel is perhaps the most faithful record yet of Said’s ob‐ servations on efforts to raise Palestinian consciousness to intelligently re‐ sist this erasure without regressing into militant nationalism. Such efforts have taken the form of “a collective national and detailed understanding, a detailed chronicling, a detailed coming to terms with—a seeing of—the day‐to‐day effectiveness of Zionism and Israel in oppressing the native pop‐ ulation of Palestine” (Said 1979, 51). Even amongst a pariah people Sacco’s avatar is attracted to relative outsiders. The mosaic of Palestinians Sacco interviews is engaged in cul‐ tural resistance, demonstrating hospitality and creative resilience despite enormous odds, a people determined to educate themselves as they await the slow arc of justice to turn towards them. Through his conversations, Sacco, like the Palestinians he interviews, receives an informal, improvised education to support his growing awareness of the tensions that constellate Palestinian life. These insights inform Sacco of the inequities, trauma, and injustices that shape Palestinian lives, but also the promising development of associative life that attempts to address the needs of children, the disa‐ bled, and women subject to domestic violence. For example, Sacco is be‐ friended by Sameh, a young man living in the Jabaliah refugee camp. Sameh is highly active, volunteering as a social worker at the camp’s rehabilitation centre that he helped establish. The centre organizes education for children with special needs, and works with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to promote children’s education, with plans to start a vo‐ cational program (Sacco 2002, 206). Despite being nominated by the UNRWA to undertake a relevant course at Bethlehem University, Sameh is



212 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH denied permission by the Israeli government to complete the course be‐ cause the program is not affiliated with the UNRWA. As Sacco notes, how‐ ever, this does not prevent Sameh from developing other plans for his fu‐ ture, such as studying for his Master’s degree in Europe. Despite tangible and ongoing problems—such as a lack of financial resources or external support—Sameh’s work is one example of idealism and hopeful resilience under Occupation. Sameh’s struggle to educate himself and assist his com‐ munity suggests that the emancipation of the Palestinians will not open the floodgates to anti‐Semitic hordes, the secret fear of many Israeli Jews and Israel’s supporters in the west, but rather allow the fulfilment of a range of individual destinies. Sameh’s story is a reminder of the contribution of ref‐ ugees and stateless peoples to the intellectual and political life of western countries since World War II. The Occupation To capture the Occupation without simplifying its effects into a di‐ gestible slogan, Sacco’s style works hard against easy reading as a potential prelude to forgetting. Sacco has commented on the way that he utilises cap‐ tion length to “slow a reader down” when required, or provide the narrative with a sense of movement or excitement (quoted in Groth 2011, 406). The narrative takes time to read, its visual and verbal messages simultaneously intense and jarring, and the performativity of the narrative is in this way central to its meaning. Words stare out at the reader, angled obtrusively against the horizontal placement of the panels. Sacco also renders the faces of the individuals he meets, Palestinians and Israelis alike, in ways that re‐ sist the “smoothing” over—of their respective stories. In particular, their mouths and teeth—the vehicles of expression—are emphasised, as they loom large within the frame of view; these are characters who are highly individualized, and their verbal and gestural communication is designed, through Sacco’s pen, to remain at the forefront of the page. For example, in an early sequence, Sacco visits a hospital in Nablus, where he clearly indi‐ cates his journalistic agenda (“I’m warming up to my photo op! I’m prowl‐ ing around! Looking for angles!” [Sacco 2002, 32]). As he encounters a man in “Bed Number Three”, he asks the patient’s mother if he can take a photo‐ graph, to which the man responds “La!” (“No!”). While Sacco records the man’s words (and draws him), the impact of this scene is rendered through the latter’s grimaces of pain, his face laced with sweat (32).



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 213



Figure 2, ‘Bed Number Three’ from Palestine by Joe Sacco. © Joe Sacco, 2001, by permission of Fantagraphics Books, Inc and The Random House Group Ltd.

While drawn from different angles, the man’s expression does not relax from its anguished grimace, and here the reader observes the com‐ munication of pain that emanates from the man’s mouth, as it is held in its tortured position. Details such as these pervade the entire work to differ‐ entiate each of the people Sacco meets. As the author explains, he realised that he had to draw “distinctions” because “you don’t want everyone to be looking the same and having the same sort of bodily expressions” (quoted in Groth 2011, 402). Sacco refuses to reduce the representation of Palestin‐ ians (and Israelis for that matter), to an iconic image. While comics theory



214 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH often assumes that readers may project themselves onto a visually simpli‐ fied protagonist (such as in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis [2007]), part of Sacco’s project seems to resist this kind of identification. That is, while Sa‐ trapi depicts her avatar’s features as a stylised series of dots and circum‐ flexes—a cartoon—whose abstract simplicity encourages the reader to identify with the character, Sacco’s characters are drawn in a more photo‐ realistic style, which retains the specificity of each character so that the reader cannot project him or herself onto the text as readily. Moreover, as an increasingly self‐effacing journalist‐observer, Sacco’s presence in the story, compared to say Satrapi’s avatar, is backgrounded through the depic‐ tion of his opaque spectacles that act as a screen on to which the action is projected without omniscient commentary or a reassuring alignment of spectator and reporter. The reader’s consistent exposure to individual stories with similar refrains augments a broader collective or choral voice about the ordeals of life under Occupation, but Sacco is careful to avoid making pronounce‐ ments on behalf of the Palestinian people. His reporter avatar dwells in the question. He is not shown as mastering his subject matter by drawing on a single “native informant” or by writing up his experiences as an egocentric account of his heroic travels with peremptory conclusions. As Wendy Kozol notes, Sacco “conveys the scale of Palestinian struggles and resistance through interviews that almost always take place in collective settings, usu‐ ally around a tea or coffee circle” (2012, 171). These exchanges take place in intimate and informal spaces, mostly in homes in which the willingness to accommodate and entertain is contrasted with the ravages of an Occupa‐ tion that seeks to impoverish and brutalize. It is paramount for Sacco that differentiation is retained in the portrayal of the Palestinian people such that they retain their thorniness in the reader’s memory. We suggest that the intimacy with which Sacco depicts his exchanges with the Palestinians he meets, in which he presents their vulnerabilities as well as his own, sup‐ ports the documentation of poignant intersubjective encounters that resist ethnographic commentary or typological judgments. In these ways, Sacco’s project evinces the “detailed chronicling” that Said describes, and this is particularly visible in his conversations with the Palestinians he meets. Taken together, these exchanges present a col‐ lective story of cultural renewal and social organisation within Palestinian



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 215 territories, along with a sense of the hope as well as despair that its inhab‐ itants face. In an interview about the ongoing conflict in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sacco states that “there’s a sense, I think, of even constipation, where they [the Palestinian people] just cannot digest this stuff” (quoted in Groth 2011, 392–93). In response, the visual lexicon that Sacco creates of‐ fers something new and recalcitrant to the reader, a lexicon that must be carefully digested. This is what Said describes as Palestine’s “power to de‐ tain us, to keep us from impatiently wandering off in order to follow [. . .] a lamentably predictable narrative of triumph and fulfilment” (2002, v). The narrative’s power to detain is supported by Sacco’s attention to detail, which implicitly challenges the ideological notion of Palestine as a kind of terra nullius, ready for occupation. For example, a chapter bearing the cas‐ ual title, “Refugeeland”, opens with splash pages that capture activity in every corner of the double‐page spread (Sacco 2002, 146–47).

Figure 3, “Refugeeland”: from Palestine by Joe Sacco. © Joe Sacco, 2001, by permission of Fantagraphics Books, Inc and The Random House Group Ltd.





216 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH Here, a variety of actors inhabit the space of the page, such as moth‐ ers walking with their children, men packing supplies, children playing, and sheep rummaging through a waste bin. The pages are consistently detailed, including the extremities of the page. Very few of the figures are static, so that a striking impression of mobility counteracts a possibly objectifying scene of Indigenous indigence. The physical details that accompany the movements therein contribute to the impression that the reader is being exposed to a snapshot of a larger, more complex, scene. For example, a cor‐ rugated roof holds bricks and stones on its surface, and it seems that these objects are helping hold the roof in place. This portrayal of camp life speaks to the enduring capabilities of human beings to improvise and adapt in sol‐ idarity with their surroundings. The splash page speaks ambivalently, as Berger argues, of “undefeated despair”, of a shantytown of underemploy‐ ment with its muted acceptance of a world defined by its stasis unreality; but we are also in the midst of an “endless body” of people, things, attach‐ ments, to move out of which would constitute “an amputation”, an abroga‐ tion of responsibility to intergenerational survival (2006, 605). It is pre‐ cisely the lack of a predictable relationship between cause and effect that affords Palestine its difficulty, and its promise. Yet the story of a transform‐ ative occupation is unrelenting. Stories dovetail into one another; for exam‐ ple, a mother recalls how Israeli soldiers “cut down 70 olive trees, the trees of 13 families” (Sacco 2002, 60). In response to Sacco’s question about where her sons were when this happened, she explains that she kept her youngest son in the house to keep him from view because the soldiers had beat him a month earlier (61). Both of these episodes—the beating, and the tree cutting—are set in relief, carved out through the use of solid frames against the unframed backdrop of the family’s living room. The reader thereby engages with each respective episode through its detailed por‐ trayal while literally keeping an eye on the present as the woman tells the story. The simultaneity of past and present requires the reader to negotiate between the two and actively participate in the construction of the text’s meaning. The reader must decelerate his or her reading to effectively ab‐ sorb the multiple layers of meaning and the slow time of the text itself. While Sacco’s journalistic agenda remains intact, he is not always in control of where he goes or how he travels—which provides moments of grim humour in his recollections. Sacco’s portrayal of life under Occupation mobilizes a human rights narrative in favour of a relentlessly dehumanized



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 217 people, depicting torture, constant military incursions even into hospitals, mass imprisonment and humiliation of children and young people. These concerns are supported by the exigencies of portraying the spatial dimen‐ sions of the Occupation through detailed depiction of real individuals who are constantly subject to physical and psychological incursions by Israeli forces. Thus Palestine suggests that Palestinian stone‐throwing and street demonstrations are an artefact of their suffocation by Israeli forces and the aggressive settlers they support, that the Palestinians have no “place”, no secure location in the world from which to assert their identity. Palestinians and Self-Education In response to this apparent impasse, Sacco depicts the ways in which Palestinians have become highly organized, particularly through ed‐ ucation. In one episode, Sacco visits a family in the Gaza Strip, where Pales‐ tinians cannot leave their homes from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. The father, Ibrahim, leafs through Sacco’s guidebook, which contains an illustration of an Arab and a donkey. He becomes upset at this depiction, and issues an imperative to Sacco, “you will tell them what you see here! In my family . . . we have students! a professor! a teacher of computers! Arabs have technology! and we Palestinians love education” (Sacco 2002, 167; emphasis in original). Sacco replicates Ibrahim’s words, telling the reader what he has seen. Now the reader is also exposed to Ibrahim’s beseeching words, and thus the nar‐ rative moves through the past into the reader’s present. The Palestinians Sacco meets repeatedly affirm the importance of knowledge acquisition, their interest in international perspectives, and organisational capabilities. In another episode, Sacco’s avatar visits Ansar III, a prison opened in March 1988 to hold political prisoners from the first intifada. One of the prisoners explains the deprivations they face, requiring the organisation of the prisoners into committees to arrange the distribution of food; he details well‐attended educational lectures by the prisoners, many of whom include doctors, teachers, lawyers, and journalists (Sacco 2002, 86). Sacco does not seek to glorify the many Palestinian political prisoners, but rather to pre‐ sent a view of Palestinians that conveys adaptability to circumstance, the continual reproduction of the social body under constrained circum‐ stances. These depictions are, as we have indicated, an attempt to overcome the impression that the Palestinian people are fanatical, instinctively vio‐



218 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH lent, and reject peace. Said identified the invisibility to the western intelli‐ gentsia of another Palestinian narrative, that of an increasing collective pre‐ paredness for statehood, when he complained that “real peace seems so far‐ fetched and remote a possibility [. . .] worst of all, Western metropolitan in‐ tellectuals see the situation as so entirely confused as to be left to the ‘ex‐ pert’ crisis‐managers” (Said 1979, 54). By contrast, Sacco renders the con‐ flict as an attempt by a subject people to understand and overcome an un‐ endurable situation. In “Undefeated Despair” Berger records his discus‐ sions with some of the 8,000 or so Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, 350 of them under 18 years old, in which “prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of university . . . you learn how to learn there” (2006, 607). Ber‐ ger reminds us of Sacco’s visit to Ansar III, and confirms the extraordinary political capabilities of colonized peoples, a prominent theme in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that was powerfully dramatized as a rousing testimony to the self‐awakening of Arab Algerians in Gillo Pon‐ tecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966). Conclusion In his Foreword to Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, Joseph Slaughter (2012) draws attention to the function of liter‐ ary models of communication in mobilising support for Amnesty cam‐ paigns, such as “the personal story”, or letter‐writing campaigns. He notes that “the techniques entailed in defending freedom of expression are of the same kind as the modes of expression for which the political prisoner is being punished” (xvii). He goes on to assert that literature draws performa‐ tive attention to the enduring power of the literary universe and its condi‐ tions of possibility more generally, arguing that literary form can demon‐ strate the survival of freedom of expression, and empathy for individual suffering denied by political rhetoric. In this way, the performativity of hu‐ man rights within literature seems to instantiate the kind of communica‐ tion that can be occluded in other realms of representation. Similar to Slaughter’s attempt to uncover narrative modalities that provoke more than “simply” empathetic identification, we suggest that Sacco’s embedded storytelling within Palestinian towns and refugee camps exemplifies the kind of meaningful communication that can occur when estranged interloc‐ utors are willing to listen to one another in productive ways. Sacco high‐



THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN JOE SACCO’S PALESTINE 219 lights the civil courage required to address the Israeli Occupation by depict‐ ing how it can constantly shade into its opposite; Palestine portrays Sacco’s sporadic cowardliness and attraction to Israeli privilege, a strategy that re‐ minds the reader of an immense failure of will in regards to the Palestinian situation. Concurrently, however, his practice of spending time with Pales‐ tinians, dwelling on their everyday suffering and resilience, and drawing rather than moralizing their lives, also suggests that the claim for human rights still requires individual and creative contributions by those who cut through defensive cant and protest a situation that is too affronting to civi‐ lizational norms to be allowed to continue. In Palestine, Sacco has produced a polyphonic narrative that under‐ mines his presumed authority as a western observer, and instead captures the voices of the Palestinians he meets, which jostle alongside his own ques‐ tions, doubts and fears. The allowance for uncertainty within the text en‐ courages unexpected narratives to emerge, through which Sacco tests his own assumptions and ideas. Sacco thus operates as a storyteller embedded in the political realities that shape the shrinking spaces available to the Pal‐ estinians. As a worldly response to the political conflict between Palestine and Israel, his endeavour implicitly responds to Said’s contention that the “study of history” is crucial to critical consciousness so that “intellectual work more closely approaches political worldliness, when the study of cul‐ ture is activated by values, ideals, and political commitment” (1979, 56). Indeed the particular, though by no means exclusive, benefit of Sacco’s presence in Palestine is the way that he is able to mediate his experiences there by re‐presenting a visual topography of the public and private spaces of Palestine, their mutual implications, and the hope that persists within those spaces.

Bibliography Bernard, Anna. 2013. Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Is‐ rael/Palestine. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Berger, John. 2003. “A Moment in Ramallah.” London Review of Books 25 (14): 20–22. ‐‐‐. 2006. “Undefeated Despair.” Critical Inquiry 32 (4): 602–09. Brister, Rose. 2014. “Sounding the Occupation: Joe Sacco’s Palestine and the Uses of Graphic Narrative for (Post) Colonial Critique.” ARIEL: A Re‐ view of International English Literature 45 (1/2): 103–29.



220 NED CURTHOYS AND GOLNAR NABIZADEH Groth, Gary. 2011. “Interview with Joe Sacco on Footnotes in Gaza.” The Comics Journal 301: 381–426. Khalifa, Omar. 2008. “Joe Sacco on Palestine.” Aljazeera, July 19. Accessed April 7, 2016.http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2007 /11/2008525185042679346.html. Kozol, Wendy. 2012 “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” In Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, edited by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, 65– 79. New York: Routledge. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2010. Human Rights and Memory. Univer‐ sity Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. “Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2): 365–70. Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. 1966. The Battle of Algiers. 121 mins. Italy: Igor Film. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. 2002. London: Jonathan Cape. Said, Edward. 1979. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” Social Text 1: 7–58. ‐‐‐. 1992. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage. ‐‐‐. 2002. “Homage to Joe Sacco.” In Palestine, by Joe Sacco, i‐v. London: Jon‐ athan Cape. Satrapi, Marjane. 2007. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books. Slaughter, Joseph. 2009. “Humanitarian Reading.” In Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, edited by Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, 88–107. New York: Cambridge Uni‐ versity Press. ‐‐‐. 2012. “Foreword: Rights on Paper.” In Theoretical Perspectives on Hu‐ man Rights and Literature, edited by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, xi‐xiv. New York: Routledge. Williams, Patrick. 2015. “Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Post‐ colonial Studies.” In What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, edited by Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray, 87–104. Lon‐ don: Routledge.



“Pictures on the Wall, Music in the Air”: Popular Culture Forms, Human Rights Agitation and Fiction in Africa Gareth Griffiths 1 This chapter highlights the increasing role played by popular cul‐ ture forms in advocating and defending human rights. Popular representa‐ tional forms have become a vital part of the narration of human rights em‐ bracing popular music, street graffiti, impromptu street theatre and the costumes, masks and banners employed in street demonstrations. Alt‐ hough not exclusive to Africa the widespread use by post‐independence re‐ gimes throughout that continent of repressive censorship of public media and the banning of open political opposition has made such popular repre‐ sentational modes an increasingly important part of resistance to human rights abuse in many African countries. But although in this chapter the fo‐ cus will be on Africa the discussion of how this use of popular forms of re‐ sistance has developed there also serves to illustrate similar movements that have occurred across many post‐colonial spaces. Whilst formal artistic expressionsuch as literary texts, gallery art and mainstream performance have all played a vital role in developing human rights consciousness, even these have increasingly referenced popular forms as the analysis of recent African novels later will show.1 Of course, for a long time literary narratives have been disseminated beyond the readership for fiction through film and television adaptations that place their messages before a wider audience than printed fiction usually achieves. The interrelationship of written fic‐ tion and film/television is now inextricable and the flow between one and the other in both directions ensures that the traditional gap between the verbal and visual representation is progressively disappearing. This is not only true of hybrid forms such as the increasingly important graphic novel

1

Of course once created these forms can also be rapidly disseminated beyond their points of origin through social media outlets, an increasingly vital space for human rights expression, as discussed later.

221

222 GARETH GRIFFITHS discussed elsewhere in this collection, but of all contemporary long narra‐ tives in every genre.2 In addition to the influence of visual elements on fic‐ tion, what we might call the “soundscape” of contemporary fiction has be‐ come profoundly influenced by contemporary popular music forms. Just as film depends for so much of its effect on a literal soundtrack accompanying, augmenting and commenting on the visual elements, much contemporary fiction deliberately evokes in the mind of its readers a “soundtrack” that acts in the same way to supplement and enhance its verbal messages. Be‐ fore considering how these shifts are reflected in recent African fiction let us consider some examples of how popular forms such as street graffiti and popular music have been employed in Africa for progressive and resistant ends. It would be impossible to deny that music has been one of, if not the most, important form of resistance in recent decades in many regions of Africa and indeed in the world at large. In fact it is arguable that this has been the case throughout the long history of African exploitation from the commencement of large‐scale chattel enslavement from the 18th century onwards both in the resulting African diaspora and in Africa itself. An obvi‐ ous example is the spirituals of the slave plantations and their appropria‐ tion of Christian imagery to resistant ends, a practice extended into the op‐ position to colonial regimes in Africa that often used hymns as an outlet for the expression of dissidence. One example may serve for many. In Natal Zulu congregations in the 1990s sang the popular hymn “Thule Sizwe”. Its opening verse reflects its dual purpose: Thula Sizwe, ungabokala, uJehovah wakoh uzokunqobela Inkululeko sizoyithola uJehovah wakoh uzokunqobela (Hush Nation, do not cry, our God will conquer for us. Freedom we will get it, our God will conquer for us.)3 Hymns like this allowed the congregation to assert its cry for com‐ passion and its demand for freedom through a form that was shielded from

2 3



See the chapter by Ned Curthoys and Golbar Nabizadeh, "The politics of repre‐ sentation in Joe Sacco's "Palestine". http://www.topchristianlyrics.com/2009/12/04/thula‐sizwe‐be‐still‐nation‐ lyrics/. This and all the downloads cited in this article were accessed on June 9, 2016.

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 223 censorship by its compliance with Christian forms of worship and church mu‐ sic genres. The fact that hymns sung in black congregations in the local lan‐ guage could evade suppression reinforces the fact that it was the popular and seemingly transient nature of such musical expression that allowed this to occur. When similar sentiments are couched in written forms government scrutiny is easier and suppression stronger. A written form by its very fixity and “permanence” may seem to offer a greater threat and be more likely to attract direct censorship. Ironically, as the persistence of hymns such as Thula Sizwe into the modern anti‐apartheid period and beyond shows, this assessment of the subversive potential and likely persistence of such formal and popular forms was completely wrong. Popular forms are far likelier to outlast and resist suppression than more formal genres. The way this song has continued to be sung and developed by artists such as Miriam Makeba illustrates this.4 The reference to such forms persisting as resistant acts “beyond” the colonial period (or in the case of South Africa and Zimbabwe beyond overt white suppression under the apartheid system or the post‐UDI re‐ gime) draws attention to the fact that independence from oppressive exter‐ nal rule did not mean freedom from its continuing influence. As recent dis‐ cussions have emphasized this refers not only to the persistence of control in post‐independence Africa by colonial powers and their successors in world power politics such as the United States, Russia and more recently China, a persistence defined earlier by Kwame Nkrumah as neo‐colonial‐ ism. But beyond this, as recent decolonization theory has argued, is the fact that the regimes of many post‐independence nations have devolved onto an elite autocracy which remains inextricably bound up in a world‐view that depends on values founded on ideas of racial and cultural exclusion. Theorists of decolonization argue that the values of neo‐liberal in‐ stitutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank depend on the construction of an excluded Other for which Africa has provided a prime example (Ndlovu‐Gatsheni 2013, 107–14). Thus the op‐ position to colonial power now faces a double enemy: the enemy without which is the neo‐colonial power exercised through these post‐war “[neo] liberal” institutions, and the ruling elites within the postcolonial nations whose assertion of their juridical sovereignty (that is the claim that the state is independent of other states and exercises full authority within its borders) does not, as international institutions such as the United Nations

4



See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSBvvlg‐cVM

224 GARETH GRIFFITHS claimed in the post‐war period, include the existence in the postcolonies of empirical or popular sovereignty. In fact some recent proponents of decol‐ onization theory go further and argue that “in practice juridical sovereignty as a central governing rationality is utilized by the center to prevent the realization of empirical sovereignty in the center” (Jakwa 2016, 75). The result is that in the postcolony elite regimes claim juridical authority whilst actually serving the interests of external ruling forces, themselves the agents of modern globalized capital. Further decolonialist theory argues, the authority of the ruling elites of the postcolony and those of their exter‐ nal “rulers” depends on the acceptance of a post‐enlightenment concept of liberal modernity that endorses the idea of mind as the expression of “uni‐ versal” reason. Of course in practice such reason is then defined as the sole possession of white Europeans who alone possess the capacity and so the right to legislate for the others, the non‐whites who become “the passive recipients of these decisions” (Jakwa 2016, 81).5 One does not have to concur fully with all the premises of decolo‐ nization theory to agree that the practice of elite regimes in the postcolony often makes them not only complicit with but also the primary agents of repressive external and internal forces acting to deny popular sovereignty and true liberation in their states. Thus forms such as popular music that were instrumental in opposing colonial regimes are now primarily address‐ ing the problems caused by internal oppressive regimes in many African countries. As well as music, as we shall see, cartoons and graffiti have also been used to evade repressive censorship and speak directly to a broad spectrum of the population. However, how they do this and whether they have successfully created an effective counter‐discursive formation re‐ mains in dispute. Thus Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian critic now resi‐ dent in South Africa, is cautious in his assessment of the degree to which these forms succeed in evading the control of the elite. In his major study of authority in the postcolonial state On the Postcolony Mbembe (2001) pro‐ vides a detailed analysis of the use of cartoons lampooning the leadership of post‐independence Cameroon and of similar forms of popular resistance elsewhere. Mbembe suggests that since in the postcolony “the forms of

5



Jakwa’s paper which deals with the issue of the Fast Track Land Reform move‐ ment in Zimbabwe presents these issues in a clear way and so I quote it here. For further discussion of the theory and practice of decolonization theory es‐ pecially as it pertains to Africa see Ndlovu‐Gatsheni (2013).

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 225 overt protest, such as marches, strikes, sit‐ins, petitions, tracts, and riots, have simply increased repression and intensified authoritarianism [. . .] everyone has suddenly gone ‘underground’” (2001, 146–47). Amongst the various reactions one of the most common is what he calls the embrace of “the reverse side”. Protest takes the form of silent evasion, taxi‐drivers driv‐ ing without licenses, people faking water or electricity meters, or falsifying taxes. But in this list he includes more overt acts such as “civil servants working with one hand and striking with the other. Banned meetings [. . .] held at night or in secret” (147). Despite their resistant intention such acts avoid confrontation or direct challenge in the public space. In his earlier discussion of popular cartoons of the leadership Mbembe emphasizes the empowering aspect of such representations, accepting that they are central to people’s need to assert their right to evade, if not avoid the power that dominates every aspect of their life, but he also suggests that these repre‐ sentations remain contained by the very power they seek to confront and resist. Sharing the same living space, as he says, the oppressor and the op‐ pressed are irresistibly drawn into a relationship that, for all the harshness of its expression, remains inescapably “convivial” (105). Although Mbembe’s work has been welcomed as a significant contribution by expo‐ nents of more radical forms of decolonizing theory such as Ndlovu‐Gatsheni (2013), it has also been criticized along with other theories that draw on the proliferation of “posts” in modern criticism (postmodernism, post‐ structuralism, postcolonialism etc.) to argue against the interpretation of “postcolonial relationships in terms of resistance or absolute domination, or as a function of the binary oppositions usually adduced in conventional analyses of movements of indiscipline and revolt (e.g. counter‐discourse, counter‐society, counter hegemony, ‘the second society’)” (Mbembe 2001, 104–105). 6 The dispute between theorists such as Ndlovu‐Gatsheni and Mbembe revolves around the issue of whether the emphasis on hybridity

6



When Ndlovu‐Gatsheni includes postcolonialism in this criticism he absolves those forms of it which insist on the fact that postcolonial refers to the continu‐ ity of forces from the moment of colonization to and beyond the post‐independ‐ ence, neo‐colonial moment, forces that continue to act powerfully in the post‐ colony after nominal independence. I am pleased to note that my own work and that written with Bill Ashcroft and Helen Tiffin has always insisted on this con‐ tinuity. (See Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 2).

226 GARETH GRIFFITHS and cultural interaction by Mbembe and others has reduced the effective‐ ness of Africans’ assertion of an alternative radical revision of the role of African cultures in their self‐construction. As Ndlovu‐Gatsheni argues: To Mbembe, postcolonial Africa which he termed the 'postcolony' is manifesting a complex sedimentation of the past, present and the future in one moment of time, creating what he termed an en‐ tanglement. What Mbembe (2001, 14) termed the postcolony en‐ closed 'multiple durees made up of discontinuities, reversals, in‐ ertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another; an entanglement'. (2013, 28) For all its importance this dispute over the way such practice en‐ gages with and remains in a state of “conviviality” with the forces it resists7 perhaps overshadows what is one of the major breakthroughs in Mbembe’s analysis of the postcolony and one of especial relevance to this chapter. A key shift in Mbembe’s analysis of resistant forms in the postcolony is his emphasis on popular, extra‐institutional representations that embrace the core of life at the street level, especially in the mixing pot of the modern urban African space where traditional forms of popular culture have been modified or replaced by appropriations of contemporary international forms such as graffiti or popular recorded music. As Mbembe puts it, in such dense urban spaces in which people of all the classes and ethnicities of the modern postcolony intermingle and overlap: first there is overloading: overloading of language, overloading of public transport, overloading of living accommodations, begin‐ ning with the tightly packed houses. Everything leads to excess, here. Consider sounds and noise. There is the noise of car horns, the noise of traders seeking to ‘fix’ a price, the noise of taxi‐drivers arguing over a passenger, the noise of a crowd surrounding quar‐

7



This aspect of Mbembe’s analysis which has attracted the criticism discussed above is similar to the also controversial assertion by Paul Gilroy (2004) that the way forward in British race relations is through a resistance to simplistic binaries in analyzing cultural interactions.

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 227 reling neighbors. There is the infernal noise of music from disco‐ theques and bars. All this overloading constitutes an aspect, not of the environment, but of the culture itself. (2001, 147) In this overloaded space the forms of popular culture resonate and reflect aspects of both the local and the international genres and technolo‐ gies they adopt and adapt to their own uses. 2 A powerful example of this in practice and one which shows the way such forms can become a focus for local resistance to human rights abuse is the recent upsurge of street graffiti in Kenya, especially in the dense urban space of the capital Nairobi. The Kenyan scholar Mokua Om‐ bati (2015) has provided a useful analysis of this phenomenon and its up‐ surge after the brutal excesses of the 2007 national elections, which saw a violence greater even than the violent election of 1992. The 2007 election saw ethnic discrimination, forced exclusion of voters, brutal beatings and killings of those identified as having voted for the wrong party or of having voted at all against their exclusion on ethnic grounds. The election in 2013 showed a major improvement over 2007. Ombati does not draw a direct link between this and the development of a popular call for reform through not voting for politicians identified with corruption and ethnic discrimina‐ tion. But he does assert that in 2013 Kenyans “remained largely patient through a delayed and error‐ridden voting and tallying process, although isolated incidents of violence did take place” (30). And in the article that follows he suggests that artists in Kenya became more actively aware of the need to act to influence civic and political attitudes after the traumatic events of 2007. These artists whom he and they have called artivists seek to combine art and action to influence political behavior. They are young and work in popular forms, i.e. street wall graffiti, rather than in more es‐ tablished forms. In general they have followed the tradition of street graffiti artists of using pseudonyms (a tradition resulting from its illegality in the majority of countries) such as Uhuru Betero, Swifo Simba and Smoki Lallah to preserve their anonymity; though one of the leading figures in the move‐ ment, Boniface Mwangi, “a photojournalist and leader of the graffiti writ‐ ers” (31), who supplied the images for Mokua Ombati's analysis, coura‐ geously insisted that he be identified in the article by name.



228 GARETH GRIFFITHS As Ombati asserts “in the run up to the 2013 elections, the urban physical space became the new ‘shrine’ for graffiti. The display of graffiti [. . .] within the city of Nairobi entered the Kenyan public space with a bang”. (2015, 33). He describes it thus: The graffiti attacks elite corruption, poor governance, and the in‐ effective and unaccountable leadership considered to be a threat to the prosperity, stability and cohesiveness of the nation. It calls for effective governance and morally accountable and responsible leadership. While graffiti may not be considered an enlightened means of resistance, the mural displays and graffiti illustrations cover the public, physical space with slogans of uprising and pro‐ test that imagine the possibility of resisting elite oppression. (33) Ombati also shows that “the graffiti’s distinctive imagery displays a visual vocabulary transcending language, religious, ethnic and class boundaries” (2015, 34). Several of the murals reproduced from Boniface Mwangi’s photographs show the image of what the graffiti artists term “vul‐ ture politicians”, who prey on the people. One of the images shows a vul‐ ture‐headed politician siting on the head of a woman. According to Ombati this image of the head of a woman is a popular symbol (Wanjiku) widely used in Kenya to reference “the common citizenry” (34).8 One of the graffiti reproduced shows a vulture with a rope around its neck being towed back‐ wards across the image by a small human figure. The surrounding words include the slogan in a bubble from the towing figure, say “Powers to the people. I will be the change. I want to see. My voice, My Vote, Our Future”. As this suggests the emphasis is on the ability of people to employ the po‐ litical process to effect change by refusing to vote for corrupt “vulture” pol‐ iticians who are in other graffiti reproduced in the article shown carrying briefcases labeled “stolen loot”. Boniface Mwanga comments that

8



The idea of an oppressor shown squatting or standing on the head of an op‐ pressed subject is not unique to Kenya of course. For example, I have a Shona soapstone sculpture from Zimbabwe showing a figure standing on the bent‐ over head of a man, the title of which is “Chieftain”. Vultures are also commonly used as symbols in Shona sculpture.

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 229 We are using images of a vulture member of parliament stamping on the face of protestors and parliament to tell Kenyans when you sell your vote, you are mortgaging ‘our’ future–the young genera‐ tion’s future. [. . .] We are trying to encourage men and women of integrity and character to vie for elective office because if they don’t you will find vultures on the ballot. (quoted in Ombati 2015, 35) The drive of this campaign, as Mokua Ombati and Boniface Mwangi describe it, is to change the society through the electoral process. Whether or not this campaign had an effect on the relative success of the 2013 elec‐ tion (and the article implies it did) it is not a call for violent revolution but for a democratic process of change9 . The young artivists involved in the graffiti movement recognize fully that the elite leaderships of the current postcolonies such as Kenya have sold out to the external forces that con‐ tinue to control the supposedly sovereign nation. They are aware too that in this process they have colluded with the corporate entities (local and in‐ ternational) that largely run the Kenyan economy and indirectly control the government. But in their response they have aimed at insisting that radical change can be achieved by peaceful means. By emphasizing the democratic process they have succeeded, as Mokua Ombati argues, in drawing behind them a wide range of Kenyans, collapsing some class differences as well as different ethnicities. Thus he records how many small‐ to medium‐sized business people applauded the graffiti. ’The graffiti tells the truth about how we have been taken for a ride by our leaders for a long occasion,’ said businesswoman Nyiva Mwende. Motoba Makara, a businessman next to one of the murals, confirmed that many people had thronged to the ‘spaces’ of the graffiti and virtually all were delighted. ‘Many people have trooped and jammed here to have a look at the paintings. I have a feeling they like the messages. This is a good teaching, because for long pol‐ iticians have taken us for fools to be swayed around,’ he said. Read‐ ing the graffiti, Mrs Nyuka Waudo nodded in agreement, looking clearly dumbfounded as she scanned the list of injustices the polit‐ ical class had perpetrated against its own people. (2015, 43)

9



Though the violent rejection of the result of the recent 2017 election suggests that this process of reform is an ongoing one.

230 GARETH GRIFFITHS Government responses, as might be expected, have been largely negative. Also, as might be expected, some people surveyed agreed with the official view expressed by the head of the city’s inspectorate department that graffiti is ”an organized criminal activity, bedecked in revolutionary, anarchist, situationist slogans and attitudes” (Ombati 2015, 39). Ombati notes that “proponents of this proposition call for restrictions, controls and injunctions on the activities of ‘gang graffiti’ to address and protect public and private physical space from damage and vandalism” (39–40). Although we need to be cautious, perhaps, in reading Mokua Om‐ bati’s largely optimistic assessment of the effectiveness of the campaign it remains clear that the young generation of artivists responsible for the street graffiti of recent times in Kenya have tapped into a far broader and more diverse audience of people through this popular form than would have been reached by more traditional forms of representation or activism. However, although cartoons and graffiti have been a major force for protest, if one were asked to name the most widespread form that hu‐ man rights protest has taken in Africa in recent decades it would have to be popular music. The examples of this are so many and so ubiquitous that it is hard to select from them. But few would dispute that the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian artivist, has been one of the most powerful and far‐reaching. In the last decade or so since his death, his music and his life have become synonymous with resistance to the corrupt regimes (civilian and military) that dominated Nigerian politics throughout Fela’s lifetime until his untimely death in 1997. Determined to assert the fact that African music, although it borrowed from many elements including performers from the American black diaspora, was its own unique form, he coined the term Afrobeat for his blend of earlier popular African forms such as juju and highlife with elements from American black soul music. His repudiation of the influence of the black “soul” musician James Brown (from whose style he nevertheless clearly borrowed elements) stemmed from his determina‐ tion to assert the uniquely African source of the blend of music for which he has become world famous. In the same way, although Fela’s political ideas clearly show the influence of the US Black Power movement, he em‐ phasizes rather the influence of the Pan‐Africanist ideology developed by early figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of modern Ghana. Pan‐Africanism represents, as Ndlovu‐Gatsheni and other decolonization theorists have argued, one of the two conflicting forces that struggled in the



“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 231 early period following the wave of independence for African colonies in the 1960s. These divided into leaders such as Nkrumah who argued that Afri‐ cans needed to reach out beyond the arbitrary “national” state boundaries that colonization had created to forge a broader pan‐African polity, and oth‐ ers such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere who argued that it was first necessary for the newly independent states to develop a successful government within their borders, which could forge economic development and unity between their own disparate communities (Ndlovu‐Gatsheni 2013, 67–70). Fela embraced the former position, reflecting perhaps his disillusionment with government attempts to unite the various groups that had violently contested post‐independence, in Nigeria especially, during the brutal civil war of the mid‐1960s. In practice Fela’s music became a rallying cry against the corruption of many post‐independence regimes and the human rights abuses they initiated. The struggle against these excesses was, of course, also a feature of many practitioners of more traditional art forms, for exam‐ ple, writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and especially Ken Saro‐ Wiwa, who opposed the corrupt alliance forged between the military dicta‐ tor Sani Abacha and the Shell Oil Company in the Niger Delta that led to massive environmental destruction and the brutal oppression of the Ogoni people of the region. Saro‐Wiwa also stands as a powerful example of how in modern Africa artistic genres and forms have been creatively fluid, with writers like himself using both traditional written forms (the novel, poetry, theatre etc.) and modern media outlets such as radio and television. His tel‐ evision sit‐com Basi and Company broadcast from 1985–90 was one of Af‐ rica’s most widely watched television series with an estimated audience at its peak of upwards of 30 million people. Dealing as it did with the corrup‐ tion that followed on the discovery of the rich oil deposits in Nigeria, it is a classic example of how modern media forms can reach and influence mas‐ sive audiences unreachable by traditional forms such as the novel. Each ep‐ isode involves the anti‐hero, the would‐be get‐rich‐quick young man Mr B (Basi) in increasingly bizarre confidence schemes from placing people on government payrolls for jobs they do not have to selling real‐estate on the moon.10

10



Several episodes are available on YouTube, e.g. The Transistor Radio, based on the original radio play written by Saro‐Wiwa from which the TV series was de‐ veloped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc1ujHlA5MY. Later episodes such as The Machine (that deals with Mr. B’s attempts to sell a machine that can

232 GARETH GRIFFITHS Despite the powerful anti‐corruption message of the show, the gov‐ ernment reaction was curiously ambivalent. Tony Momoh, the minister for information and culture in the government of General Ibrahim Babangida, praised the series for employing standard Nigerian English rather than the pidgin that many television sit‐coms used in Nigeria at the time. Saro‐Wiwa concurred, saying that the popularity of the show was based in part on the fact that young people used it to learn English. This response seems odd since Saro‐Wiwa had made his name as a novelist with Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, published in 1985, the same year the TV series went to air. The novel used a ground‐breaking form of English that echoed local pidgin English but in a modified form more easily understood by a general and non‐Nigerian readership. This novel’s influence continues, as can be seen in Uzodinma Iweala’s recent account of the life of a child‐soldier, Beasts of No Nation (2005), which also uses a modified form of English to reflect the Nigerian usage of the child protagonist. That novel, of course, also refer‐ ences Fela Kuti’s famous album “Beast of No Nation”, the title song of which lampooned and attacked the then military dictator Major‐General Muham‐ mudu Buhari, who had recently had Fela Kuti imprisoned. The time weh I dey, for prison, I call am "inside world"
/The time weh I dey outside prison, I call am "outside world"
/Na craze world, na be outside world/
CRAZE** WORLD *(after each line) **(crazy)
/Na be outside‐ da police‐i dey/
Na be outside‐ da sol‐ dier dey/ Na be outside‐ da court dem dey
/Na be outside‐ da magistrate dey/ 
Na be outside‐ da judge dem dey 
/Na craze world be dat/
Na be outside‐ Buhari dey
/Na craze man be dat/ 
Animal in craze‐man skin‐i
/Na craze world be dat
/Na be out‐ side‐ Idia‐gbon dey
/Na craze man be dat‐ oh
Animal in craze‐

do virtually everything or so he claims) were not all written by Saro‐Wiwa, making the crucial point that popular forms are not defined by the “ownership” of their creator but become templates for multiple authors. See https://www.y outube.com/watch?v=hg2nL4SgNNo. Once developed a popular form such as a TV series or a style of music can and often is adapted, developed and used by others. “Cover” music is the classic example of this. In the same way, Fela’s “new” genre Afrobeat and the loose extended lyrics it embraced has now been employed by musicians across the continent.



“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 233 man skin‐i
/Na craze world be dat
/Na be outside‐ dem find me guilty/
Na be outside‐ dem jail me five years
–––––––––I no do nothing11 The government’s surprising tolerance of Basi and Company may reflect the difficulty they would have had in suppressing a show that had such a broad popular following, illustrating that popular forms are pro‐ tected by their very popularity, even when they may contain potentially subversive messages. Saro‐Wiwa’s endorsement of the government’s sup‐ port for the show’s linguistic usefulness in educating the young may also, of course, reflect the need for compromise on his part too if the show was to continue to air. The change from Buhari to the regime of Babangida might also have helped, occurring as it did during the long run of the series. Ba‐ bangida’s regime, though clearly also a dictatorship, paid lip‐service to anti‐ corruption measures and was nowhere near as brutal as the regime that followed, that of Sani Abacha. It was the Abacha regime of course that hanged Saro‐Wiwa, along with other Ogoni activists falsely accused of in‐ volvement in the murder of a local chief who supported the regime. The obviously false accusation that led to massive international protest did not prevent the death of this powerful advocate for human rights. But his death had a significant effect, causing international boycotts of Shell petroleum and the temporary expulsion of Nigeria from the Commonwealth. Although these examples show how complex the negotiations between regimes and opponents may be in daily practice they also reveal that popular resistant forms are not insulated from the repression that such regimes routinely ex‐ ercise; though they may be able to evade them they cannot entirely avoid them. When their proponents such as Ken Saro‐Wiwa or, as we shall see, Fela Kuti are seen to be active regime opponents, they are ruthlessly sup‐ pressed. After his imprisonment, Fela declared his studio and his family compound in central Lagos an independent “republic”, called the Kalakuta Republic, which he named after the jail cell he had inhabited and likened to

11



http://www.nitrolyrics.com/fela‐kuti_beast‐of‐no‐nation‐lyrics.html. It should be noted, of course, that Buhari was reelected President of Nigeria again in 2014, replacing Goodluck Jonathan in what has been hailed as a sign of the growth of democracy in Nigeria, since it was the first time a President in Nigeria was replaced by an election in which the loser stepped down.

234 GARETH GRIFFITHS “the black hole of Calcutta”. Initially, in line with his attempt at asserting a separate African tradition and identity, Kalakuta was designed to assert the right to practice traditions such as polygamy, which Fela defended as a “true” African way. In this regard Fela’s politics reflect complex attitudes that are sometimes difficult to reconcile with his broad concern for human rights and his stand against corruption. Both in his public statements and in his music, Fela’s attitude to women (sometimes bordering on misogyny) conflicts with many of his other ideas. Despite such shortcomings, Fela’s music openly and courageously attacked corruption in government and advocated strongly against the bru‐ tality of the corrupt soldiers and police who ran the country. The song “Zombie” mocks the military leaders and the way they failed to rein in the other ranks from brutalizing and extorting bribes from the people, compar‐ ing the soldiers to mindless Zombies whose actions are controlled by a lead‐ ership that cannot avoid responsibility for their actions: Zombie no go go unless you tell am to go/(Zombie)/Zombie no go stop unless you tell am to stop (Zombie)/Zombie no go turn un‐ less you tell am to turn (Zombie)/Zombie no go think unless you tell am to think (Zombie)/Zombie O Zombie12 Despite personal and other limitations, particularly with regard to gender issues as noted, there is no doubt of Fela’s commitment to the idea that popular music and art had to be designed to effect change in society if it was to be worth performing. He summed his view up thus: Music is supposed to have an effect. If you're playing music and people don't feel something, you're not doing shit. That's what Af‐ rican music is about. When you hear something, you must move. I want to move people to dance, but also to think. Music wants to dictate a better life, against a bad life. When you're listening to something that depicts having a better life, and you're not having

12



For this song and many other Fela lyrics see http://www.metrolyrics.com/fela‐ kuti‐lyrics.html.

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 235 a better life, it must have an effect on you. (Quoted in Bordowitz 2004, 170) This commitment is clear in songs like “International Thief, Thief”: Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money go/Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money go/Them go write big English for newspaper, dabaru we Africans/Them go write big English for newspaper, dabaru we Africans. 13 Or in the song Coffin for Head of State: So I waka waka waka
I go many places
I go government places/
I see see see
All the bad bad bad things
Them dey do do do./ Look Obasanjo!
Before anything at all, him go dey shout:
"Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, Almighty Lord!"
"Oh Lord, oh God!"/
And them do bad bad bad bad bad bad things/Through Jesus Christ our Lord
 (Amen, Amen, Amen!)
/By the grace of Almighty Lord
(Amen, Amen, Amen!)14 This attack on the first military government of the then General Olesegun Obasanjo in the 1970s15 draws on the popular music forms but also references (albeit satirically) the use of Christian hymns discussed ear‐ lier. For Fela not only Christianity but all religions have been sucked into the black hole of corruption, as this song suggests, satirizing Muslims and Christians for their corrupt practice. Significantly he identifies both these religions as forces that have come from outside, and contrasts them with Indigenous African religious and cultural practice:

13

See http://www.metrolyrics.com/international‐thief‐thief‐lyrics‐fela‐kuti.html See http://www.metrolyrics.com/coffin‐head‐of‐state‐lyrics‐fela‐kuti.html 15 The “first” government (1976–79), because in 1999 Obesanjo, now a civilian, was elected again and served as President until 2007. 14



236 GARETH GRIFFITHS I waka many business anywhere in Africa/
I waka many business anywhere in Africa/
North and South them get them poli‐ cies/
One Christian and the other one Muslim/
Anywhere the Muslims them they reign
Na Senior Alhaji na him be Director/An‐ ywhere the Christians them they reign 
 Na the best friend to Bishop na him be Director/
It is a known fact that for many thou‐ sand years
We Africans we had our own traditions/ These mon‐ eymaking organizations
Them come put we Africans in total con‐ fusion./ Through Jesus Christ our Lord
(Amen, Amen, Amen!)16 Fela Kuti’s music is probably the best known example of the power of popular music to address human rights issues in Africa, especially since his success eventually provoked the government into a direct attack on his independent republic, an attack involving more than a thousand armed sol‐ diers and in which his mother was killed (according to the authorities by accidentally falling from a balcony when the compound was stormed). De‐ spite further persecution, Fela survived until 1997. His death has been at‐ tributed to the many government beatings he endured when imprisoned over the years, although some assert the disease of AIDS was the immediate cause. Since then his impact continues to grow, especially with the posthu‐ mous revival of international interest through the musical Fela that opened on Broadway in 2009, after which it toured worldwide17 and a documen‐ tary film entitled Finding Fela (2014)18. But his work is the most visible part of what is a continent‐wide phenomenon that continues unabated to this day, the wedding of popular music and political protest. 3 As the preceding section has tried to show, popular forms remain one of the most successful means of getting messages against corruption and human rights abuses to a wider audience than forms such as the novel and mainstream gallery art and theatrical performance can reach. But these popular arts have themselves had a profound effect on the more traditional forms. Film, the importance of which as a means of addressing wider audi‐ ences, especially when wedded to non‐traditional distribution means, as

16

See http://www.metrolyrics.com/coffin‐head‐of‐state‐lyrics‐fela‐kuti.html See http://www.felaonbroadway.com/ 18 See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2194328/ 17



“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 237 discussed by Sukhmani Khorana in her chapter in this collection, has of course also been a major influence on older forms such as the novel. Indeed it sometimes seems that modern novels achieve their greatest impact through visual adaptations. Less frequently, the novel(s) of the film, usually in popular genres such as science fiction (e.g. the Star Trek series) shows how extensive this interdependence is becoming. This process has not al‐ ways been in the service or interest of progressive social elements, as the huge success of the Christian fiction series Left Behind, that was made into films, and privately distributed and shown to evangelical church communi‐ ties across the world, demonstrates. The co‐author of the series, Tim Lahaye, was a leading figure in the Christian right’s campaign in the election of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California and the series, like the multi‐ million dollar Christian publishing industry, continues to have a profound effect on conservative US politics.19 This example shows how popular forms may be used by and for proponents of both sides of politics, radical and conservative. In either case the popular genres they employ–speculative fiction, romance, adventure, crime fiction etc.–and the spin‐off into film or television series, ensure their messages get to a mass audience. The work of the young Kenyan novelist, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, illustrates how recent narrative fiction engages at all levels with both film and the wider popular forms discussed earlier, especially music. In an in‐ terview about her work, Owuor, who before beginning her writing career had worked as the director of the Zanzibar Film Festival, explains how for her (and, one suspects, many writers of her generation) the decision of how to cast any narrative is an inter‐genre one. In a discussion about her first book Weight of Whispers (Owuor 2003) that won the Caine Prize for that year she was asked: “You are a writer and film‐maker, which is an interest‐ ing combination. Given a choice, would you rather read the book or watch the movie version first?” To which she replied: I am actually just a writer. The film‐making was an oblique way of entering into writing and story. I reach for the story that comes to me through whatever medium without quibbling whether it is the

19



See http://www.leftbehind.com/. For a broad assessment of the series and popular Christian fiction in general see Fedson (2011).

238 GARETH GRIFFITHS film or the book I get first. (Quoted in an online interview; see Musiitwa 2014) At the time of the interview her second book Dust (2014) had just come out but the interviewer was already asking her if the rumour that it was to be made into a film is true. This interview suggests that not only for writers like Owuor does the narrative idea precede the choice of media (print or film), but that for her and her enthusiastic interviewer the idea that a novel only just published would automatically be considered as po‐ tentially a film is a given in the contemporary world of storytelling. In the same way, the Nigerian novel discussed earlier, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) was made into a prize‐winning film almost immedi‐ ately after its publication. Released in a limited art house distribution, it has nevertheless achieved a wider reach after it was selected for Netflix release later that year. So it can be downloaded online using Netflix, a new and in‐ creasingly powerful way of distributing films that may not make it to the mainstream cinema chains. Additionally, since like all recent films many scenes are widely distributed on the internet via YouTube, it continues to reach broader audiences through the reproduction of trailers and key scenes .20 This again shows the role various forms of social media play in distributing modern narratives to wider audiences. Owuor’s novel Dust may well be considered in due course as poten‐ tial film material but even in its present form as traditional print narrative it shows how important the referencing throughout of popular music is to the shaping of the narrative. The ubiquity of reference to popular music throughout the text acts as a sort of soundscape, as the reader, who is pre‐ sumed to be familiar with the songs and musical forms named and quoted in the text, is invited to “hear” the songs as an accompaniment to the words on the page, supplementing them and adding emotional and cultural den‐ sity to the narrative. In this respect the references to songs in the novel function in a way analogous to how the score of a film adds to the experi‐ ence of its audience. Every part of the text is imbued with references to mu‐ sic, beginning with the continual referencing and quoting of traditional Kenyan, Ethiopian, Somalian and Eritrean “water songs” (the novel is set in

20



For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xb9Ty‐1frw, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=3XRKrwnZqswbe.com/watch?v=3XRKrwnZqsw

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 239 the remote Turkana region of northern Kenya that borders on two of these countries, Ethiopia and Somalia). One of the major characters, the police‐ man Ali Dida Hada, is an Eritrean refugee who has crossed the largely po‐ rous and fictional borders, fleeing what the text ironically calls “the Horn of Africa’s liberation wars” (Owuor 2014, 219), and has adopted Kenyan iden‐ tity. In addition the text is marked throughout with references to a wide variety of popular music. These range from current Kenyan forms such as mugithi, which records the “overloaded” culture (to use Mbembe’s term discussed earlier) of the bars of Nairobi’s slums, through famous Kenyan musicians such as Fadhili Williams, to the Congolese singer and political ac‐ tivist Franklin Boukaka and the more romantic Cape Verdean female singer Cesária Évora, as well as the songs of Fela Kuti discussed earlier. Thus, for example, early in the novel, when the main protagonist Ajany has just been confronted with the death of her brother Odidi, her pain at the situation that has led to his death and that of so many others is amplified by the text referencing one of the songs of the Congolese musician Franklin Boukaka. Outside sounds. Etude of squealing tires. Bird chirp. Machine‐gun opening sequence. A scream. Fragments of a song from some unseen citizen’s room. Franklin Boukaka’s plaintive summons–Aye Africa … kokata koni pasi, soki na kati koteka pasi–and for a whole minute it over‐ whelms the frenzied crescendo screams of Haki yetu, ‘Our rights’. (21) When the song is quoted, however briefly, a whole range of mean‐ ings that the text explores throughout and which are common to human rights struggles across Africa are invoked as the words of the song are re‐ called by the reader: Aye Afrika, eh eh../O Independence! O Freedom!/Chopping wood is tough/after chopping selling is just as tough/with this suffering how sad/with the kids I won’t make it/Some for whom I voted/went for power and nice cars/When voting time comes/I



240 GARETH GRIFFITHS become someone for them/I wonder/ the white man left/who is independent?/Aye Afrika, O Independence!/Aye Afrika, O Free‐ dom!21 Through this and many other references to this continent‐wide range of popular music, the novel evokes the sense of a pan‐African, shared space and common problems of oppression and abuse. These popular songs of protest and longing, like the traditional water songs, refuse to be con‐ tained within the limiting and divisive concepts of the sovereign nation pro‐ moted by the ruling elites. As discussed in the first section of this chapter, in the way those elites use ethnicity as a means to divide and rule the nation replicates not only the practice of the colonial rulers they are supposed to have displaced but also the brutal suppression of opponents based on their supposed conflicting ethnic and national identities. As well as using these references to popular music to create a “soundscape” that reinforces the novel’s message against brutality and corruption in Kenya, the text also al‐ ludes to many of the popular images that have been developed in street art to represent the negative forces in Kenyan society. In particular, the image of the vulture to represent the forces of greed that oppress Kenyans, that is such a prominent feature of the recent street art in Nairobi, is used through‐ out the novel. Static. Kofi Annan’s voice weaving through in words that don’t connect: Parties…eminent persons…bloodshed…peace…violence… Peace…spoken…Honorable gentlemen…war…tribal…politics… Nyipir says, voice crackling, ”They know when a body is cooling”. ”Who?” ”Vultures”. Within a dark nook in Nyipir’s heart, a long‐ago man whispers, ”By the time I’m done with you, you’ll become another. You’ll become mad. To live. ” Nyipir shivers. ”Vultures”. Nyipir wipes his face with the blanket. (Owuor 2014, 68)

21



See the original with English subtitles at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= LvDn11AEoas.

“PICTURES ON THE WALL, MUSIC IN THE AIR” 241 Again, when Nyipir meets the gravedigger burying corpses killed by the colonial authorities during the Mau Mau liberation struggle, the im‐ age is again explicitly evoked to represent the forces of oppression and bru‐ tality preying on the people: “‘What’s this work called?’ asked Nyipir. ‘Vul‐ turing’ replies the gravedigger” (167). This fascinating and powerful novel weaves together the story of the atrocities of colonial rule during the colonial period with the post‐inde‐ pendence regimes’ use of the same brutal methods to repress opposition to its rule, reinforcing the point made by so many popular artists that the cur‐ rent elite rulers have merely replaced the colonial oppressors and employ the same or even worse tactics to retain power. Throughout, the failure of the new rulers to transcend the practices of the repressive colonial regimes is emphasized by the incidents of the story and by references to the popular awareness of how this oppression has continued, expressed in popular im‐ ages and music. The full use of these elements in this rich text must await a more detailed analysis than space permits here. But these examples show how popular and traditional art forms are forging new and mutually enrich‐ ing relationships in modern Africa and uniting popular and traditional art forms in the struggle for human rights.

Bibliography Bordowitz, Hank, 2004. Noise of the World: Non‐Western Musicians in Their Own Words. New York: Soft Skull Press. Fedson, Joanna. 2011. “Redeeming Fiction: American Evangelical Fiction, Gender, and Culture.” PhD thesis, University of Western Australia. Iweala, Uzodinma. 2005. Beasts of No Nation. London: John Murray. Jakwa, Tinasha. 2016. “Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme: Beyond Emancipation, Towards Liberation.” The Australasian Re‐ view of African Studies 37 (1): 73–94. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of Cali‐ fornia Press. Musiitwa, Daniel. 2014. "An Interview with the Caine Prize Winning Author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor." Africa Book Club, March 1. http://www.africabookclub.com/?p=15442 Ndlovu‐Gtsheni, Sabelo J. 2013. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonisation. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA.



242 GARETH GRIFFITHS Ombati, Mokua. 2015. ”Public Artworks: Creative Spaces for Civic and Po‐ litical Behaviour in Kenya.” The Australasian Review of African Studies 36 (1): 29–50. Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo. 2003. Weight of Whispers. Nairobi, Kenya: Kwani Trust. ‐‐‐. 2014. Dust. London: Granta. Saro‐Wiwa, Ken. 1985. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Port Harcourt: Saros International Publishers.



On Show: Truth and Reconciliation in Canada Helen Gilbert In the late summer and early autumn of 2011, a small group of Ab‐ original Canadians1—five men and one woman from the Moose Cree, Pea‐ wanuk, Attawapiskat and Waskaganish First Nations—walked 2200 kilo‐ metres from Cochrane in Northern Ontario to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to raise public awareness of the brutal and far‐reaching legacies of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) system. This federal system, implemented in the 1870s as a fundamental instrument of settler colonial governance, quickly expanded until the middle of the 20th century, when pressure on funds be‐ gan to change education policy, and was not fully dismantled until 1996. By then, more than 150,000 Inuit, Métis and First Nations children, some as young as six, had attended the church‐run residential schools. Most of these students were forcibly relocated from their communities, separated from their land and kin, forbidden to speak their languages and aggressively trained to conform to the norms of white society. Many were denied ade‐ quate food, shelter and clothing, leaving them vulnerable to illness and in‐ jury. Six thousand children are now estimated to have died in the schools (Schwartz 2015)2 and tens of thousands more endured physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse. Although there was ample evidence by the 1980s that IRS “education” had constituted a particularly virulent attack on Indigenous cultures and rights, official measures to acknowledge and redress the wrongs thus perpetrated were at best partial and piece‐meal3 until legal claims for reparation had mounted in the thousands, eventually leading to

1

2

3

In keeping with Canadian usage, “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” are deployed interchangeably in this essay as broad terms encompassing Inuit, Métis and First Nations populations. This figure is based on oral statements by officials of the Truth and Reconcilia‐ tion Commission. The TRC’s written report notes that 3200 such deaths have been documented but precise numbers are elusive because IRS records were regularly destroyed. Formal apologies came from the Oblate, Anglican, Presbyterian and United Churches between 1991 and 1998; the Catholic Church, which ran the largest number of IRS schools, did not follow suit. For its part, the Federal Government delivered a “Statement of Reconciliation” in 1998, along with funds to establish the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

243

244 HELEN GILBERT the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2006. The corner‐ stones of this multi‐party agreement, the largest class action settlement in Canadian history, were financial compensation for approximately 86,000 former IRS students still alive at the time, and the establishment of a broad‐ reaching Truth and Reconciliation Commission to promote awareness of Indigenous peoples’ experiences of residential schooling and thereby help heal social and cultural divides fostered by the system. The most prominent mechanism for this restorative justice agenda has been the spoken testimo‐ nial process, a core part of seven TRC National Events staged in different regions across the country from 2010 to 2014. Statements shared at these public gatherings, along with excerpts from private hearings, are interwo‐ ven with extensive archival research to form the Commission’s final report, released in July 2015. This multi‐volume narrative makes no bones about naming what happened in, and as a result of, the residential schools as “cul‐ tural genocide” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 1). The six walkers who trekked to Halifax timed their arrival to coin‐ cide with the opening of the TRC National Atlantic Event at the city’s World Trade Convention Centre on October 26, 2011. Each of the group was (and is) indelibly connected to the traumas about to be aired: the older couple, Patrick Etherington Sr and Frances Whiskeychan, as residential school sur‐ vivors; the younger men, Patrick Etherington Jr, Robert Hunter, James Ki‐ oke and Samuel Koosees, as sons or grandsons of former students. Their three‐month pilgrimage had taken them through many Aboriginal commu‐ nities where they talked with elders, at‐risk youth and church leaders about the intergenerational effects of the IRS system, gathering stories of both loss and resilience to carry along to the traditional territories of the Mi’kmaq nation, on which Halifax stands. My own fly‐in journey there to research the politics and aesthetics of reconciliation in action at the TRC proceedings could scarcely have contrasted more. Mindful of the limits to what I might glean in this context, I watched the walkers enter the city cen‐ tre with their Warrior flag held high. They briefly broke their stride to pose for waiting journalists in front of an Occupy Movement encampment that had sprung up in the main square, then continued on to a small park where local elders would light the Sacred Fire to guide the Commission’s work. The difference in choreographic strategies captured by that momentary pause was simple but striking: the walkers took civic action by moving, the Occupy protestors, in essence, by staying still. Yet, the form and force of



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 245 walking itself as a conciliatory act—with potential to repair the subjects’ relationships with their own bodies, with kin and with the land (McKegney 2013, 26)—only became clear to me later in the day when the wayfarers were invited to discuss their journey at one of the many sharing circles scheduled in the TRC programme. Although these open sessions were de‐ signed to follow Indigenous practices and protocols, the younger men clearly struggled to express themselves in this forum. The seminar room, the light, the expectant hush and, not least, the task of translating pro‐ foundly embodied experiences into words seemed to sap the speakers of the pride and energy evident in their walk just hours before. As I saw them shuffle in their seats with their eyes cast down, and as I heard their halting narratives punctuated by long and almost unbearable silences, I began to wonder what social and cultural work the TRC national events could possi‐ bly do. What other options would there be for expressing and honouring “truth” within the therapeutic, pedagogic and broadly consensualizing framework set out for such occasions? What other spaces could these state‐ endorsed, made‐for‐media events offer for enacting—or constructively re‐ fusing—reconciliation? For rethinking human rights in—and on—Aborigi‐ nal terms? This essay attempts to answer such questions, focusing not on the testimonial hearings per se, though they are part of the story, but rather on artistic performances integrated into the TRC gatherings. While my ar‐ gument draws primarily on examples from the programme in Halifax, it is also informed by in‐situ observations of TRC proceedings in Saskatoon (2012) and Montréal (2013), as well as a big‐picture survey of programmes and videos documenting the other four National Events in the series, held in Winnipeg, Inuvik, Vancouver and Edmonton respectively. I write as a non‐Indigenous scholar participant (from a distant settler nation) and, I hope, as a “respectful guest” (in David Garneau’s terms, 2016, 29) alert to my implication in the colonial matrix and to the incommensurability be‐ tween the survivors’ experiences and mine. To the extent that they harnessed conventionalized testimonial genres to produce an exposé—and an archive—of state‐sponsored violence against subjugated populations, Canada’s formal TRC hearings seem to align with numerous others that have played out in specific national do‐ mains since the 1980s. Yet, the broad political context for the Canadian TRC was unusual, if not unique. As Deborah Posel (2008) notes, truth commis‐ sions are “techniques of nation building” that tend to occur in developing



246 HELEN GILBERT countries, typically as products of the political transition from authoritar‐ ian to democratic rule in brutally divided polities seeking to reconstitute themselves through “a new‐found embrace of human rights” (120–21). Commissions in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Sierra Leone and, not least, South Africa, are oft‐cited cases in point. The Canadian Commission, by contrast, was launched in a stable democracy, apparently to fine‐tune just govern‐ ance for a postcolonial nation committed by charter to multiculturalism. It cast reconciliation in broad social terms as an intersubjective process that would establish “new relationships embedded in mutual recognition and respect” and that would ideally involve all sectors of the populace (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Our Mandate” n.d., 1). The Com‐ mission had no mandate to hold any individual or group to account for the atrocities under scrutiny, and no juridical need to prove the depth or scale of the harm done, since the broad principles of survivor compensation had already been agreed. In these circumstances, Canada’s TRC lacked the ur‐ gency as well as the mechanisms to foster real political reform. One activist webpost seemed to speak the frustration of many Indigenous people on this issue when it emphatically rejected the Federal Government’s official apol‐ ogy in 2008 for the IRS system, just after the TRC had been established: “this commission”, the authors stressed, “can (1) subpoena no witnesses, (2) compel no testimony, (3) requisition no document. It cannot find, charge, fine, or imprison” (quoted in Chrisjohn and Wasacase 2009, 222). Unable to fully discharge the investigative part of its role—to create “as complete an historical record as possible of the IRS system and legacy” (Truth and Rec‐ onciliation Commission of Canada, “Our Mandate” n.d., 2)—the Commission has sometimes been critiqued, on the political front at least, as merely an exercise to shore up the nation’s “multicultural brand” (Vedal 2013, 107). What “truth‐gathering” the TRC could do to elaborate—or con‐ test—the existing records of residential schooling (an issue visited in some depth a decade earlier in the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Abo‐ riginal Peoples) was focused squarely on the experiences of IRS survivors and their families. This emphasis spoke to the national reconciliation agenda by clearing a space for Indigenous citizen‐subjects to present, in their own terms, deeply experiential realities previously denied or sup‐ pressed, and importantly, for those multifaceted expressions of truth to be registered, recorded, discussed and archived as public history. Matt James



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 247 (2012) sees this approach as “performatively overturn[ing] the basic ped‐ agogy of the residential schools” through its validation of Indigenous per‐ spectives and knowledges (21), especially in the TRC‐sponsored commu‐ nity commemorations, which featured cultural camps, art workshops, Abo‐ riginal history circles, music jams and other grassroots initiatives. The seven National Events were more formally structured and, as historical reckonings, carried the weight of competing expectations on a much larger scale. Like their influential South African counterparts, these extensively documented gatherings quickly became the “symbolic précis” for the over‐ all reconciliation process (Posel 2008, 131), staged, as they were, in the public eye and packaged for mass consumption in a range of (mostly) digi‐ tal media. Not surprisingly in this context, Indigenous scholars, in particular, have been sceptical about the efficacy of bearing witness to individual trau‐ mas, even as an apparently ethical exchange.4 Dian Million (Tanana Atha‐ bascan) (2013) asks, for example, what is at stake in making Aboriginal peoples the “subject of a humanitarian project” at a time when human rights have become “volatile” spaces in various parts of the world, notably in relation to the territorial sovereignty of nation states (6, 8). Approaching this issue from the angle of Indigenous self‐determination, Taiaiake Alfred (Kanien’kehá:ka) (2009) argues that reconciliation obfuscates the social and economic problems resulting from the colonial theft of lands, whether or not it “move[s] us beyond the unpalatable stench of racism in public and social interactions” (166–67). Métis scholar‐artist David Garneau (2016) likewise stresses the ways in which reconciliation remains implicated in Canada’s colonial project, not only in structural terms but also through the TRC’s characteristic modes of representation: The sanctioned performance of Reconciliation is foundationally distorted. Testimony produced for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is constrained by non‐Indigenous narratives of healing and closure; by western religious ideology (the Catholic

4



According to the TRC Website, witnesses in Aboriginal traditions are “called to be keepers of history when an event of historical significance occurs”. As such, they are expected to actively share and incorporate into their own lives the knowledge they have gained (“Honorary Witness.” http://www.trc.ca/web‐ sites/reconciliation/index.php?p=331).

248 HELEN GILBERT rite of reconciliation and Christian concepts of forgiveness); by an emphasis on individuals over communities; by the public display of victims but not perpetrators; and by the degrading and corrupt‐ ing influence of cash‐for‐testimony. As a result, not all stories are welcome in these official sites and not everyone is interested in engaging this often humiliating theatre. (23–24) Garneau goes on to outline a politics and praxis of “Indigenous re‐ fusal”—a refusal to be a subject of the reconciliatory gaze—that might shift the ground on which present and future relations between settler, immi‐ grant and Aboriginal polities are (continually) negotiated (27–29). Such a politics is evident in a range of artistic responses to the TRC, including An‐ ishinaabe performance artist Rebecca Belmore’s haunting video installa‐ tion, Apparition. This work was created for the 2013 exhibition Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, which opened at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver shortly before the TRC arrived in the city for its British Columbia National Event. In Belmore’s looped video foot‐ age, we see witnessing staged as the silent repetition of an untold—and possibly untellable—narrative whose presence (but not content or form) we can sense only as a fleeting apparition. First kneeling like a child at prayer, then sitting, the performer slowly removes a piece of duct tape gag‐ ging her mouth and then, eyes still fixed on the unseen viewer/s of the art‐ work, leaves the frame without speaking. Her silence, extended and ampli‐ fied in the endless replay of the video loop, becomes an eloquent refusal to bear witness in the languages of the colonizer. At the same time, the instal‐ lation’s repeated deferral of closure highlights the conundrum that attends Indigenous participation in the official reconciliation processes. There are echoes, here, of the silence‐inflected testimonies that the young Aboriginal walkers offered to the sharing circle I described in Halifax, even though Bel‐ more’s abstract art has a very different tenor and purpose. The above‐cited critiques of the official reconciliation process are both compelling in themselves and consistent with broader arguments by scholars such as Joseph Slaughter (2007), whose Human Rights Inc. shows how the commoditization of trauma and poverty in defense of human rights readily plays into the markets and logics of neo‐imperialism. Yet, exposing the TRC’s shortcomings as a platform for postcolonial redress only takes us



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 249 so far in understanding why thousands of Indigenous Canadians partici‐ pated in the National Events5 and what other social work these gatherings may have done even as they co‐opted those involved to help author—and authorize—a grand récit of the nation’s efforts to repair its blemished de‐ mocracy. Garneau’s assertion that the TRC was destined to stage perfor‐ mances of a script always already skewed by western ideologies offers a productive lead in broaching such questions, even though he sees little room for Indigenous agency in this theatrical endeavour. To think about the National Events as theatre, whatever their flaws in political terms, directs our attention to the material spaces, embodied acts and relational intensi‐ ties through which the drama of reconciliation unfolded. From this stand‐ point, it is possible to trace Indigenous investments in specific aspects of the TRC process and thereby slant discussions away from its apparently to‐ talizing effects. In her cogent analysis of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as both civic ritual and national theatre, Catherine Cole (2010) demonstrates how the domain of performance was called upon to navigate the gaps, paradoxes and excesses inherent in the testimonial process at hand, especially as it sought to bring previously unspeakable histories into the public sphere. Her conclusion, that claims to truth—and power—were made as much through the “affective, kinetic, sonic and visual” registers of the enacted testimonies as through their narrative content (159), equally pertains to the hearings in Canada. The two Commissions went about their work in similar ways, essentially following theatre practices as they se‐ lected different casts of witnesses in given locations, directed their public performances and stage‐managed the proceedings to show reconciliation in progress on a national scale. Canada’s TRC proffered a greater range of testimonial platforms—including Commissioner’s panels with simultane‐ ous video projection as well as the smaller sharing circles—but its most

5



The TRC estimates that there were over 155,000 visits in total to the National Events (where visit means attending for one day at one event). Over 9000 for‐ mer IRS students registered for the gatherings and many more came without registering, often bringing family members and friends (Truth and Reconcilia‐ tion Commission of Canada 2015, 25). News media report that associated events (e.g. reconciliation marches, concerts and town hall forums) attracted up to 20,000 people on occasion, with on‐line audiences in the thousands in as many as 36 countries.

250 HELEN GILBERT distinctive feature was the integration of aesthetically‐coded perfor‐ mances, often as programmed highlights, into the fabric of the National Events. As a result, reconciliation was not only steeped in ceremony but also leavened with entertainment. Aboriginal influences on the form and content of each gathering are especially evident in this particular conjunc‐ tion. The four‐day events, each themed according to one of Seven Sacred Teachings (truth, humility, love, honesty, wisdom, respect and courage), typically opened with the lighting of the Sacred Fire and closed with its ex‐ tinguishment. Other ceremonial performances included formal welcomes, sunrise and pipe ceremonies, and survivors’ processions. Most afternoons ended with a Call to Gather, which brought participants together in a com‐ mon venue to watch projected video excerpts of the day’s main highlights and to reflect on the proceedings. As part of such sessions, various guests or witnesses were invited to make offerings to a specially carved Bentwood Box to commemorate personal journeys towards healing and reconcilia‐ tion.6 Among the many items placed in the box were tear‐soaked tissues collected daily by the Commission’s health support workers as symbols of expended grief. Evenings were normally given to some form of entertain‐ ment, much of it unashamedly populist. Each national event staged a talent show inviting all (would‐be) performers to share their gifts, as well as a free concert featuring a range of local Indigenous artists alongside stars such as Innu folk rock legend Florent Vollant and Cree singer‐songwriter Buffy St Marie, who is also a well‐known social activist. The musical numbers that dominated these shows took many acoustic and electronic forms, ranging from throat singing and powwow drumming to performances of hip‐hop, jazz and blues. Most concert line‐ups also featured dances and stand‐up comedy, each involving various degrees of audience participation. For their part, the talent nights assembled a wide variety of solo and group acts by people of all ages; some were obviously seasoned artists, others amateurs

6



This box, carved by Coast Salish artist Luke Marston from a single piece of red cedar, steamed and bent into place, was designed to be a lasting tribute to all residential school survivors. As well as representing First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples, Marston’s carving also remembers his grandmother, whose hand was damaged after she was thrown down the stairs as a child by a nun. The Bentwood Box functioned not only as a receptacle for material items dur‐ ing the TRC hearings but also as a covenant of sorts, becoming a highly visible symbol of the Commission's work towards healing social and cultural rifts.

ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 251 just having fun or trying out a new routine. The fare consisted mainly of song, dance and spoken‐word performances (Indigenous‐style), along with some quirkier acts, notably an Elvis Presley impersonation at the Montreal TRC and a puppetry show in Halifax. Some of the national gatherings also incorporated special entertainments that drew on local traditions or events and reached out to settler communities while simultaneously mobilizing intertribal connections. Examples include a thundering Round Dance open to all‐comers in Saskatoon and a (heavily‐discounted) BC Sports Hall of Fame ice hockey match in Vancouver, which featured a tribute to First Na‐ tions players across the country. Sporting prowess of a different kind was on show at the Northern Event in Inuvik through demonstrations of tradi‐ tional Inuit games. Screen performances likewise found a place in the TRC’s capacious cultural programming, albeit initially in auxiliary sessions containing mostly short documentaries that were dwarfed in impact by the massive live‐feed video projections in the main witnessing panels. One fiction fea‐ ture stood out for me among the films offered in Halifax: Ojibway poet Ar‐ mand Garnet Ruffo’s (2010) A Windigo Tale, which couches interwoven sto‐ ries of a family haunted by residential school traumas within the narrative framework of a redemptive road movie. As the TRC’s work gathered pace, new screen offerings emerged to register—or creatively imagine—Indige‐ nous experiences of the IRS system and, in a few cases, of the official recon‐ ciliation process itself. Again it was documentary film that seemed to catch the Commission’s eye, with the notable exception of Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), Jeff Barnaby’s award‐winning debut feature about a teenage girl’s plot for revenge against a scheming and abusive government agent. Some of the new films were given prominent spots in the schedules at the Vancouver and Edmonton National Events, with Q&As afterwards, and many more circulated in the dedicated screening rooms at each gathering. In this respect, the TRC became a significant node in Indigenous cinema networks, allowing lesser‐known filmmakers to build their resumes as well as reach new audiences. When the TRC wrapped up its work with a final gathering in 2015 in Ottawa, the Commission paid special attention to the arts (broadly de‐ fined) as a vital, ongoing platform for reconciliation. The programme fea‐ tured public discussions on this particular subject at both the National Gal‐ lery and the National Arts Centre, the latter followed by a showing of the



252 HELEN GILBERT TRC’s largest sponsored creative project, Going Home Star—Truth and Rec‐ onciliation by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. This intercultural work, which was years in the making before its 2014 premiere, uses the idioms of clas‐ sical dance to stage a visceral, densely symbolic reckoning with colonial his‐ tory. Its protagonists are a restless young urban Aboriginal woman and a homeless residential school survivor/trickster. His stories and visions teach her Aboriginal ways of bearing witness to the injustices of the IRS system while she, in turn, helps him to carry the burden of a traumatic past. The project’s creative team included Indigenous talents such as Métis nov‐ elist Joseph Boyden, as scenarist, and Inuit throat‐singer Tanya Tagaq, who worked with the Northern Cree Singers and the Winnipeg Symphony Or‐ chestra to help develop and perform an experimental score that bridges the gap between Aboriginal memory and western choreography. Despite early criticisms because its cast lacked Indigenous dancers, the ballet was hailed as a watershed production for the nation’s flagship dance company. A well‐ received four‐province tour in 2016 consolidated this effort when review‐ ers—and First Nations leaders—lauded those involved for having artfully and sensitively presented a Canadian story, not just an Indigenous one (see, Enright 2016; Smith 2016). This achievement aligned neatly with the TRC’s mission to build a collective commitment to reconciliation across the na‐ tion. The spectrum of performances described here in précis suggests the TRC’s instrumental investment in the arts not just as a means to heal social schisms but also a way to heighten its own visibility. In this respect, the polymorphous theatricality of the national events served the Commis‐ sion’s aspirations to both accommodate different kinds of public state‐ ments and appeal to a wide range of audiences in a format intended to in‐ digenize (and Canadianize) the imported truth commission genre. Perfor‐ mance thus functioned for the official reconciliation process as a key site of what John Gillis (1996) calls “memory work”: the physical, mental and emo‐ tional labour, embedded in power relations, that determines what is re‐ membered (or forgotten) by different societies and cultural groups (3). Workshops designed to harness traditional cultural practices to the theme and ethos of reconciliation also involved conscious, visible performances of indigeneity—or of support for Indigenous communities on the part of set‐ tler participants—that helped to localize the redress process. These hands‐ on sessions focused on building competencies in Aboriginal languages, arts



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 253 and crafts, including, in one instance, storytelling techniques for digital me‐ dia. At the same time, the fruits of such labours were tacitly valorized by the inclusion of a dedicated area for Aboriginal artisans and vendors to set up stalls in each TRC venue, usually alongside educational displays and pin‐up boards featuring archival photographs of residential school children in the relevant provinces. Among the many items on sale in these busy malls were postcards and T‐shirts memorializing the TRC itself. This meshing of commerce and public education, though kept to spaces separate from the testimonial rooms, sometimes gave the events I attended the feel of a cultural exposition, particularly in Halifax where the main venue came with all the expected trappings of a trade‐oriented con‐ vention centre. Most of the other TRC national events were also staged in convention facilities, but ones inflected to varying degrees by histories of Indigenous inhabitation, especially where there were adjacent outdoor spaces for learning tents, markets, food stalls and entertainment. In Saska‐ toon, for instance, we gathered at Prairieland Park, site of the 2013 Cana‐ dian Indian Rodeo final and home annually to various National Aboriginal Day activities, while in Winnipeg the hearings were held at The Forks, a re‐ vitalized central‐city parkland precinct with a 6000‐year history as a meet‐ ing and trading place for Aboriginal peoples—and more latterly settlers and tourists. The Oodena Celebration Circle, a popular amphitheatre used for powwows and other intertribal gatherings, makes this Indigenous her‐ itage visible amid the precinct’s extensive attractions. At the time of the TRC hearings in 2010, construction had just begun a few hundred metres away on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which now houses the Bent‐ wood Box in displays about the Indian Residential School system and the national reconciliation process. Despite its lofty aims, the museum has been criticized by some Indigenous activists for downplaying the genocide of Ab‐ original peoples among the many other human rights narratives it tells. The underlying architecture of the TRC National Events seems to bear the influence of contemporary interdisciplinary arts festival models in so far as it integrated theatricalized expressions of topical themes with other cultural exchanges, intangible as well as material, to produce net‐ worked local gatherings attuned to specific social concerns, however tem‐ porarily. This resonance makes practical and even political sense given the acknowledged successes of events such as Planet IndigenUS and the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, both held in Toronto, and the



254 HELEN GILBERT Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver. Such initiatives have drawn in settler as well as Indigenous audiences and increased the visibility—and accessi‐ bility—of Aboriginal cultures across Canada over the last two decades, while also providing regular international platforms for Indigenous arts from other parts of the world. Like these festivals, the TRC gatherings were designed to operate as sites of intercultural communitas with numerous spatialized connections, even reaching as far as London in 2013 when the Commission’s Chair, Justice Murray Sinclair (Ojibway), appeared by video link for a special ‘Evening of Truth and Reconciliation’ at the Origins Festi‐ val of First Nations, joining panelists from Maori, Mayan, Aboriginal Aus‐ tralian and Native American communities. What this event staged, along‐ side specific histories of Indigenous trauma, healing and resurgence, was the growing currency of reconciliation as a democratic project spanning dif‐ ferent postcolonial countries. Beyond their festival‐like frameworks and their evident imbrica‐ tion in transnational, late capitalist “ideoscapes” of democracy (Appadu‐ rai’s term, 1996, 36), the Canadian TRC events were nonetheless indelibly shaped by Indigenous performance genealogies. In this respect, the hear‐ ings drew not only from Aboriginal ceremonial practices but also from a long history of fairground entertainments and travelling shows reappropri‐ ated from colonial repertoires during the Indigenous rights movements of the 1960s–70s and moulded into the form of the modern urban intertribal powwow. These multi‐ethnic gatherings are not just spaces for culturalist performances of Indigenous identities. As Kathleen Buddle (2004) argues, they are also dynamic contact zones for the ongoing mediation of indigene‐ ity within and across cultures through the performative registers of speech, song, dance, music, dress, ceremony, trade and creative digital practice (30). The TRC’s mobilization of both embodied arts and digital media to elicit public engagement with the reconciliation process is in keeping with the focus in urban powwow circuits on the “social uses of expressive cul‐ ture” rather than its “defining elements”. Buddle sees this emphasis as what makes powwow practice in North America “a crucial feature in the appa‐ ratus of an Aboriginal public sphere” (34). Even as it pegged reconciliation to an implicitly Christian drama of revelation and catharsis through the tes‐ timonial hearings, the Commission worked through its artistic programmes to validate that public sphere as an alternative domain by which to consider



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 255 the history and impacts of residential schooling. On a structural level, ech‐ oes of powwow practice were also evident in the TRC’s main modality as a travelling roadshow of sorts, blending commemoration, spirituality, enter‐ tainment, education and commerce in distinct, site‐responsive iterations across the country. The enactment of family bonds—and of kinship rela‐ tions with land and other non‐human beings—is fundamental to powwow traditions and likewise seemed to animate the TRC events I attended. Espe‐ cially notable were the ways in which the performance programme made spaces for children to participate in a form of memory work often seen as solely the province of adults. There were children in the concert and talent show line‐ups, including an Arcadian trio known as the Doucet Sisters in Halifax (see fig. 1), and many young people in the audiences, some stepping up to the stage when MCs or other performers invited them to join the danc‐ ing or singing. In the final evening of the Atlantic National Event, a group of former IRS students’ grandchildren—most of them between ages four and eight—sang “Happy Birthday” in Mi’kmaq, Inuktitut, Cree, French and Eng‐ lish to honour all those not able to celebrate their birthdays while attending residential school. The other hearings featured similar birthday parties (with candles and cupcakes) and some programmes made special provision for school children to visit exhibits or participate in workshop activities. This stress on young people’s involvement in the reconciliation process served not only as a poignant reminder of childhoods brutally curtailed by the IRS system but also, and more crucially, as a potent visceral strategy for fostering the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous values and prac‐ tices previously interrupted by a “civilizing” mission designed deliberately, if not explicitly, to “kill the Indian in the child”.7

7



The oft‐repeated phrase, sometimes wrongly attributed to poet‐bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott, who oversaw the IRS system’s rapid expansion in the 1920s–30s, seems to have derived from a 1892 speech by Col. Richard C. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania: “[A]ll the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (see Abley 2014, 36–37).

256 HELEN GILBERT

Figure 1, The Doucet Sisters in performance at the TRC Atlantic National Event concert, Halifax, Oct. 28, 2011. Photo: Marites N. Sison, courtesy of the Anglican Journal.

Powwow customs were also abundantly visible in the specific style of the TRC concerts and talent shows, as well as in their content, which in‐ cluded some acts drawn from powwow circuits. Signs of such influence could be found in the tipis marking the different public stages as Indigenous spaces, the drum processions and prayers framing the entertainments, the pulse and pace of the performances, the embrace of amateur talent, the proud display of Aboriginal aesthetics in action and, above all, the strong sense of intertribal solidarity working in tandem with an inclusive ethos that also welcomed non‐Indigenous audiences and participants. The Master (or Mistress) of Ceremonies is integral to the generation of such communi‐ ties and coalitions. At the TRC entertainments, MCs were typically well‐ known Indigenous comedians and/or media show hosts who readily turned their banter to the matter and mode of the business at hand, some‐ times poking fun at the very concept of reconciliation, in its official rheto‐ rics at least, through witty commentary, innuendo or physical humour. I watched many instances of such reflexivity at the talent night in Halifax, as emceed by Tlingit stand‐up comedy duo Sharon Shorty and Duane Aucoin in their traditional stage personas of Gramma Susie and Cash Creek Charlie.



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 257 Styled for the event as vagabond TRC groupies who had accidentally wan‐ dered onto the stage, the duo first feigned astonishment at finally finding themselves part of a well‐funded show, and then turned their repartee to the vexing question of what truth they might impart, having arrived (once again) at just the place for its telling. As the evening progressed, they of‐ fered an impersonation of an Indian Affairs officer, a grouse dance lesson in which the Commissioners were enticed on stage as pupils, to great hilar‐ ity among the audience, and periodic jokes about sex, reservation life, gen‐ der roles, Aboriginal stereotypes and white hippie supporters. As acci‐ dental hosts, Susie and Charlie also called the order of events, encouraged the performers in their efforts and periodically spurred those of us on the sidelines to join the action, just as powwow MCs do. Some of the pair’s quips were spoken in Tlingit with parodied English translations as they mocked their own imperfect mastery of their mother tongue while also comically mashing up various Aboriginal names and titles in the talent lineup. There were other subtle jests about intertribal identity politics until, trickster‐ like, the feisty elders shed their guises to take on new mantles as young, country music MCs. Although I missed some of the cultural references, I un‐ derstood these comic interludes as multiple, vernacular truths, not just mo‐ ments of levity to balance the sorrow expressed in many of the survivor testimonies we had witnessed to that point. Taking a lead from the trickster energies animating their performances, we might also interpret the MCs’ vignettes as suggesting the ambiguity and relativity of the TRC as a sanc‐ tioned space for addressing violations of human rights. In this context, the talent show provided different entry points for joining—or sidestepping— the national “truth gathering” process as well as avenues for scepticism, al‐ beit fairly gentle, about the efficacy of that project. The various performances described in brief in this essay consti‐ tute a form of embodied social work in dialogue with international rights discourses and their associated cultural flows but in tune with the conven‐ tions and creativity of an Aboriginal public sphere that has long fostered imaginative ways to navigate injustice. These performances stage the gift of participation in the reconciliation process rather than the gesture of refusal that Garneau advocates, but can nevertheless work in coalition with a poli‐ tics of refusal to shift the grounds on which both rights and responsibilities are negotiated at the level of cultural praxis. Such tactical coalitions are ev‐ ident in Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō) and Keavy Martin’s recent, edited volume



258 HELEN GILBERT (2016) on the instrumentality of the arts in Canada’s reconciliation process. The book puts apparently incongruous perspectives into conversation to show the TRC as “a venue of possibility” for aesthetic and sensory interven‐ tions that had the potential to constitute political action as well as alterna‐ tive forms of healing (7). This claim is particularly borne out by several case studies of the performativity of Aboriginal songs at the National Events. While some songs enacted local protocols of relationality and social respon‐ sibility (Diamond 2016), others brought Indigenous modes of personhood and (intimate) public assembly to the fore (Dueck 2016). At the same time, however, the power of songs to affectively engage audiences across the so‐ cial strata left listening positions available, especially to settlers, wherein empathy could stand as a surrogate for restitution or other forms of activ‐ ism (Robinson 2016). These studies anticipate my essay’s main focus on non‐representational aspects of performance in order to open up ideas about the inclusions and exclusions of human rights narratives. Less directly, my analysis of the TRC national hearings as events insistently shaped by the apparatus of theatricality puts pressure on narra‐ tivity as the assumed locus of reconciliation and redress. At its best, such theatricality has the potential to creatively realign the many narrative per‐ formances of grief, sorrow and forgiveness seen and heard at the public tes‐ timonial sessions and witnessed in absentia by interested media users. Paths to cultural survival lead from such vantage points, as Margaret Werry (2011) intimates: “Performance, in the context of the state, is both a re‐ source of the dominant culture (which requires repetition, participation, and witness to uphold that dominance) and of the powerless, who use it to navigate, to inhabit, and even to trick systems not of their making” (xxxiii). In this respect, while individual artists lent their talents to Canada’s truth and reconciliation process, what was ultimately on show was a collective investment in performance itself. The Aboriginal walkers who journeyed together to Halifax for the Atlantic hearings committed to that investment in their own distinctive ways. By the time the Commission’s public work drew to a close four years later, most of them had notched up several long‐ distance TRC treks and the group as a whole had earned the name of the Oskapewisk (the helpers). I have come to see these walking performances as rehearsals of and for a resurgent Indigenous community politically en‐ ergized by the redistribution of affective resources such as hope and deter‐ mination. At another level, the walks are also acts of gathering that help us



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 259 to imagine what the embodied action (rather than the oft‐heard TRC meta‐ phor) of “walking together” in solidarity might encompass. Acknowledgements This research was funded by the European Research Council as part of the interdisciplinary project “Indigeneity in the Contemporary World”, which I led from 2009–14. The TRC fieldwork component was un‐ dertaken in dialogue with a team of scholars and artists led by Keavy Martin and Dylan Robinson with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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260 HELEN GILBERT Dueck, Byron. 2016. “Song, Participation, and Intimacy at Truth and Recon‐ ciliation Gatherings.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Ac‐ tion in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Can‐ ada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 267–82. Water‐ loo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Enright, Robert. 2016. “RWB’s Going Home Star—Truth and Reconciliation Is Inspired and Inspiring.” CBC News, October 2: http://www.cb c.ca/news/canada/manitoba/rwb‐s‐going‐home‐star‐truth‐and‐r econciliation‐is‐inspired‐and‐inspiring‐1.2785096. Garneau, David. 2016. “Imaginary Places of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation and Healing.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 21–42. Wa‐ terloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Gillis, John, ed. 1996. “Introduction.” Commemorations: The Politics of Na‐ tional Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. James, Matt. 2012. “A Carnival of Truth? Knowledge, Ignorance and the Ca‐ nadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 6 (2): 1–23. McKegney, Sam. 2013. “‘Pain, Pleasure, Shame. Shame’: Masculine Embodi‐ ment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization.” Canadian Lit‐ erature 216: 12–33. Million, Dian. 2013. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Posel, Deborah. 2008. “History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Public Culture 20 (1): 119– 41. Robinson, Dylan. 2016. “Intergenerational Sense, Intergenerational Re‐ sponsibility.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 1–20. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Robinson, Dylan and Keavy Martin, eds. 2016. “Introduction: The Body is a Resonant Chamber.” Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ed‐ ited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 43–65. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.



ON SHOW: TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN CANADA 261 Schwartz, Daniel. 2015. “Truth and Reconciliation: By the Numbers.” CBC News Online, June 2. www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/truth‐and‐rec‐ onciliation‐commission‐by‐the‐numbers‐1.3096185. Slaughter, Joseph R. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Smith, Janet. 2016. “Going Home Star an Unusually Intense, Artfully Meta‐ phorical Night at the Ballet.” The Georgia Strait, April 8. http://www.straight.com/arts/674681/going‐home‐star‐unusual ly‐intense‐artfully‐metaphorical‐night‐ballet Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. n.d. [2007] “Our Man‐ date.” http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=7 Accessed October 10, 2016. ‐‐‐. n.d. “Honorary Witnesses.” http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution /index.php?p=7 Accessed October 10, 2016. ‐‐‐. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Can‐ ada. www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Honouring_ the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf. Vedal, Lauren. 2013. “Closure or Connection? Healing from Trauma in Rich‐ ard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed.” Studies in Canadian Literature 38 (2): 106–25. Werry, Margaret. 2011. The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism and Race in New Zealand. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minne‐ sota Press, 2011.





Cognitive Maps and Spatial Narratives: US Deportation Hearings and the Imaginative Cartographies of Forced Removal Ethan Blue 1 Maps enact power. Where a person stands in relation to a map— on one side of a borderline or another—has profound conse‐ quences about their life chances, their legal status, the privileges of citizenship and belonging or the alienage that curtails their full legal personhood, their rights to have rights. (Arendt 1973) On its most fundamental level, a map is a graphical representation of a set of relations. Maps are visual arguments and stories; they make claims and harbor ideals, hopes, desires, biases, prejudices, and violences. They are always relational, in dialogue or in contact with someone or something. They [. . .] are fundamentally propo‐ sitions, suffused with world‐views, structuring epistemologies, and ways of seeing. (Presner, Shephard, and Kawano 2014, 15) In the settler‐colonial transformation of conquered lands into sov‐ ereign territory, the United States developed graphical knowledge of abso‐ lute space as a means to understand and control the peoples, resources and boundaries of its new domain (Goetzman 1966; Farman 2010; White 2010, St. John 2011; Adelman and Aron 1999). Military conquest and land seizure required one kind of map, but controlling globally mobile populations, es‐ pecially those from distant regions affected by modern empire, required another. To this end, between 1875 and 1929, immigration controls hard‐ ened around increasingly policed geopolitical borders to regulate the arri‐ val of desired migrants, and were enabled by a host of laws expanding the categories of prohibited peoples—Chinese laborers, prostitutes, anarchists, the so‐called feebleminded comprise a very partial list—and identifying the places from whence they must not come. 263

264 ETHAN BLUE In what follows, I draw on Fredric Jameson’s (1988) concept of cog‐ nitive mapping—the subjective process of understanding both geographic and political space—to assess early 20th‐century immigration case files for evidence of contests over migrants’ and immigration agents’ understand‐ ings of space and movement. Mapping depicts and enacts spatialized power relations, but understanding movement through space requires a sense of narrative. During the deportation hearings I examine, immigration inspec‐ tors gauged the desirability or repugnance of those they investigated, from their economic and moral status to their political sensibilities and mental capacities. Officials’ first steps were to check a migrant’s papers: certificates of residency or legal status had become, after the 1892 Geary Act, a domi‐ nant mechanism of both immigrant control and contest, as migrants pro‐ duced fraudulent documents to fool inspectors (Salyer 1995; McKeown 2003; Hsu 2000; Lee 2003; Pfaelzer 2007). But immigration officials also sought migrants’ life stories, and descriptions of their travels, or spatial nar‐ ratives, which became a site of struggle between state agents and migrants.1 A spatial narrative is a travel story based on the landmarks and understand‐ ings developed through cognitive mapping; it depicts a migrant’s effort to conceive of, inhabit, and navigate political and geographic space. Spatial narratives are specifically situated representations of mobility that meshed or conflicted with a documentary record as available (or not) from other immigration sources (such as entry or exit records, or certificates of resi‐ dence) or from shipping firms. In giving their life histories, migrants drew on their cognitive maps of the United States to claim spatial and legal legit‐ imacy. Yet during deportation hearings, inspectors tested migrants’ spatial narratives against state spatial imaginaries, codified across an official geog‐ raphy of border formation and regulated entry. When a migrant’s narrative conflicted with state agents’ spatial imaginaries—imaginaries which offi‐ cials took as an increasingly common‐sense matter of objective spatial re‐ lations—officials used this information to weaken the migrant’s case to re‐ main. Thus immigration officials who were increasingly sceptical about fraudulent papers employed spatial narratives and geographic emplot‐ ments to supplement their reliance on documents, a practice validating Hayden White’s (1980) insistence that narrativity—spatial or historical—

1



Ridge, Lafreniere, and Nesbit (2013) use the term “spatial narrative” to refer to a curated journey through a richly annotated, web‐based map.

COGNITIVE MAPS AND SPATIAL NARRATIVES 265 gains import in conflicts over truth, law and authority. In combating clan‐ destine arrivals, the state tried to master knowledge of movement across space; or, to use a literary term with geographic resonance, the emplotment of spatial narratives. Yet migrants were scarcely passive in deportation hearings; their spatial narratives strategically reflected their own experi‐ ences and calculations, combining a mixture of truth and plausible fiction (Davis 1987, Ewick and Silbey 1995) based on their cognitive maps and the lessons they had learned en route. Richer historical knowledge of interior deportation hearings (rather than port‐of‐entry interrogations) is all the more relevant if, as Elliott Young (2014, 161) has argued, US immigration scholars have over‐emphasized the numerical significance of fraudulent entry, and underestimated the importance of clandestine entry. Moreover, given the massive expansion of the US deportation regime over the 20th and 21st centuries (De Genova and Peutz 2010; Kanstroom 2007; Hester 2015), the micropolitics of deportation hearings are necessary for under‐ standing the experience of migration and modern statecraft. 2 Immigrant restriction and selective criminalization after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act impeded but never stopped migrants displaced by the forces of racial capitalism and empire from seeking opportunities in the United States. Exclusion forced travel underground, and along what many came to call the “crooked path” of covert migration. These routes could be exceedingly complex. Among the Chinese, who were the most radically ex‐ cluded, covert travel was often paid for by kin networks, enabled by trans‐ national shipping firms; it was overseen by smugglers with the ability to cross vast distances, strike deals with local officials, traverse the United States’ Canadian and Mexican borders, and provide contacts and support in destination cities (Young 2014). Many Chinese travelers began in villages in Guandong, would link through Hong Kong, Yokohama, Honolulu, and from there, to the Americas. US Immigration agents discovered one net‐ work that linked Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Juarez/El Paso, replete with dor‐ mitories at holding areas where migrants awaited the next available north‐ ern run, and in which instructors who had lived in San Francisco or else‐ where in the US taught basic English and the geography of some US cities (Young 2014, 176). Many migrants so coached could pinpoint their exact alleged place of birth in San Francisco; others were given English language



266 ETHAN BLUE newspapers or dictionaries to brush up on their skills. Indeed, clandestine migrants’ training regimen paralleled the “paper” sons’ and daughters’ ge‐ nealogical preparation for questioning at ports of entry. In 1906, immigra‐ tion agents feared that immigration brokers distributed 10,000 copies of a detailed San Francisco map to their prospective clients (Lee 2003, 203). Regardless of the actual paths that they had travelled, migrants would do well to develop a compelling spatial narrative of their journey. The lived experience of travel, but also the ability to tell a story that ac‐ corded to official spatial representations, would require a kind of spatial double consciousness (Du Bois 1903); a parallax narration of lived experi‐ ence and formal representation. Doing so would help them tell a convincing story to immigrant officials, whose spatial knowledges used geography as another means to entrap and then expel those they deemed undesirable. The maps, train routes, and dictionaries that migrants carried were im‐ portant to help find their way in strange new cities or the covert networks that connected them, but also because the knowledge they contained would help if they were brought before immigration agents within the United States. After 1900, officials proclaimed the importance of scouring the inte‐ rior spaces of the nation for migrants who had entered covertly or else should not have been permitted to enter in the first place. Commissioner‐ General of Immigration Frank Sargent’s 1903 Annual Report argued that “any reasonable amount of success in the continuance of the exclusion pol‐ icy [depends upon] the success of the expulsion [policies] as well” (quoted in Lee 2003, 224). Three years later, Sargent’s 1906 Report again declared “that even thickly settled city districts will not afford, as in the past, a safe‐ harbor for those who clandestinely enter” (quoted in Lee, 2003, 185–86). Deportation hearings combined both an “informal” preliminary ex‐ amination and a formal hearing. They were often conducted in a hospital, jail, prison visiting room, or asylum, and commonly after a migrant’s lengthy period in detention (Blue 2015). Immigration inspectors acted as prosecutor, defense, and judge, and conducted the hearings as if they were criminal trials (Van Vleck 1932). Inspectors bullied those they interro‐ gated; they asked leading questions and sought additional charges of de‐ portability. The preliminary examinations were deemed informal events, but only insofar as informality justified the prospective deportee’s lack of legal representation. Incriminating statements were fully admissible in for‐



COGNITIVE MAPS AND SPATIAL NARRATIVES 267 mal hearings. Despite what critics and even supporters understood as im‐ migration law’s summary character, none of this was taken as a diminution of aliens’ legal rights (Clark 1931, 331–32). In addition to reviewing whatever charges may have been brought before them, a major part of internal deportation hearings consisted of transcribing what Herman R. Landon (1943), Chief of the Exclusion and Ex‐ pulsion Division, called the migrant’s “personal history data”. Much of this included spatial information and the migrant’s life story. Calls to transcribe personal histories were codified in 1940, but the practice had been in place for many years. Spatial questions included the migrants’ city, province, and country of birth. They also included the most recent city of residence in their birth country; their most recent foreign residence; and the country from which they entered the United States. So too did agents demand the dates, places and manner of entry into the United States, as well as verifica‐ tion of the manner and place of entry (Landon 1943, 17–18). The infor‐ mation was scarcely a neutral means of ascertaining geographic fact, and it served multiple purposes. Firstly, it could help confirm the migrant’s non‐ citizen status, allowing deportation to proceed. Secondly, in the case of al‐ leged unlawful entry, the migrant held the burden of justifying their pres‐ ence. As written into the 1924 Immigration Act, “the burden of proof shall be entirely upon such alien to show that he entered the United States law‐ fully, and the time, place and manner of such entry into the United States” (US Congress 1924, Sec 23, 68th Congress, Sess 1, Ch 190, 165–66). Indeed, this information helped to construct a spatial narrative that would adhere to or depart from the immigrant inspectors’ sense of plausibility and more pointedly, verifiability, of permissible entry. This is one point where interior examinations differed from examinations at ports of entry. Spatial narratives, unlike the “paper family” histories tested at ports of entry, were contingent on the traveller alone and his or her cogni‐ tive maps. Unlike the paper sons’ and daughters’ complex genealogies, spa‐ tial narratives did not need to be verified by extended family members to be successful (Lau 2006, 48–60). But they did need to mesh with immigrant inspectors’ spatial imaginaries. 3 In September 1914, US immigration officials arrested nine Sikh men on an unnamed island in the Puget Sound off Washington State. Sikhs



268 ETHAN BLUE had been traveling to the North American West and along the Canadian and US Pacific coast since 1903, and faced white settler backlash, legal and ex‐ tralegal, for much of that time (Chang 2012, 106). Canadians attempted to halt Indian migration with the 1908 Continuous Journey Order. Ostensibly color‐blind, the legislation prohibited migrants who did not travel directly from their country of origin. In fact it targeted South Asian Indians, because there were no direct steamship routes from Calcutta to the Americas (Chang 2012, 124). The US, for its part, passed the 1917 Immigration Act to prohibit any migration from the “Asiatic Barred Zone”, which stretched more or less from Afghanistan to the Pacific (Ngai 2004, 37). US officials accused these nine men of trying to take advantage of the region’s relatively unguarded waterways to enter the United States without inspection. They were imprisoned and interrogated at the Seattle Detention House. When Sundar Singh was first questioned, the 26‐year‐old told the investigator that he had been born in Burggil village, in Punjab. In 1909, he explained, he traveled from Punjab to Hong Kong, and then San Francisco, landing in March or April 1909. He spent three months picking oranges and plums in Palerma, California, and about a year working for the Western Pa‐ cific railroad near Portola. He worked in Tracey, California for about six months, and walked to Marysville (about 110 miles), earning his keep from farm to farm along the way. He spent about a year there, picking sugar beets for a labor contractor. The inspector was especially curious about his time in Marysville. Q: “Which way [was the farm] from Marysville?” A: “I don’t know which way.” […] Q: “Is Marysville in the mountains, or on the plains?” A: “Plains.” Q: “How far away are the hills?” A: “Very far.” Q: “Is there any river or water there?” A: “No.” Q: “No river?” A: “Yes, a small rivulet, a small river.” Q: “How many?” A: “I don’t know how many.”



COGNITIVE MAPS AND SPATIAL NARRATIVES 269 Q: “Is [Marysville] on the railroad?” A: “There is no railroad there. I was working on the farm, didn’t see any railroad.”2 It may have been difficult for Singh to parse the examiners’ in‐ tended scale: did he mean a river on the farm, or in the town? The inspector tried to trip up Singh with what seemed to be first‐hand knowledge, bol‐ stered by a bird’s‐eye view: “There are three railroads running through Marysville and the town is situated at the junction of two rivers. [. . .] You couldn’t go anyplace without going through the town” (September 24, 1914 examination). Singh responded yes, there was a railroad, but it was far away from the farm where he worked, and he never went into the city. Given that the 1907 race riots Bellingham, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, were very real memories and the possibility existed of similar outbreaks in cities like Marysville, it wasn’t impossible that he would spend his time with other Sikhs and migrant workers on the farm itself. Nevertheless, Singh continued, he later traveled south and picked grapes in Fresno before looping north to Seattle. The inspector challenged Singh’s chronology, linking space, time, and labor into a coherent narrative: “‘You say you have been here only five years, yet you have only accounted for three years’” (September 24, 1914 examination). Singh responded as best he could, but failed to convince the inspector. “‘I have been walking around’ Singh explained, ‘working from place to place; I don’t remember the exact dates’” (September 24, 1914 examination). Inconsistencies in the spatial narratives and travel stories heightened the inspectors’ skepticism. Under prolonged questioning, a minor detail in Sundar Singh’s testimony contradicted what another man had said, and the likelihood of their remain‐ ing in the United States decreased.

2



September 24, 1914 examination, Case File 53852/19, RG 85, Entry 9, National Archives and Records Administration, Archive 1. All references to Sundar Singh’s case come from this case file. In some ways the questions about Marysville echoed questions asked about the geography of villages from whence Chinese migrants came, the difference being that the inspector may have had lived experience in addition to a Cartesian map of Marysville, while, as Madeleine Hsu (2000) has shown, he would likely have been profoundly ig‐ norant of village geography and only sought to test the migrant’s representa‐ tion against the immigration bureau’s paper record.

270 ETHAN BLUE Inspectors kept Singh and the others locked in Seattle’s crowded detention house for a week before a second round of interrogation. His nar‐ rative was consistent in most respects, but changed in others. He reiterated his place of birth and route to the United States, along with the kinds of ag‐ ricultural and railroad work he’d done in California. The crucial difference was that this time, rather than traveling south from Marysville to Fresno, he said he went north to Blaine, Washington, where he walked across the border into Canada and began working in lumber mills in and around Van‐ couver. Eventually, he decided to return to the United States, which led to his capture by US immigration officials (October 2, 1914 hearing). Here, more or less, were the two years missing from his narrative. Despite having earned a consistent living, he was deported to India under the provision of having been “likely to become a public charge”, and for entering the United States without inspection. His removal would, in theory, protect the rights of American workers and citizens from eugenic and racial threats, and, were he to become a public charge, prevent him from being a drain on the welfare state. 4 On the morning of March 26, 1919, police pulled Ng Ah Get and three other Chinese passengers from a train bound from Plattsburgh to New York City. They had done nothing specific to draw the train conduc‐ tor’s attention—other than simply being Chinese—but the conductor sent a telegram to the immigration services at Rouses Point, who then contacted local police. Authorities arrested Ng and the others, one of whom was a 12‐ year‐old boy, and held them in the Clinton County jail for two months be‐ fore their eventual removal.3 Ng was seemingly ill‐prepared for his interrogation; his attention was presumably on the life he would face in New York rather than on how to contest his arrest and trial. The 26‐year‐old was unable to produce proper documentation, and instead tried, unsuccessfully, to claim “paper son” status. If Ng’s knowledge of the United States was based on maps sup‐ plied by migrant smugglers or travel networks, he hadn’t studied them well,

3



All references for Ng Ah Get’s experience com from Case File 54650/3, RG 85, Entry 9, RG 85, Entry 9, National Archives and Records Administration, Archive 1, Washington DC.

COGNITIVE MAPS AND SPATIAL NARRATIVES 271 or was badly coached. When interrogated, he said he didn’t know where he was born. He said his father had been a laundryman in New York, though, and that his mother was born in “a small town a short distance from here”. But Ng could give neither the name of that town, nor details about his fa‐ ther’s New York laundry. It was unclear when his family had traveled from the United States to China, but when asked when he returned to the United States, he replied “‘A long time ago’”, but could not recall how many years it had been. He later said that he came to San Francisco from China when he was just over 20 years old, but he did not remember the name of the steamer. He said he lived in San Francisco for three or four years. Picking at holes in his story, the Inspector asked if he was given any papers by US of‐ ficials, or if he was asked any questions by immigration inspectors. He said he was not. “‘You just walked off the steamer and you were right in San Francisco?’” Ng couldn’t remember, and neither could he answer questions about life in San Francisco—the name or address of the laundry where he worked, important street names, or if there was or was not a Chinese thea‐ ter in the city. “‘I did not pay any attention to it’”. (March 28, 1919 exami‐ nation). Flustered, Ng contradicted himself, explaining that he had lived in both San Francisco and New York at the same time. The Inspector repeat‐ edly suggested that Ng had come to Plattsburg in an automobile from Can‐ ada, but Ng declared that he came by train “from the South . . . [from] San Francisco”. This indicated a misstep in cardinal direction and proximity, lo‐ cating two key nodes in Chinese American geographies—San Francisco and New York—more closely than the inspector would have done, further con‐ tradicting the inspector’s cognitive and Cartesian maps (March 28, 1919 examination). Ng’s clothing compounded his difficulties, because it indicated a different spatial narrative from the one he told. Chinese migrants were careful to dress in western rather than Chinese clothing to demonstrate be‐ longing (Pegler‐Gordon, 2009), but the tactic failed Ng. When challenged, he said his uncle had given him the entire outfit years earlier, but the In‐ spector thought the clothes looked quite new, and, moreover, pointed out that his linen collar and “Penman” undershirt were both Canadian brands (March 28, 1919 examination). Eventually, Ng’s attention flagged and his resolve weakened, and he said that he had been born in Hong Kong. On the transcript, a red pencil makes special note of this answer, which virtually guaranteed his removal (March 28, 1919, and April 15, 1919 examinations).



272 ETHAN BLUE 5 Despite profound asymmetries in the power relationships within deportation hearings, migrants did have the ability to influence the pro‐ ceedings. This was what many clandestine migrants attempted in their spa‐ tial narratives, after all. Those who were most successful would not have been caught or deported, but even among those who were unsuccessful, traces of their efforts remain. In November 1914, Germaine Monet was arrested in Portland, Or‐ egon for prostitution. Immigration officials charged her with having “com‐ mitted a [. . .] crime of moral turpitude prior to her entry”, submitting false documents, and entering the country without inspection (November 16, 1914 Arrest Warrant). 4 Investigators impugned Monet’s morality. Not only had she lived in a house of prostitution, but she admitted to living out of wedlock with a man for two years in in her native Belgium, and for three and a half years in Can‐ ada. She related her travels to the inspectors: from Brussels to Liverpool to Montreal, eventually to British Columbia and finally Portland. She was forthright about having worked as a prostitute, but hazy about the name of the ship on which she had traveled. This raised the inspector’s suspicions but did not overly concern him, because Monet’s prior testimony virtually assured her removal. But there was a problem. Monet could not be safely deported to Belgium because of the mounting European war. As a result, and because they were unwilling to pay for her imprisonment for a lengthy period, she was released from detention (December 12, 1914 Correspond‐ ence from J.B. Densmore to Portland Office). Sources do not specify Monet’s whereabouts after she left deten‐ tion. But in 1919, with the war over and as immigration officials sought to clear the backlog of removable aliens, they contacted Monet to arrange her travel. She replied, and told them that her real name was Germaine Rig‐ oulot. Neither was she really from Belgium; in fact, she had been born in Dijon, France. “‘I came to this country right after the war was declared’”, having “‘left Paris on the first day of August, 1914’”. The war had been fore‐ most in her mind when she misled officials about her birthplace. “‘I thought

4



All references and documents in Germaine Monet’s case come from Case File 53835/245, RG 85, Entry 9, National Archives and Records Administration, Ar‐ chive I.

COGNITIVE MAPS AND SPATIAL NARRATIVES 273 that if I said I was a Belgian’”, she explained, “‘I would not have to go back’” (Monet/Rigoulot to Bonham, April 12, 1919). She was astute. Other French women convicted on prostitution charges at the same time were deported despite concerns over safety or the availability of shipping lines. (See Cle‐ mence Gentry case file 53835/204, RG 85, NARA 1.) Despite Rigolout’s rev‐ elation, details of her spatial narrative remained vague. When pressed, she mentioned a French man with whom she traveled from Brussels to England and eventually to British Columbia, but refused to give his full name. She then traveled by train to Portland with a different man, while her initial companion went by boat (Monet/Rigoulot to Bonham, April 12, 1919). Portland’s Immigrant Inspector Bonham was furious. He fumed that Rig‐ oulot had lied “‘for the purpose of defeating, or at least delaying, deporta‐ tion, assuming and in this instance correctly, that if she claimed to be a sub‐ ject of Belgium she would not be returned thereto during the war’” (April 15, 1919 Correspondence from Bonham to Commissioner‐General). More‐ over, she appeared unrepentant about her status as a sex worker. In the context of the white slave panics of the early 20th century, women—white women more than women of color—might gain sympathy as coerced sex workers (Moloney 2012). But, Bonham railed, she “consistently refused” to help investigators identify her procurer or uncover the larger covert migra‐ tory or prostitution networks (April 15, 1919 Correspondence from Bon‐ ham to Commissioner‐General). Rigoulot might have been able to remain in the United States by seeking saviors in the immigration authorities and aid‐ ing their investigations, but she was unwilling to do so. Nevertheless, Rig‐ oulot effectively combined her status as white woman with knowledge of contemporary geopolitics into a useful spatial narrative. As a result, she managed to remain in Portland for five years longer than would have oth‐ erwise been possible, earning a living by whatever means, contributing to Portland’s underground sexual economy (Boag 2003; Shah 2011), and es‐ caping the ravages of a European war, when imperial powers turned on themselves (Du Bois 1915). 6 Clandestine migrants in the United States needed to master space across multiple scales and dimensions. It was not enough to have traveled the breadth of the planet, or to have negotiated the complex relationships and border crossings that migrant smugglers and border agents demanded.



274 ETHAN BLUE As a supplement to the false papers that would support claims of belonging, migrants needed a kind of spatial double consciousness, a fluency with eve‐ ryday spaces and stories that would overlay the immigration officials’ cog‐ nitive maps. In their recent volume HyperCities, digital humanities scholars Presner, Shephard and Kawano (2014) query how different mapping sys‐ tems interact through and via colonial conflict. In a gesture toward de‐co‐ lonial cartography, they ask “What, after all, happens to those spatial rep‐ resentations that cannot be georectified because they betray entirely in‐ commensurable spatial systems rooted in different notions of proximity and distance, memory and community, duration and extension?” (125). The spatial narratives that migrants gave in early 20th‐century deportation hearings might not mesh with immigration agents’ cognitive maps, but nei‐ ther did they enumerate alternative, transient, or de‐colonial cartographies in any straightforward manner. They were meant to deceive officials by op‐ erating on the dominant spatial register, but many of these spatial narra‐ tives showed that migrants had incompletely mastered state agents’ hege‐ monic cognitive maps. Just as many migrants’ language skills only partially meshed with those of US officials or their translators, so too were their spa‐ tial imaginaries halting translations of US territorialization. Their own cognitive maps, I suspect, had more to do with the im‐ mediacy of a vast journey through a manifestly hostile global, racial, politi‐ cal economy; their maps enabled connections within clandestine networks and a migrant underground, which only somewhat adhered to official US space. When interrogated, they were understandably reticent about dis‐ closing the realities of those networks. Their spatial narratives spoke to the much more immediate orientation of migrant survival in the lands they now inhabited. The incommensurabilities between official and migrant maps do speak, however, to the possibility of other spatialities. The nuance of subaltern migrant cartographies is not readily found among the depor‐ tation archives’ spatial narratives. As with many records gleaned from a disciplinary state, they can be read against the grain, but the most effective, and the most subversive, spatial narratives would literally escape appre‐ hension, remaining invisible. We would do better with sources less medi‐ ated by state transcription—memoirs (Bulosan 1973), poems etched into the walls at Angel Island (Lai, Lim, and Yung 1991), coaching maps pro‐



COGNITIVE MAPS AND SPATIAL NARRATIVES 275 duced to fool immigration agents, thick maps of Chinatowns and the net‐ works that linked overseas Chinese among them (Young 2014). Wrenched from home by the tumult of racial capitalism and the consequences of em‐ pire, clandestine migrants risked the danger of covert travel, the threat of criminalization or racial violence, and the indignities of exploitation at low wage labor. The spatial narratives found here shed light on early 20th‐cen‐ tury migrants’ navigations across the globe and into US political and geo‐ graphic space. The US state aimed to render clandestine migrants as “unde‐ sirable” and “illegal aliens”, and expel and punish them to protect its own sovereignty, territory and settler‐citizens. But migrants’ travels and persis‐ tence a century ago bespeak a sensibility beyond the nation‐state as arbiter of rights and freedoms, and mapped worlds, however incompletely, that may yet be possible beyond the boundaries of state, capital, and empire.

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“Visual history at its best!”: Visual Narrative and UNESCO’s 1951 Human Rights Exhibition Jane Lydon In November 1951 a travelling photographic exhibition titled simply Human Rights opened in Adelaide in its impressive Public Library lecture room on North Terrace, still the city’s cultural hub. Curated in Paris by UNESCO, the exhibition presented 110 photogravures (printed photo‐ graphs) depicting ancient manuscripts, sculptures, paintings, mosaics, en‐ gravings, and “contemporary photography”, that traced the “dramatic struggle of man, from earliest times, to assert his birth right to free citizen‐ ship” (UNESCO 1950). The exhibition aimed to explore five broad catego‐ ries of rights by showing “man successively as a physical organism, a moral personality, a worker, an intelligent being and a member of the commu‐ nity”, and so, as the Adelaide News explained on November 12, 1951, re‐ viewing the abolition of slavery, freedom of movement, protection against arbitrary arrest, freedom of the press, emancipation of women, right to ed‐ ucation, freedom of religion and the dignity of labour. In this essay I explore this exhibition and its Australian reception in the context of UNESCO’s attempts to harness the “universal language” of photography to disseminate the new system of principles embodied in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), pro‐ claimed in December 1948. At the end of the Second World War, this new legal and ethical framework was articulated through a range of visual nar‐ ratives that sought to create a sense of a universal humanity and a shared global culture through picturing “unity in diversity”. At this utopian histor‐ ical moment a new visual strategy was formulated of “struggle”, revealing violence and atrocity alongside a more harmonious vision of a global, uni‐ versal culture and history. As Article 1 of UNESCO’s constitution states, it would collaborate in the “work of advancing the mutual knowledge and un‐ derstanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication and to that end recommend such international agreements as may be necessary to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image” (UNESCO 2014). From 1945 to 1950 a cosmopolitan view of the future of interna‐ tionalism dominated intellectual and political visions of an anticipated new world order circulating around the creation of UNESCO. However, Glenda 279

280 JANE LYDON Sluga (2009) and others have traced continuities between the interwar lib‐ eral idealism of the League of Nations’ mandate system and its notions of imperial “trusteeship”, and postwar international efforts. The league’s aim to create world citizenship through education, symbolized by its slogan “One World in the things of the mind and spirit”, also underpinned the UN and UNESCO’s faith in the “universal power of knowledge”. Figures such as Julian Huxley, UNESCO’s first director general and an adherent of Darwin‐ ism, aimed for “unity‐in‐variety of the world’s art and culture”, to be achieved through a policy of miscegenation and education of the “darker races” and the less privileged (Winter 2006, 99–121). Although explicitly opposed to the racism of Nazism, nonetheless UNESCO’s political thinking in this immediate postwar period saw “development” of the world’s colo‐ nies as a new source of imperial legitimacy (Cooper and Packard 1997, Cooper 2006, Louis 1987). Similarly, conceptions of “the nature of man” re‐ lied upon foundational imperial narratives: in drafting the declaration, for example, debate regarding the relation between the individual and the community (Article 29) made extensive reference to Daniel Defoe’s Robin‐ son Crusoe—that “prototypically modern realistic novel” about a European who builds himself a colony in a remote land (Said 1993, xiii, Whyte 2014). Delegates agreed to temper the individualism of the UDHR by declaring that the free and full development of his personality could be implemented only in community. In this discussion, the novel’s Indigenous character, Friday, was not mentioned. As Joseph Slaughter (2007, 53) has pointed out, in ig‐ noring Friday, delegates rearticulated Defoe’s colonial characterization of the social relations of Crusoe’s island—in which there was no scope for Fri‐ day himself to become a protagonist or even a legal person. Photography became a major means of furthering UNESCO’s goals to overcome barriers of nation, language and illiteracy. The medium was already the basis of new forms of mass communication that had emerged during the 1940s, in the form of photo‐books, exhibitions, magazines and other ephemera. As Tom Allbeson (2015) has argued, postwar conceptions of photography as a universal language and of cultural diplomacy as a means to achieve mutual understanding were co‐constitutive, producing a standardized visual language that underpinned a shift from nationalist to internationalist conceptions of identity.



“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 281 The Family of Man, 1955 The most famous of the visual projects mounted during these years was the 1955 photographic exhibition, The Family of Man (FoM), curated by Edward Steichen for New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This interna‐ tional blockbuster contained 503 photos from 68 countries, and toured the world, showing the seemingly eternal dimensions of human life—birth, play, work, marriage, death. Steichen (1955) explained that FoM aimed to illustrate the “essential oneness of mankind throughout the world” (4), mir‐ roring mankind back to himself. It was tremendously popular, and by 1960 had been seen by around seven million people in 28 countries, Steichen noted that photography “gave visual communication its most simple, direct, universal language” (1966, 107). However, the FoM exhibition is now re‐ membered in terms of Roland Barthes’s anti‐humanist critique of its simul‐ taneously exoticizing and incorporative effects—emphasizing difference only to assert a transcendent sense of shared humanity, efface cultural and historical differences, and naturalize the status quo. Barthes’s (1972 [1957], 100–102) famous attack on the exhibition set out the primary ob‐ jection to such attempts to visualize universalism on the grounds of its ef‐ facing difference and history. This myth of the human “condition” rests on a very old mystifica‐ tion, which always consists in placing nature at the bottom of history. Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?), one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature. Progressive hu‐ manism, on the contrary, must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to scour nature, its “laws” and its “lim‐ its” in order to discover history there, and at last to establish nature itself as historical. Others have examined the FoM’s complicity with American cold war liberalism and its “benign view of an American world order stabilized by the rule of international law” (Sekula 1981, 19). Louis Kaplan (2005) ar‐ gues that its conception of global community echoed American liberal for‐ eign policy, with all its exclusions, excisions and suppressions. Despite the positive intent of Steichen’s assertion that “the family unit is the root of the family of man, and we are all alike” (1958, 160), as Kaplan points out, “the



282 JANE LYDON utopian inclusiveness of the ambiguous myth of human community de‐ mands a series of exclusions that mask inequalities and cultural hierar‐ chies” (2005, 74). More concrete attacks were also mounted at the time of the exhibition: in 1959, for example, Nigerian Theophilus Neokonkwo razored and tore down several images because he objected to the represen‐ tation of Africans as primitive and unclothed. The same year, the exhibi‐ tion’s hosts in Russia objected to an image of a Chinese beggar on the grounds that it undermined a new communist ally. Its Japanese sponsors insisted on including a large mural depicting the victims of the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These protests expressed national sensitivities concerning implied civilization and racial status as well as na‐ tional trauma, challenging the visual rhetoric of inclusivity and equality. Photographing Human Rights: Paris, 1949 Although the most famous of these postwar visual projects, the FoM was by no means unique. A year after the United Nations proclaimed the UDHR in 1948, it mounted an exhibition at the Palais Galleria designed “to convey a compelling visual history of human rights” and disseminate the abstract contents of the UDHR through a display of photographs, images, documents and objects (UNESCO 1950). The images were roughly divided into 14 themes, each covering a historical struggle for a set of five broad rights. Human rights, explained the album’s introduction, “are the outcome of a struggle that has been going on since the dawn of human history” (UNESCO 1950, 5). The text narrated rights as the culmination of human progress, conceived in global terms, explaining that “the illustrations mark the stages along the road leading from the cave‐man [. . .] to the free citizen of a modern democracy”. Twenty‐four images followed, offering a journey from prehistory to the postwar period, enfolding widely different cultures into a single human narrative of progress, expressed visually by photo‐ graphs of famous monuments, artefacts and architecture. The booklet ar‐ gued for a shared world history and culture, asserting that “these few land‐ marks emphasize the contributions made by all peoples, all nations and all civilizations to the present sum total of human rights. They underline the universality of those rights and the solidarity of mankind”. A second section points to the frailty of these conquests:



“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 283 violations of human rights by the totalitarian States imperilled the entire heritage of mankind. A war had to be fought to safeguard it. The United Nations organization was set up in response to the need for preventing fresh violations and therefore fresh conflict. A striking element of this popular and visual version of the UDHR is the emphasis on duty as the foundation of rights: an epigraph quoting Mahatma Gandhi stated, I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be de‐ served and preserved come from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. (UNESCO 1950, Preface) At the inception of human rights, visual collage was employed to assert a universal history and culture. Different cultures—and historical epochs—are visually juxtaposed within the album to emphasize specific themes such as “Emancipation of Women” (Figure 4), “Right to Education” (illustrated by a collage of three photographs and a painting showing peo‐ ple reading or in libraries), and “Social Security. Family and Property” (Fig‐ ure 3). These emphasize social stability and harmony, picturing an ideal way of life. Yet of particular interest is the exhibition’s innovative narrative of “struggle”, adumbrating a now‐dominant visual language of human rights as pictured through their violation. Significantly, while much of the exhibi‐ tion presages the harmonious, familial imagery of the FoM in its depiction of a shared way of life, a counter‐narrative of atrocity is introduced through images showing war dead, juxtaposing two images—soldiers washed ashore beside a pile of Nazi victims’ corpses at Buchenwald (Figure 1), and scenes of “book‐burning”—one an engraving, one a photograph of Nazis (Figure 2). In this way the UN exhibition can be seen to contribute to a new genre of atrocity imagery, marking the first deliberate and systematic use of atrocity imagery to picture the violation of the new concept of human rights, and forming a significant counterpart to the humanist conception of a shared human history, culture and identity.



284 JANE LYDON

Figure 1, War dead. UNESCO, Human Rights: Exhibition Album (1950)

Figure 2, Book-burning. UNESCO, Human Rights: Exhibition Album (1950)





Such photographic evidence for distant suffering has now come to assume a predominant place in global visual culture (e.g. Reinhardt et al



“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 285 2007, Kleinman and Kleinman 1996). As historians have shown, the shock‐ ing photographs emanating from the liberation of the camps in the wake of the Second World War gave photographs of atrocity a new documentary power (e.g. Brink 2000). In the immediate aftermath of the war, press cov‐ erage of the Holocaust obscured local understanding of the Jewish genocide by editorial practices that reported events in isolation, rather than as a de‐ liberate Nazi program (Struk 2004, Zelizer 1998, Anderson 2015). It was not until the 1990s that the “Holocaust” came to be defined as a coherent program in the way we understand it today. Nonetheless, photography be‐ came the pre‐eminent means of bearing witness to distant horror (Zelizer 1998), and over the following years a growing sense of outrage framed these images, inaugurating the principal modern media strategy of arous‐ ing empathy and arguing for rights. By picturing the history of human rights as a “struggle” against re‐ pression, the exhibition came to be read as a linear narrative, as, one by one, specific types of freedom were fought for and won. This modernist faith in progress was for many disrupted by growing recognition of what is now termed the Holocaust in the aftermath of the war, prompting scepticism to‐ ward grand narratives of progress, universality and equality. Today, a sub‐ stantial literature explores the nature of atrocity photography, arguing for its crucial status as proof of distant suffering; indeed, recent histories of hu‐ man rights argue that rights are only visible in their violation. Historian Lynn Hunt (2011), for example, argues that “Human rights and spectator‐ ship have a necessary yet vexed relationship. Rights come into existence when a group of people sees that their rights are being violated; it is the perception of violation that makes the rights palpable” (ix). Similarly, Susie Linfield (2011) suggests that photographs “are the perfect medium to mir‐ ror the lacunae at the heart of human rights ideals. It is awfully hard to pho‐ tograph a human right . . . in fact, rights don’t look like anything at all” (37). Instead, she suggests, photography shows us what those without rights, or those struggling for rights, may look like. For many, the shocking photo‐ graphs taken at the liberation of the Nazi camps have come to symbolize this message, and indeed to inaugurate a new era of photojournalism (e.g. Sontag 1978, 20; Zelizer 1998).



286 JANE LYDON The Exhibition’s Australian Reception After the Paris exhibition ended, 12,000 copies of a portable pho‐ tograph album intended to form the basis for local exhibitions were sent out to the fifty member states, including 20 copies that were sent to Aus‐ tralia. Australians were closely involved in the process of drafting, pro‐ claiming and disseminating the UDHR at the United Nations. Australia was one of the 51 founding member states of the UN and one of eight nations involved in drafting the Universal Declaration, largely due to the influential leadership of Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, the head of Australia’s delegation to the UN. In 1948, Evatt became President of the UN General Assembly and oversaw the adoption of the Universal Declaration (Australian Human Rights Commission 2015, Devereux 2005). Another prominent member of the Human Rights Working Committee was Australian lawyer Colonel Roy Hodgson (Glendon 2001). However, the form of Australia’s engagement with the declaration and its application at home were shaped by the partic‐ ular political and administrative individuals involved, as well as restrictive domestic attitudes toward the rights of immigrants, women and Indigenous people. When the UNESCO exhibition reached Australia in 1951, it was mounted for display in Queensland and in South Australia, presumably due to the enthusiasm of local UNESCO committees. It opened first in Brisbane in July, heralded by the Courier Mail Friday July 27, 1951 as “Visual history at its best!” and one of the “most formative and educative displays of pic‐ tures yet assembled on the subject of human rights” (2). The Adelaide exhi‐ bition was launched in November by Walter Duncan (1903–1987), a pro‐ fessor of political science and history at the University of Adelaide, and a champion of adult education. Duncan was also a left‐wing liberal, a Soviet sympathiser, and a critic of capitalism, imperialism and religion (Stretton 2007). In his speech, Duncan offered a challenge to Australians, in arguing that “people still had to be awakened to the significance and implications of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which their Governments had agreed”. As the Adelaide Advertiser recorded on November 13, 1951, Dun‐ can pointed out that “not all of the rights in the declaration are recognised in every country”, and suggested that South Australians might examine the declaration and see how many are recognised here. Some comparatively recent rights included the right to



“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 287 work, to rest and leisure, to form trade unions, to equal pay for equal work, to education and to participation in culture. [. . .] The right to form trade unions was only recently acknowledged in the US. [. . .] In South Australia, the right to equal pay for equal work seems to have aroused some controversy recently. (2) The same report noted that Duncan thought the declaration was a “supremely worthwhile” goal, and represented “the ends for which the State and governments existed”. He concluded, the report continued, that “it can never be sufficiently emphasised that the end of all State action is the development of individual personality. That is, respect for the dignity and rights of the individual”. Duncan’s view of the declaration as a means to challenge the status quo was, however, contradicted by media responses, which remained anodyne. Despite Duncan’s radical views, his challenging speech and particularly his reference to “equal pay for equal work”—a ref‐ erence to South Australia’s strong feminist tradition—the exhibition did not spark confrontation. Two images from the exhibition were reproduced in Adelaide newspapers over the following days: an image of book‐burning, or atrocity, and a portrait of a Maori mother and child (Figure 3), neatly encapsulating the twin themes of familial humanism and “struggle” that were to become emblematic of the modern visual discourse of human rights. On November 13, the Advertiser reproduced a 17th‐century engrav‐ ing headlined “Books Burnt Publicly” (Figure 2), illustrating the right to freedom of thought and opinion. The accompanying text on page two ar‐ gued that “rulers have checked the progress of civilisation by silencing re‐ formers, persecuting scientists and philosophers, and burning libraries, as pictured above. [. . .] The freedom of thought and opinion is illustrated in a large section of the exhibition”. On November 14, the Adelaide News captioned a page 3 image of a Maori mother teaching her child how to weave rushes, “Security of Family Life”. It argued that they represented “the need for a calm, cheerful home in which each member respects the rights of others”, and commented: A section of the exhibition is devoted to social security, family and property. In present days, there is nothing revolutionary in the stipulation that men and women, without any limitation due to race, nationality, or religion, have the right to marry and found a



288 JANE LYDON family. But the rights of women, within the family itself, are only a recent achievement. This very qualified acknowledgment of women’s rights suggested only that women had a right to marry and participate in a family, a circum‐ scribed role even at the time. As Sekula pointed out of the later FoM, such imagery “universalizes the bourgeois nuclear family, suggesting a global‐ ized, utopian family album, a family romance imposed upon every corner of the earth. The family serves as a metaphor also for a system of interna‐ tional discipline and harmony” (1981, 19). Australia had opposed “equal pay” clauses in the drafting of the UDHR, given entrenched disparities in domestic wages between men and women, and continued to oppose such moves into the 1950s on the grounds of “community sentiment” against women working outside the home (Devereux 2005, 135–36). The collage of four photographs showing women at work—a robed British QC, a young woman in a sari addressing a global forum, a female naval officer and Chi‐ nese laboratory technicians/scientists—remained a utopian vision for most women even in first world countries.

Figure 3, Families. UNESCO, Human Rights: Exhibition Album (1950)





“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 289

Figure 4, The Emancipation of Women. UNESCO, Human Rights: Exhibition Album (1950)



Aboriginal Rights A significant gap in the UN exhibition and its reception was acknowledgement of Australian Aboriginal people. Instead the Maori Ma‐ donna and child provided a regional gesture toward unity in diversity. This national lacuna reflected continuing community prejudice despite official commitment to a system of human rights, and contrasted with the growing popular acknowledgement of new ideas of rights and the evils of racism, and especially demands from Aboriginal activists for better conditions and equality (e.g. de Costa 2006, 75). Campaigners such as the Victorian Council for Aboriginal Rights pointed out the need to include Aboriginal people: on the eve of exhibition in June 1951, for example, medical doctor and out‐ spoken activist Charles Duguid appealed to the federal government to in‐ clude Australian natives in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Australia’s own constitution. On June, 20 1951 the Advertiser reported Duguid’s “Human Rights Plea for Aborigines”, and his declaration that “there will be no justice for the aborigines until they get full education, the same as whites, work instead of the dole, and decent wages”. The UDHR also provided ammunition for the campaign for constitutional reform that emerged during the late 1950s, launched by activists such as Jessie Street.



290 JANE LYDON Street argued against the explicit exclusion of Aboriginal people from Com‐ monwealth control and for the nation’s commitment to the UDHR. Calls grew for a referendum to remove discriminatory clauses from the constitu‐ tion, culminating in the 1967 referendum, which allowed the Common‐ wealth to create laws for them. However, as Annemarie Devereux has shown, as the local implica‐ tions of ratification became clearer, the Australian Government’s engage‐ ment with these issues during the late 1940s and 1950s shifted to very qualified acceptance of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cul‐ tural Rights (ICESCR). Australia abstained on clauses covering the prohibi‐ tion of slavery, freedom of movement and a right to equality, and voted against clauses prohibiting racial hatred, a right to self‐determination and specific plans for compulsory, universal and free primary education (Deve‐ reux 2005, 237). Australian government departments were aware that sev‐ eral Aboriginal policies were vulnerable to allegations of inconsistency with the conventions’ human rights requirements, including the prohibi‐ tion of arbitrary interference and the removal of half‐caste children, but the Department of Interior argued that convention rights were not intended to apply to “natives who have not yet reached a state of civilization where they can fend for themselves and protect their own interests”. Other inconsist‐ encies included the right to freedom of movement and the restrictions on movement in the Northern Territory; the right to marry and laws requiring permission for Indigenous women to marry non‐Indigenous males; equal suffrage and the ban on voting; and, finally, the right to work and re‐ strictions on Indigenous peoples working in the mining industry (Devereux 2005, 73). Instead of applying human rights principles to Australian circum‐ stances, a domestic policy of assimilation was implemented in 1951 that mirrored the UNESCO rhetoric of unity and inclusivity. This “new deal for the Aborigines” aimed to raise the status of Aboriginal people so that they could qualify for full citizenship, by merging them into the mainstream pop‐ ulation—although it was an agenda contested then and now, primarily on the grounds of its coercive implementation (Rowse 2005). Official visions of an Indigenous future relied upon an imagined modernity and equality, contrasted with a primitive past, in a conversion narrative as old as coloni‐ zation. The Australian government produced glossy official publications



“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 291 filled with high‐quality photographs in visual conversion narratives that contrasted substandard living conditions with new building programs. Newspapers and magazines such as the Australian Women’s Weekly pro‐ moted assimilation by reproducing the logic of transformation—“from this to THIS!”—demonstrated by individual “success stories”. What was new was the sight of Aboriginal people taking their place as equals in a modern society, becoming ideal suburban middle‐class families (Rowse 2005, McGregor 2011). However, despite the rhetoric of equality, some pointed out the hypocrisy of providing inferior dwellings and resources through housing schemes; they were often implemented as a means of instructing Aboriginal people, rather than given to them as a right. The intensified role for photographic evidence in reporting distant atrocity after the war intersected with new understandings of the perni‐ cious effects of racial thought, and it became increasingly common for ob‐ servers to draw an analogy between Jewish and Aboriginal experiences of displacement and oppression. Visual campaigns to improve Indigenous liv‐ ing conditions during the 1950s drew on photographic evidence that was frequently compared explicitly with concentration camp imagery. On March 1, 1955, for example, Michael Courtney of the Australian Magazine described Murray River camp settlements as “shocking” because they were “second‐class concentration camps” (Lydon 2012, 175).

Soviet Attack Amid increasing international interest in Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people, communists seized upon photographic evidence to challenge Australia’s standing on human rights (Boughton 2001, Macintyre 1988, 143). Soviet criticism in the United Nations and other international forums became a powerful form of external scrutiny, as photographs of Ab‐ original prisoners and “fringe‐dwellers” transcended barriers of language and culture to become effective ammunition against Australia’s interna‐ tional reputation on Indigenous issues. In 1949, the communist Tribune attacked the official treatment of Aboriginal workers using front‐page photographs of Aboriginal prisoners in neck‐chains that were taken up around the world. On its front page of March 5, 1949, the communist Tribune described the images as “Not imag‐ inary Russian ‘slave camp’ inmates, such as have Dr Evatt’s sympathy, but Australian Aborigines are here pictured in chains in a real Australian slave



292 JANE LYDON camp”. The “inmates” featured were held at Fitzroy Crossing, Western Aus‐ tralia, for 18 months while police sought evidence for their offence, but were eventually released without charge. The issue was taken up overseas by the British Anti‐Slavery Society and the Soviet government, which re‐ published the photographs (Lydon 2012, 187). In April 1949 the Polish del‐ egate to the United Nations, Jan Drohojowski, launched a sustained attack on Australia’s human rights record. As the West Australian reported on April 14, 1949, he asked: Who is coming to the rescue of alleged violations of human rights in Hungary? From the antipodes comes Australia, a country whose original immigrants have almost entirely exterminated the abo‐ rigines. As a matter of fact, Australia seems to consider the re‐ maining aborigines as zoological specimens In October, speaking in the UN Political Committee debate on the violation of human rights in Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary, the Soviet For‐ eign Minister, Andrey Vyshinsky, attacked the Australian Government’s “to‐ tal disregard” for the human rights of Aboriginal people. Governed by Cold‐ War dynamics, the External Affairs Minister (Dr Evatt) replied “bluntly” in the House of Representatives, accusing the Russians of deflecting attention from their own record on religious persecution. Soviet support for the Ab‐ original campaign against a Long Range Weapons facility, Woomera, was effectively dismissed on the grounds that it was concerned not so much for the Indigenous occupants as for the limitation of western technological de‐ velopment (see Morton 1989). The Soviets found photographs published in official assimilation pamphlets a particularly useful means of attacking Australia’s record on In‐ digenous affairs. While these photo‐booklets were intended to serve as propaganda for the success of assimilation, they presented visual evidence for squalid living conditions that contradicted their own claims. Australian legations were required to distribute them to show its government dealing humanely with its Indigenous “problem”. Typical of this paternal, benevo‐ lent attitude was Our Aborigines, first issued in 1957, that noted under “Cit‐ izenship” that the position of Aboriginal citizens



“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 293 is somewhat like that of a minor who is basically a citizen but who, because he is under the age of 21 years, may not be able to do eve‐ rything that other inhabitants of Australia may be able to do, and who may be protected and assisted in ways in which the adult is not protected and assisted. (Department of Territories 1957) Overseas observers were appalled by photos contrasting the poor circumstances of the camps many Indigenous people lived in. The visual logic of assimilation propaganda contrasted the camps, representing the past, with “model” homes with modern, hygienic facilities standing for their future. Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev referred to visual evidence con‐ tained within the pamphlet Fringe Dwellers to attack Australia at the United Nations. In October 1960, at a United Nations Correspondents lunch in New York, Krushchev said, “Take Australia—Prime Minister Menzies has spoken here. Why did he not tell of the way in which the native population of Aus‐ tralia was treated? Why did he not tell of that shameful fact, that most of the native population of Australia has been virtually wiped out?” (Lydon 2012, 196). By 1961 the Department of External Affairs had begun to note that “adverse references now appear regularly in the Soviet and Communist Chi‐ nese press and radio”, such as when Krushchev was reported in the Mos‐ cow press as having “pointed to the eternal shame that rested on the ruling class of Australia for the extermination of the Aborigines”. In 1961 an Abo‐ riginal camp depicted in the pamphlet One People prompted criticism of Australia in the Moscow newspaper New Times, which was published in eight languages. These visual conversion narratives were premised on an evolu‐ tionist vision of assimilation, as Aboriginal people would abandon their close‐knit communities and an ethos of collective identity and resources to pursue the goals of possessive individualism. In an idealizing vision very close to that of Christian missionaries before them, in order to attain rights, Indigenous Australians must undergo transformation to become educated, productive citizens.



294 JANE LYDON

Figure 5, Woman and weatherboard house. Fringe Dwellers, 1959



Conclusion: Blind Spots? At different moments since the FoM and UNESCO exhibitions were mounted, observers have identified key “blind spots” that define the west‐ ern‐centric constitution of the UDHR. Viktoria Schmidt‐Linsenhoff (2004) for example suggests that FoM’s photographs of Jewish people are “pre‐ sented in such a way as to conceal and at the same time highlight the ab‐ sence of the Shoa as the invisible centre of the exhibition” (11). 1 Again, where key documents of rights were presented, a notable exclusion is the Russian Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People (1918): as Tom Allbeson points out, “the Soviet Union [was], in a sense, the exhibition’s unconscious; while not explicitly referenced, the threat of nu‐ clear war animated much of postwar visual culture” (2015, 15). For many Australians, the 1950 exhibition provided their first com‐ prehensive and accessible introduction to human rights. No doubt many

1



The biblical “Shoah” became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of Eu‐ ropean Jewry as early as the early 1940s. Yad Vashem, http://www.yadvashem. org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/the_holocaust.asp#!prettyPhoto accessed 13 March, 2016.

“VISUAL HISTORY AT ITS BEST!” 295 observers absorbed its utopian vision of equality—although others were quick to use its idealising principles as a means to identify local shortcom‐ ings. The UNESCO/FoM projects showed the sameness of diverse peoples, linked to a story of a shared progressive struggle to secure a range of global rights. In a parallel story of progress, Australian state‐produced assimila‐ tionist photo‐booklets pictured an evolutionary movement from primitive to civilized, and the transformation of Aboriginal people into citizens who would eventually be worthy of their rights. The inclusive UNESCO ideal of “unity in diversity” contrasted starkly with the domestic emphasis on coer‐ cive assimilation of Australian Aboriginal people, mapping the limitations of Australia’s deployment of human rights in the immediate postwar pe‐ riod. Despite their utopian intent, in practice, the building of universal rights entailed a process of “inclusive exclusion” (Agamben 1998, 28–29), requiring the abandonment or invisibility of certain groups, such as Jewish victims of the Shoa, communists, or Aboriginal people. This history chal‐ lenges UNESCO’s view of the development of human rights as one of inevi‐ table progress: despite their idealizing intent, such blind spots remind us that the UDHR was drafted in a world still largely under colonial rule, while postcolonial state formation and national self‐determination still lay in the future. The symmetry between the program of universality espoused by the UNESCO and Australian assimilationist ideals of unity in diversity is striking, revealing how the practice of human rights has been profoundly shaped by state agendas and cultural predispositions at many scales. On one level, the domestic application of the ideals and language of human rights indicates a tension between principles of universalism and local dif‐ ference that continues to be central to current analysis of global networks, linked to concepts of universal human rights and local values. This dilemma is a problem not merely of articulation between different orders of practice, but of how to conceive human subjectivity and difference (Lydon 2009). It is true that the dichotomization of universal and local values overlooks the effects of globalization and transnational juridical processes, where many Indigenous peoples, for example, adopt human rights principles, identify with a pan‐global category and become enmeshed in transnational linkages (Merry 2003, Wilson 1997). Notwithstanding commitments to cultural di‐ versity and local rights, the application of universal values by state or cor‐ porate interests often proves to overlook or subsume local agendas in the



296 JANE LYDON interests of the powerful. Postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) notes that our notions of social justice, human rights and other as‐ pects of political modernity are unthinkable without the European Enlight‐ enment and its ideal universal and secular conception of the human. How‐ ever, as he points out, 19th‐century colonizers preached this humanism at the colonized even while they denied it in practice, reducing the figure of the human to the white, male European. Such shortcomings nonetheless point toward the ways that these ideals have provided the basis for critique of social injustice, and measure how far we have left to travel toward their realization.

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Balancing the Quotidian and the Political: Beyond Empathy in Australian Multi-platform Refugee Narratives Sukhmani Khorana Akin to the response to asylum seekers in most of the OECD (Or‐ ganisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development) world, the public debate on the issue in Australia has been vexed and polarizing. However, what distinguishes Australian policy is that despite being a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, “it is the only country where there is manda‐ tory immigration detention for all unlawful non‐citizens” (Brown 2013). Additionally, according to the Refugee Council of Australia, mandatory de‐ tention is used as more than a risk‐management tool as until recently, “asy‐ lum seekers arriving without authorisation were detained for the entire time it took to determine whether or not they were refugees—regardless of whether they posed any health or security risks to the community” (Ref‐ ugee Council of Australia 2014, n.p.). In terms of the political and public re‐ sponse, sociologist Klaus Neumann (2012) writes that there has been con‐ sensus on both sides of politics that “asylum seekers pose a threat to the integrity of Australia’s borders or to its social fabric, that fear of asylum seekers is legitimate, and that a policy of deterrence is an appropriate re‐ sponse” (n.p.). This socio‐political context to a large degree explains the above‐mentioned interpretation of the policy of mandatory detention. Neu‐ mann adds that this policy of deterrence is occasionally questioned when the courts insist that it must not violate Australian law, and when the public sporadically shows compassion for individual asylum seekers, especially children (2012). Given the above, the power of narrative to invoke a response to the asylum seeker issue, however fleeting, amongst the Australian public mer‐ its particular attention. However, such a response is often articulated as a feeling of empathy or compassion, and seldom crosses over into the realm of responsibility or action. This has led cultural studies scholar Carolyn Pedwell (2014) to conclude that empathy “has become a Euro‐American political obsession . . . within the contemporary ‘western’ socio‐political sphere, empathy is framed as a ‘solution’ to a very wide range of social ills and as a central component of building cross‐cultural and transnational so‐ cial justice” (ix‐x). Therefore, similar to Sara Ahmed’s (2010) postulation 301

302 SUKHMANI KHORANA on happiness, Pedwell suggests that in many contemporary narratives of social justice, empathy can become an end‐point, and a conceptual stoppage in terms of carrying on a conversation or analysis (2014, ix‐x). In this way, many refugee‐themed narratives (in Australia and elsewhere) grapple with the problem of invoking the compassion of their audiences, while also try‐ ing to ensure this affective response is not transient and/or de‐politicised. A recent instance of the limits of empathy, especially as articulated in the media public sphere, occurred at the height of the Syrian refugee cri‐ sis in Europe in September 2015, when ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program featured a discussion on the latest events in the crisis. This con‐ versation focused on the emotional response evoked by the photograph of the drowned Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi (Australian Broadcasting Corpo‐ ration 2015). While a couple of panelists and most callers called for an em‐ pathetic response that extended beyond politics, one of the interviewees (sociologist Klaus Neumann) suggested that an emotional reaction is likely to be fleeting, and we need to go deeper (Australian Broadcasting Corpora‐ tion 2015). One of the callers who stood out was a high school teacher who also teaches the children of refugees. She suggested that we need to get to a place where we realise that they are like us, and then added, “they are us” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2015). This sentiment is sympto‐ matic of the conceptual stoppage and depoliticization that often occurs when “empathy” is expressed in a narrative with settler subjects rather than refugees themselves as subjects with agency. This chapter takes as its premise the assumption that in order to effect wider socio‐political change on the perception of refugee‐related is‐ sues in Australia, we need to study existing narratives. Examining such por‐ trayals and viewers' engagement with them is important because in the ab‐ sence of wider community interactions with recent refugee arrivals, public opinion on refugee‐related issues is largely reliant on impressions gleaned from the media (Wright 2008, 99). There has been considerable discussion in the public domain about strategies of dehumanizing refugees and limit‐ ing journalists’ attempts to individualise them, as a means of managing pub‐ lic perception. According to a speech delivered by Paul Power, CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia in 2010, challenging negative media coverage of refugees and acknowledging positive representations are both keys to building accountability and community engagement (2010). It appears that



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 303 there is an assumption that links media representation with public percep‐ tion on this issue, and that this assumption has become part of the politics of the way the crisis is playing out in Australia and elsewhere. Therefore, there is a genuine point to examining precisely how media narratives, es‐ pecially in a cross‐platform environment, generate public attitudes to refu‐ gees. This is crucial not just for policy‐makers and scholars, but also for communicators (including journalists, filmmakers, and film curators and exhibitors) and the wider public. Research on Media Narratives of Refugees in Australia The media representation of refugees in Australia has received at‐ tention since the early 2000s, especially in terms of mediation in news dis‐ courses (Pickering 2001; Gale 2004; Klocker and Dunn 2003). In the con‐ text of refugee‐themed screen narratives, Szorenyi (2006) examines the practice of collecting photographs of refugees in “coffee‐table books” and concludes that the format and accompanying text tend to produce readings that lean towards spectacle (24). Similarly, Terence Wright’s (2002) inves‐ tigation of media images and fiction films based on refugee stories uncov‐ ered that the former have origins in Christian iconography, while the latter conform to the “road movie” genre (53). The last finding is also echoed in Australia‐based refugee film Lucky Miles (2007) focusing on male asylum seekers, which Jon Stratton (2009) suggests makes the “Australian govern‐ ment appear less hostile, less morally culpable, and therefore enabling white Australian audiences to feel better about themselves and the govern‐ ment that represents them” (640). This reference to the link between nar‐ rative choice and its impact on an imagined audience is key to the need to study media narrative and delivery strategies, especially in an environment where content is “narrowcast” via a range of digital and traditional plat‐ forms. The mainstream news media narratives of asylum seekers in Aus‐ tralia can be further comprehended in terms of the political and editorial stance of the outlet in question. In the case of most conservative media out‐ lets in Australia, research has established that there is a tendency to dehu‐ manise refugees. This results from editorial tactics such as visual framing, not portraying individual asylum seekers but only showing them as mem‐ bers of groups or collectives, and associating them with threats to border security rather than humanitarian crises (Bleiker et al. 2013). In other



304 SUKHMANI KHORANA words, the picture of the refugee invoked by such narratives is that of a dis‐ tant other, thereby diminishing any capacity for invoking an empathetic re‐ sponse. When it comes to the nation’s less ideologically conservative media outlets, editorials and features attempt to humanise refugees in order to evoke empathy in the reader/viewer. “Is Australia losing its empathy” (The Guardian), “Australians lack empathy for plight of asylum seekers” (Judith Ireland for The Sydney Morning Herald), “What happened to our compas‐ sion, Australia?” (Mamamia.com), “Do we need an empathy revolution” (TheHoopla.com), and “Compassion is the new radicalism” (Indira Naidoo): these are a handful of headlines and statements that are symbolic of the self‐identified “ethical” settler response to asylum seeker issues in Aus‐ tralia. Moreover, feeling empathy or compassion is established as the cor‐ rect reaction to witnessing asylum seeker testimony in the form of news stories or creative storytelling such as film or visual art. In other words, the mainstream news media narratives that aim to effect social change often stop short at invoking empathy. The subsequent section locates this sort of individually mobilised, transient and selective empathy in contemporary accounts of social justice. This is followed by three case studies of cross‐ platform Australian refugee narratives—the first of these is an instance of a de‐politicised portrayal, while the final two aim for, and achieve a better balance between the quotidian and the political. Empathy and Refugee Narratives Within feminist, anti‐racist and other social theory, the feeling and articulation of empathy has been established as crucial to the attainment of cross‐cultural and transnational social justice. Therefore, the analysis of refugee narratives in this chapter is not purported to dismiss the value of either an empathetic response, or of framing and exhibition decisions that help invoke it. According to Pedwell, following philosopher Martha Nuss‐ baum, empathy is understood as opening the self to the other in a transna‐ tional context (2014, 46). For instance, in African‐American literature, “the suggestion is that, while ‘we’ might theorise social inequalities and commit ourselves to political responsibilities and obligations in the abstract, a transformation at the affective level is required to make ‘us’ actually feel, realize and act on them” (47). Pedwell further notes that within some fem‐



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 305 inist and anti‐racist literatures, the larger affective journey moves “the priv‐ ileged subject from empathy, to self‐transformation, to recognition of re‐ sponsibility or obligation, to action with the potential to contribute to wider social change” (105). However, the evocation of empathy in refugee‐themed narratives is sometimes accompanied by a depoliticisation of systemic issues. This oc‐ curs by shifting responsibility onto the feelings of the ethical citizen rather than the imperative of international obligations and/or the power imbal‐ ance in regional relationships. In Australia’s mainstream media, through programs such as SBS’s Go Back To Where You Came From (SBS, 2015), we are invited to walk in the same shoes as the refugee by going through an affective journey as described above (Cover 2013). However, we are simul‐ taneously told that the refugee other is unlikely to be wearing shoes. The response then is to donate our shoes so we can feel better about ourselves, rather than focusing on the feelings of the person under duress. In addition, such narratives, and what are established as “ethical” responses to them fail to take into account the fact that it may sometimes be impossible to see from someone else’s perspective. Universalising Narrative: Seeking Humanity Seeking Humanity was a visual arts exhibition that consisted of por‐ traits and stories of Australia’s asylum seekers and refugees by Wendy Sharpe, a former winner of the Archibald, a premier art portrait prize awarded in Australia. It received support from the Asylum Seekers Centre, and exhibited at The Muse at Sydney TAFE, Belconnen Arts Centre in Can‐ berra, Penrith Regional Gallery, and the Vera Wade Gallery in Brisbane in early and mid 2015. According to the exhibition page on the Asylum Seek‐ ers Centre website, “[The exhibition] is not about politics, but puts a human face to those who have fled situations of great danger in their home country in search of safety and freedom in Australia” (Asylum Seekers Centre 2015). Hence, there is an outright disavowal of politics in the public debate about refugees at the same time as there is an attempt to humanise asylum seek‐ ers and incorporate them into the everyday life of the ethical Australian cit‐ izen. Moreover, politics here is narrowly understood as party‐based ideo‐ logical positioning, rather than as a process of mobilizing to effect social change.



306 SUKHMANI KHORANA According to a further description on the website, Sharpe shares the lives of 39 asylum seekers and refugees “to show that underneath all the troubles and politics around the issue, we are all the same. That we all have the same hopes and dreams” (Asylum Seekers Centre 2015, n.p.). Sim‐ ilarly, in an interview with journalist Stephanie Wood, Sharpe says that the exhibition “will turn them into real people. These are people who do the same things we like to do. They like to dance or sing. They play soccer and learn the guitar and bake cakes” (quoted in Wood 2015). In other words, the multi‐platform narratives and extra‐textual information about Seeking Humanity succeed in evoking our empathy by rendering the refugees “like us” as they participate in the same quotidian activities. However, the sepa‐ ration of politics from the evocation of empathy, and the simultaneous con‐ flation of politics with the absence of humaneness raises questions about the missing macro framework for narrating refugee stories in multi‐plat‐ form contexts. According to Skrbiš and Woodward (2013), while “there is an important role to play for visual materials in fostering cosmopolitan feel‐ ings towards strangers”, images of women and children in need are often used for ideological purposes (81). This in turn shifts the focus from the structural and political conditions that placed their lives in danger and at risk in the first place (Skrbiš and Woodward 2013, 82). Moreover, while Sharpe is empowered to tell refugee stories and feel better about her ethical responsibility as an Australian citizen, such compassion often glosses over, or reinforces already existing inequalities. According to Pedwell, there are scholarly concerns about “whether empa‐ thetic engagement across social and geo‐political boundaries can be mutual and dialogical, or whether it is more likely to remain the purview of those who are already socially privileged” (2014, 48). Jean Kelly Butler (2013) adds that over the past two decades, bearing witness “to the other, a fre‐ quently nonwhite other, has come to form the basis for the performance of ‘good’ Australian citizenship” (171). While these discourses of witnessing have given a high degree of visibility to asylum seeker issues in public cul‐ ture, they have not necessarily resulted in dialogic relationships. In other words, asylum seekers and others continue to be “objects” rather than sub‐ jects of feeling—objects in a discourse on good citizenship, rather than good citizens (Butler 2013, 172).



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 307 Alternative Cross-Platform Refugee Narratives According to Neumann’s research, politics and the everyday com‐ passion being invoked by narratives such as Seeking Humanity are not sep‐ arate, but increasingly inter‐linked in policy‐making; in fact, what we have witnessed over the past fifteen or so years is the rise of a politics of com‐ passion: a politics that refers to compassion (rather than, say, rights) for its justification and draws on the language of compassion, and which increas‐ ingly informs policy‐making. In Australia, it was Kevin Rudd who began championing a greater role for compassion. Two years before he became prime minister, he nominated compassion as one of five values “which might underpin a vision for the nation’s future” (2012, n.p.). Alternative cross‐platform media narratives are now beginning to emerge that evoke empathy in the audience while also turning us into a sort of witness to the unfolding of refugee stories that are simultaneously quo‐ tidian and political. Being a witness entails responding in a way that is dia‐ logic and political, and leads neither to apathy nor to consumerist senti‐ mentalism (see Khorana 2014). Media theorist Roger Silverstone (2007) uses the idea of “proper distance” as a key conceptual means of gaining lit‐ eracy about the other and transmuting this into a sense of responsibility. Recent multi‐platform narratives such as filmmaker Steve Thomas’s Free‐ dom Stories, and volunteer‐run Behind the Wire appear to be getting closer to establishing the right distance. Both succeed in focusing on first‐person refugee narratives, highlighting everyday resilience as well as politically in‐ duced trauma, and sustaining the debate on asylum seeker issues in this nation beyond the latest media cycle. Freedom Stories According to the website of Freedom Stories, the project began more than a year ago with the idea of an anniversary documentary explor‐ ing what former “boat people” who arrived in Australian waters in 2001— the year of the Tampa, “children overboard” affair and the Pacific Solu‐ tion—were doing “ten years on” (2015). Initially, it was unable to attract any production funding, but the filmmaking team found former asylum seekers in all walks of life—from doctors to decorators, mechanics to musicians, parents to professionals [. . .]



308 SUKHMANI KHORANA they were now doing all manner of interesting things and many, who had been children at the time, were now entering their twen‐ ties and embarking on adulthood. (Freedom Stories 2015) Thereby, in the description of the project, the focus is not on the most recent controversy surrounding refugees in the media. Rather, the production team unequivocally wants to foreground the stories of those who are no longer in dire need of our compassion: Freedom Stories is a project about social inclusion, for these are unheard stories of people who arrived at a time of great political turmoil but who have long since dropped out of the media spot‐ light. They live among us now and given the ongoing controver‐ sies over “boat people” it is timely that their stories be heard (Freedom Stories 2015) The project homepage also makes mention of the Australia Govern‐ ment’s 20‐year‐old policy of mandatory detention, the increase in the num‐ ber of people in detention, and the practice of issuing extremely precarious Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs). In this way, it does not shy away from the politics of the issue, but makes it part and parcel of the discourse of asy‐ lum seeker testimonies and their resilience over a decade. In the remaining section, I will undertake a close reading of the fea‐ ture version of the documentary film, and also discuss its cross‐platform distribution formats. The textual reading occurs within a conceptual frame‐ work that highlights the convergence of the exception and the everyday in the lives of asylum seekers. This is similar to David Farrier’s examination of Sonja Linden’s Asylum Monologues (2006) and Asylum Dialogues (2008), and their surrounding contexts, which leads him to suggest that the incursions of a politics of the exception (understood in the terms propounded by Carl Schmitt, and afterwards Giorgio Agam‐ ben) into the everyday life of asylum seekers necessitates a post‐ colonial response that can conjure even‐handedly with the excep‐ tion(al) and the quotidian without recourse to the defamiliarizing strategies that would cast the asylum seeker as irredeemably other. (2012, 431)



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 309 The 100‐minute feature film begins with the story of Mustafa, who works as an apprentice mechanic. The filmmaker, Steve Thomas, is in the aural frame, and we hear him have a conversation with one of Mustafa’s clients who is vaguely aware that the latter is from Afghanistan. When Thomas informs him that Mustafa spent three‐and‐a‐half years in deten‐ tion, the client is surprised and shows concern, but adds that it doesn’t mat‐ ter now; all he cares about is that Mustafa is his mechanic and a “good bloke”. This is followed by shots of Thomas and Mustafa at the SIEVX me‐ morial in Canberra, which marks “the sinking of a refugee vessel that took with it 353 lives, most of them women and young children” (SIEVX National Memorial Project 2015, n.p.). Mustafa tells Thomas that he realises that he was lucky to have survived the tragedy, and this in turn is followed by a shot of chooks in his backyard. He later shows the filmmaker photos of his time at the Nauru detention centre with his younger brother. In this way, we are set up for a constant switching between the everyday and the polit‐ ical that continues in the case of the remaining former refugees profiled in the documentary. Following Paul Gilroy (2004), Farrier (2012) suggests that the politics of the quotidian in Asylum Dialogues “advance a form of everyday ethics”, which will emerge from “everyday encounters with dif‐ ference” (436). In the case of Freedom Stories, the audience is similarly be‐ ing prepared for an engagement with the everyday as the ethical, rather than a political story devoid of human faces or vice‐versa. The next ex‐refugee we encounter is Shafiq, who works as a house painter in Melbourne. He introduces himself by saying that he is one of the fussiest painters and that his reputation is important to him. Thomas’s voiceover narration mentions that Shafiq worked as an artist in Afghani‐ stan—he and his work were targeted by the Taliban—and only one paint‐ ing survived. There are shots of Shafiq working on a painting, and he re‐ marks that after arriving in Australia, he realised his style had changed to become much more surrealistic. Thomas’s non‐diegetic narration tells us that Shafiq had previously painted murals at the detention centre in Woom‐ era (accompanied by footage from Woomera). Shafiq adds that he won the first prize in an art contest there, but it was awarded to his number as their names weren’t used in detention. Just as Shafiq’s individuality and human‐ ity is embraced, Thomas’s narration gives us a background of the opening of Woomera and the opposition to it. At the end of the film, Thomas returns to Shafiq’s new house and we witness close‐ups of his recent paintings.



310 SUKHMANI KHORANA When asked about this work, Shafiq says that he really likes painting um‐ brellas as they represent the idea of shelter to him. In this way, Shafiq’s po‐ liticised past is portrayed as continuing to figure in his everyday life as art‐ ist and home‐owner. Shafiq’s story is followed by that of Rehana, who arrived in Woom‐ era with her husband and two children when it was in the middle of riots. Thomas mentions that she was reluctant to participate in the project, and agreed when her daughter said she would be present for support. In this and several other scenes in the film, Thomas appears to be foregrounding the filmmaking process in order to keep the audience conscious of the role of decision‐making in the construction of narrative. This, in turn, highlights the importance of ethical practices of filmmaking and dialogic relationships with subjects in generating a sense of responsibility in the audience. When Rehana mentions that she learned English and computer skills in detention, her daughter Maryam is surprised that Rehana is talking up the accommo‐ dation at Woomera. Rehana later adds that it was a bad experience for her as she was sick and had to see counselors for three years after being re‐ leased. She was depressed as she couldn’t find work, and was missing her mother and sister whose case to join her in Australia was rejected multiple times. Maryam decides to be on camera later in the film, and we are told that she is studying criminology at university. She recalls seeing people throwing themselves on barbed wire during the hunger strikes at Woom‐ era. The segment ends with Thomas’s voiceover suggesting that he realised that Rehana is rebellious in her own way as she later shows him her interest in Facebook groups that support women’s rights in Afghanistan. When Thomas returns to Rehana’s story towards the end of the documentary, we see her without a headscarf, and working at the Migrant Resource Centre in Adelaide. Next we hear about Amir who says that the golden years of his life (27 to 31) were wasted in detention. He adds that despite the bad times, he appreciated the natural aspects of his detention location (Curtin). He used to be a jeweler in Iran, and is now a real estate agent in Sydney. Amir then takes Thomas to one of his property inspections and recounts the histories of well‐known landmarks such as Olympic Park on his way. This is followed by the background story of how hard he had to fight to get out of detention. Later in the documentary, we are introduced to Parvez, a friend of Amir’s



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 311 who faced severe depression, and tried to absorb himself in work as a dis‐ traction. They look at photos of their time together in Curtin and Amir gets emotional when they recall that Parvez tried to harm himself (sow his lips and cut himself). This is another instance of everyday stories of camarade‐ rie and professional working lives intersecting with the political within the same frame. We are then introduced to Sheri, with Thomas’s voiceover saying that her story is one of the toughest he has heard as she escaped on her own with three kids, one of whom has cerebral palsy. This is followed by domes‐ tic scenes of her feeding her disabled son and saying that he is a gift to her from God. Then the camera turns to one of her other sons, Hamid who is playing soccer in Adelaide. He says that he will always remember certain images from his time in detention, such as those of people cutting and harming themselves. He adds that he hasn't fully recovered and can still get angry very quickly. The oldest son, Mohamad also carries the scars of de‐ tention—he says the detention center feeds you, but takes away your right to be a child. During the subsequent family lunch, Mohamad disappears to his room. Sheri shares that she is aiming to get a heavy vehicle license. Ha‐ mid adds that she has always wanted to be a truck driver, to which Sheri replies that it is the 21st century, and women can do anything. When we return to Sheri’s story in the second half of the film, she has gained two out of the four licenses required in the industry. Her instructor says she is very persistent, and will not quit. We also learn that her oldest son Mohamad finds comfort in his books, especially philosophy which he treats as an es‐ cape from his depression. In this way, the story of Sheri and her family con‐ tinues the trajectory of challenging mainstream media’s simplistic stereo‐ types of refugees as victims by portraying them as complex human beings living with trauma as well as agency. Another female former refugee in the film whose story echoes that of Sheri and Rehana to a degree is Oham. Oham begins by saying she initially felt precarious because of being on a temporary protection visa, and didn't want to go back to Iraq. We are told that she works as a teacher at an Islamic college in Melbourne, and that despite having Australian qualifications, she is struggling to break into the mainstream schooling system. This is fol‐ lowed by shots of her at an education conference, and the story of her par‐ ticipation in a performance based on her life. Oham mentions that at the end of the performance, she came out from behind the screen (which was



312 SUKHMANI KHORANA in place as her then husband didn't want her face to be out in public), and has come a long way since then. She also says that she considered changing her name, but couldn't go through with it. Later in the documentary, we find out that she has decided to change her name to “Alana Elias” as she thinks it will make her transition to mainstream teaching easier. Thomas’s narra‐ tion mentions that changing one’s name to fit in better is part of the history of migration, but time will tell whether it leads to a better future. The final profile is that of Jamila, a young student at the University of Adelaide. There are several shots of her walking on campus, and she mentions that getting into university is a huge deal for her and her parents. She was also detained at Woomera as a child, and spent 3 years on a Tem‐ porary Protection Visa. She adds that she remembers being on a boat— there was overcrowding, dehydration and people praying. The Australian Navy subsequently rescued the struggling vessel. As for her reason for par‐ ticipating in the film, Jamila says she wants people to know, “we are Aussies too”. The film ends with photos of Jamila on a university exchange in Pe‐ nang, Malaysia. This is apt in terms of the realisation of her goal as it ap‐ pears that she has succeeded in being a representative of Australia in an international setting. Thomas also mentions that the Australian band SWAP found out about the project and offered one of their songs, “Go Back, you’re not one of us”, which is an ironic commentary on Australian attitudes to refugees. Therefore, the documentary ends on a politically subversive note, albeit one that is still contextualised in the everyday lives and practices of the nation as an ethical community. At the time of writing, the documentary feature had premiered at the Sydney Film Festival 2015, and also had subsequent screenings at Cin‐ ema Nova in Melbourne. According to the project’s Facebook page, it has been accepted for showings at festivals in New York and Canberra, as well as one‐off screenings in several regional centres in Australia. Early re‐ sponses to the film on these sites echo the need to move beyond empathy discussed in the sections above. For instance, one of the viewers quoted on the project website writes: Many documentaries are focused on the need to sympathise with asylum seekers, it often sounds like ‘please have pity on these mis‐ erable poor people’. Your documentary will highlight their active



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 313 participation, their real lives and Australia’s need for their skills. (MN cited in Freedom Stories 2015, n.p.) Other responses, as stated on the film’s Facebook site, are from the audience at the first Nova screening and Q&A session in Melbourne. These speak of the documentary as being “deceptively complex”, “thoughtful, qui‐ etly involving”, ask questions such as, “why aren’t they all mad as hell about their experience in detention”, and conclude, “it needs to be seen and we need to stop history from repeating”. Moreover, the project is set to be dis‐ tributed in several other formats so as to reach beyond a cinema‐going au‐ dience to a larger public. These include a cut‐down 60 minutes‐long TV doc‐ umentary, an educational DVD kit for schools, an interactive website (fea‐ turing additional stories and material not able to be included in the 75‐mi‐ nute or TV hour versions), and a regional roadshow of digital screenings that uses the film as both an awareness and fundraising tool for local refu‐ gee support groups (Freedom Stories 2015, n.p.). In my email interview with director Steve Thomas regarding the impact on audiences, he also highlighted the film’s capacity for attitudinal change: For me I think the best feedback was in a Q&A with a group of Year 7 girls, who wouldn’t let me go for an hour after the screen‐ ing. When I asked what they had learned, one girl put up her hand and said: “Your film has completely changed my attitude to refugees”. Why? I asked. “Before this”, she replied, “I had the idea that refugees aren’t very nice and are a problem”. Another girl said: “The problem is ours. We should give them a chance”. Another said “We should think ourselves lucky”. (Steve Thomas, email message to author, October 12, 2015) In terms of impact, Thomas suggests that there is an additional po‐ litical angle in that the film constitutes evidence. He writes, At least one organisation has asked to use it in such a way al‐ ready, and when the day comes that there is a Royal Commis‐ sion into the goings on in our detention system FS will perhaps



314 SUKHMANI KHORANA be called as evidence—more so perhaps in the form of the tran‐ scripts of 100 hours of rushes (constituting approx. 200,000 words) than the edited output. (Steve Thomas, email message to author, October 12, 2015) Behind the Wire The second example of an alternative Australian cross‐platform narrative is the recently launched, Behind the Wire. According to the project website, Behind the Wire is an oral history project documenting the sto‐ ries of men, women and children who have experienced Austral‐ ian mandatory detention over the past 23 years. It seeks to bring a new perspective to the public understandings of mandatory detention by sharing the reality of the people who have lived it. (Behind the Wire 2015) Like Freedom Stories, the emphasis is on first‐person narratives that aim to show a nuanced picture of the former and current lives of ex‐ detainees beyond the “queue jumper” and victim narratives of the popular media. It is coordinated by a group of volunteers with organizational sup‐ port from “Right Now” (a not‐for‐profit media organization focused on hu‐ man rights issues in Australia) and “Voice of Witness” (a non‐profit organ‐ ization dedicated to fostering understanding of contemporary human rights crises). It has also received support from Amnesty International Aus‐ tralia. The website discusses the ethical interviewing process that “fo‐ cuses on honourng each individual narrator and their story” (Behind the Wire 2015). In addition to obtaining informed consent, there is a recogni‐ tion that: Interviews are an ongoing process—rather than meeting some‐ one just once and ‘extracting’ their story, we try to hold multiple follow up interviews wherever possible [. . .] We aim to build a relationship of trust with narrators and to include narrators’



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 315 friends, advocates, and support network in the project process. (Behind the Wire 2015) Also, similar to the simultaneous emphasis on the everyday and the political in Freedom Stories, all of the seven first‐person testimonies cur‐ rently featured on the main page of Behind the Wire foreground the profes‐ sional and personal lives, as well as the political frustrations of the partici‐ pants. For instance, Ali works hard at a chemical factory in Ballarat and en‐ joys music, but also mentions that he has been a human rights activist for over 30 years, and is tired of the politics in Australia (Behind the Wire 2015, n.p.). What such narratives aim to elicit, then, is not a passive empathy that is just premised on easy identification with relatable aspects of the lives of former refugees. Instead, following Boler, Pedwell suggests that they also challenge us and invite “testimonial reading”, which is a practice that “involves empathy, but requires readers’ responsibility in a way that motivates action: a historicized ethics engaged across genres, that radically shifts our self‐reflective understanding of power relations” (2014, 73–74). The responsibility of settler subjects as testimonial readers or viewers is to understand that while “they” may be “us”, the politics of our respective gov‐ ernments, militaries and media outlets give us very different structures of feeling and belonging. Therefore, in terms of cultural production, we need to facilitate the creation and distribution of narratives that are attuned to both the quotidian and the political, and to be able to give witness outside of the chambers that are our social media platforms, lounge rooms, and cin‐ ema halls. The subversiveness (whether quiet or vocal) of the alternative narratives examined in this chapter is pivotal to elicit a response that does not disregard uncomfortable political realities, especially vis‐a‐vis the treatment of refugees in Australia, and overseas.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Asylum Seekers Centre. 2015. Seeking Humanity Exhibition. Accessed Sep‐ tember 10, 2015. http://asylumseekerscentre.org.au/seeking‐hu manity/.



316 SUKHMANI KHORANA Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2015. “1938 Revisited? Should Doors Open Wider to Syrian Refugees?” Life Matters. Accessed September 11, 2015. https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pe403W0OxQ Behind the Wire. 2015. Accessed September 21, 2015. http://behindthewir e.org.au. Bleiker, Roland, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson. 2013. “The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees.” Australian Journal of Political Science 48 (3): 398–416. Brown, Sarah. 2013. “What is Mandatory Detention?” The Asylum and Refu‐ gee Law Project, July 8. https://uqrefugeeresearch.wordpress. com/2013/07/08/what‐is‐mandatory‐detention/ Butler, Kelly Jean. 2013. Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony and Memory in Contemporary Culture. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Cover, Rob. 2013. “Undoing Attitudes: Subjectivity and Ethical Change in the Go Back to Where You Came From Documentary.” Continuum 27 (3): 408–20. Farrier, David. 2012. “Everyday Exceptions.” Interventions 14 (3): 429–42. Freedom Stories. 2015. Accessed September 21, 2015. http://freedomstorie sproject.com. Gale, Peter. 2004. “The Refugee Crisis and Fear: Populist Politics and Media Discourse.” Journal of Sociology 40 (4): 321–40. Gilroy, Paul 2004. After Empire: Multiculturalism or Postcolonial Melancho‐ lia. London: Routledge. Go Back to Where You Came From. 2015. Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). Accessed October 7, 2015. http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/go‐ back‐to‐where‐you‐came‐from. Khorana, Sukhmani. 2015. “Self‐distribution and Mary Meets Mohammad: Towards Ethical Witnessing.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 9 (1): 66–76. Klocker, Natascha and Kevin Dunn. 2003. “Who's Driving the Asylum De‐ bate: Newspaper and Government Representations of Asylum Seekers.” Media International Australia 109: 71–92. Nuemann, Klaus. 2012. “The Politics of Compassion.” Inside Story. Accessed September 21, 2015. http://insidestory.org.au/the‐politics‐of‐co mpassion/.



BALANCING THE QUOTIDIAN AND THE POLITICAL 317 Pedwell, Carolyn. 2014. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. Palgrave Macmillan. Pickering, Sharon. 2001. “Common Sense and Original Deviancy: News Dis‐ courses and Asylum Seekers in Australia.” Journal of Refugee Stud‐ ies 14 (2): 169–86. Power, Paul. 2010. “Australian Attitudes to the Acceptance of Refugees.” Summary of speech given to “Racism Revisited: Anti‐racism Lead‐ ership and Practice” Conference, Murdoch University, Perth. Ac‐ cessed December 7, 2015. http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/r/ spch/100320‐MurdochUni‐PPower.pdf Refugee Council of Australia. 2014. “Mandatory Detention.” Last modified May 17. https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/fact‐sheets/asylum‐s eeker‐issues/mandatory‐detention/ Skrbis, Zlatko and Woodward, Ian. 2013. Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea. Los Angeles, CA and London: Sage. SIEVX National Memorial Project. 2015. Accessed December 7, 2015. http://www.sievxmemorial.com. Silverstone, Roger. 2007. Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Metropolis. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Stratton, Jon. 2009. “‘Welcome to Paradise’: Asylum Seekers, Neoliberalism, Nostalgia and Lucky Miles.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cul‐ tural Studies 23 (5): 629–45. Szörényi, Anna. 2006. “The Images Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee Coffee‐table Books.” Visual Studies 21 (1): 24–41. Wood, Stephanie. 2015. “Wendy Sharpe’s Powerful Portraits of Humanity.” The Sydney Morning Herald, January 23. http://www.smh.com.au/ entertainment/art‐and‐design/wendy‐sharpes‐powerful‐portrait s‐of humanity‐20150120‐12tal5.html Wright, Terence. 2002. “Moving Images: The Media Representation of Ref‐ ugees.” Visual Studies 17 (1): 53–66. ‐‐‐. 2008. Visual Impact: Culture and the Meaning of Images. Oxford and New York: Berg.





Humanism’s Pharmakon: Subalternity and Universality Michael R. Griffiths Humanism and Repetition There are principles in the Declaration of Independence which would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace. (Douglass 1985, 529) The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the fu‐ ture is that which is repeated. (Deleuze 1994, 94) When is it time for human rights? When do human rights begin? To ask this is to ask how human rights emerge when the idea of the human is conjoined with the protections of citizenship. If human rights emerge in the event of their declaration, the social work of narrative by which they are iterated also recodes them. Etienne Balibar (2012) has affirmed “a perfect adequacy between the capacities of the human and the powers of the citi‐ zen” that is performed in and through the events of “universality performa‐ tively enunciated in such emblematic texts as the classical Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (207–08). 1 Similarly, many would identify the French and US Declarations—the most often cited predeces‐ sors to the UN Declaration of 1948—as such foundational, modern per‐ formative utterances of human rights and their relation to the protections of citizenship. But when is the time of human rights?2 Is it to be found in such events of articulation, with their own blindnesses and limitations, their contextual exclusions of people of colour and women? Is the emer‐ gence of human rights nascent in its declaration as a concept or only given in the subsequent elaborations that insist on the incompatibility of such

1 2

See also Balibar’s (1991) most sustained elaboration of this equivalence. Samuel Moyn (2010) sees the phenomenon of modern human rights discourse not even coming into full pre‐eminence until the 1970s and fundamentally dis‐ tinct from decolonial struggle. I nonetheless feel that such pre‐emergent artic‐ ulations of human rights as those I articulate here remain significant.

319

320 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS universality with such exclusion? This essay explores the temporality of hu‐ man rights through readings of Black Atlantic thought, most notably through sustained readings of a speech of Frederick Douglass and a poem by Derek Walcott, but also by deploying black feminist thought to recode the iterability of human emancipation beyond the declarations from which human rights emerged. In a Fourth of July Address given in 1862, at the height of the US Civil War, Frederick Douglass finds in the “performatively enunciated” (Balibar 2012, 207–08) event of the US Declaration of Independence the possibility of total emancipation from slavery—a possibility that will ex‐ pand and ensure human liberation into the future. Yet, the US Declaration on which he rests his case was also given to exclusion. Douglass’s statement expands on the liberatory potential of American Independence at a moment that simultaneously recalls its abuses alongside the promise of its potential. This speech, one of Douglass’s prolific performances of political ad‐ vocacy, takes place six months prior to the Emancipation Proclamation— the moment at which the American Declaration would be made to fulfill its potential vis‐à‐vis the freedom of the enslaved population—though not their civil rights. Recall, then, also that Douglass is speaking only five years after the Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court, which withheld the cit‐ izenship rights of black folk on the basis of race. I reproduce a key moment in the speech in full: There are principles in the Declaration of Independence which would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace. But alas! we have seen that declaration intended to be viewed like some colossal statue at the loftiest altitude, by the broad eye of the whole world, meanly subjected to a microscopic examination and its glorious universal truths craftily perverted into seeming falsehoods. In‐ stead of treating it, as it was intended to be treated, as a full and comprehensive declaration of the equal and sacred rights of mankind, our contemptible negro‐hating and slaveholding crit‐ ics, have endeavored to turn it into absurdity by treating it as a declaration of the equality of man in his physical proportions and mental endowments. This gross and scandalous perversion of the true intents and meaning of the declaration did not long



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 321 stand alone. It was soon followed by the heartless dogma, that the rights declared in that instrument did not apply to any but white men. The slave power at last succeeded, in getting this doctrine proclaimed from the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. (Douglass 1985, 529) Douglass speaks at a tenuous and eventful moment, between the foreclosures of Dred Scott and the promise of possible emancipation. The US Declaration did not grant rights to slaves. Indeed, this was the case in so many instances of performative universality at their Ur‐moments. On the one hand, then, Douglass insists that the “equal and sacred rights of man‐ kind” are “universal truths”, implicit in the way the document was “in‐ tended to be viewed” from the outset. On the other, the rhetorical power of Douglass’s reiteration of the universality of the rights of man as nascent, if inchoate, in the Declaration gives them the force of possibility for his audi‐ ence. Universality, then, emerges paradoxically as an iteration that is also performative, the creation of something new. As scholars such as David Brion Davis (1975) and Susan Buck‐ Morss (2009) have argued, the French intellectuals whose thought in‐ formed the Declaration of Independence in 1789 were blind to race. The American revolutionaries similarly prioritized the sanctity of property (in‐ cluding chattel slavery) over that of human liberty, regardless of race. If Rousseau’s principle that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”, is one on which Declarations were based, and revolutions conducted, then, as Buck‐Morss notes, “Rousseau referred to human beings everywhere— but omitted Africans” (2009, 33). As Buck‐Morss argues, Rousseau “de‐ clared all men equal and saw private property as the source of inequality, but he never put two and two together to discuss French slavery for eco‐ nomic profit as central to arguments of both equality and property” (33). Davis comments that “Americans genuinely believed that men who were taxed without their consent were literally slaves” (1975, 35). This was so even while, as Buck‐Morss puts it, “the new nation, conceived in liberty, tol‐ erated the monstrous inconsistency of writing slavery into the United States Constitution” (2009, 35). The stake, of course, of Buck‐Morss’s insist‐ ence on judging the historical deeds of those whose ideas nonetheless ar‐ guably frame the possibilities of universality and rights in modernity is over and against, “today’s philosopher, who is trained to analyze theory totally



322 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS abstracted from historical context” and “will attribute universality to Rous‐ seau’s writings that transcends [. . .] personal limitations”, such that “the embarrassing facts are quietly allowed to disappear” (34). The stake of Buck‐Morss’s influential insistence that Hegel’s ideas of self‐consciousness and freedom were inspired by the actions of Toussaint L’Ouverture and his often anonymous contemporaries in St Domingue is an insistence on action and interpretation in the history of ideas. “Although abolition of slavery was the only possible outcome of the ideal of universal freedom”, Buck‐ Morss notes, “it did not come through the revolutionary ideas or even the revolutionary actions of the French; it came about through the actions of the slaves themselves” (36). For Buck‐Morss, the actions that inspired ideas of universality remembered as influential must be given a role and a stage in the accounting of modernity. The effect of Toussaint on Hegel matters if we are to understand the temporality of the emergence of human rights discourse. If Buck‐Morss and Davis are right, then many of the American rev‐ olutionaries neither intended nor imagined their liberation to extend to their slaves. But the force of Douglass’s rhetorical gesture emerges not (or at least not only) from its insistence on the logical elaboration of freedom, but also on its ascription of this logic to the originary moment of Declara‐ tion. Such glorious universal truths, Douglass insists, are intentional at their moment of first enunciation. Yet even as the original declarations of humanist universalism are themselves exclusionary, they are often nonetheless reinscribed as origi‐ nary. Slavoj Žižek, speaking in Sydney in 2011, remarked that “The Haitian Revolution was a direct repetition of the French Revolution” (Žižek 2011, n.p.). Does Žižek mean that the French Revolution is a linear precursor to a Haitian revolution it inspires? While Žižek’s work is not blind to the logic of Hegelian Aufheben, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Gilles Deleuze—thinkers who would extend sublation beyond its Hegelian lim‐ its—offer an even more nuanced account of the way subsequent events can exceed and extend the logics of earlier declarations of rights. Repetition gives birth to the universal in the form of what Derrida calls the “future anterior” ([1967] 1976, 5). Similarly, though with some dif‐ ferences, the logic of repetition, Gilles Deleuze ([1968] 1994) notes, is es‐ sential to difference as such. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has put it, “the singular is the always universalizable, never the universal” (Damrosch and



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 323 Spivak 2011, 466; emphasis added). Douglass finds in its principles the pos‐ sibility of “universal principles” that necessarily must (have) grant(ed) these rights. Douglass is persuasive because something Universal (on which he insists) has not yet come to pass—in repeating the universality of the concept Douglass makes it so. The event takes place both in the decla‐ ration and in its repetition. In the exclusionary context of the declaration Douglass’s repetition functions in the form of a future anterior: what will have been (Derrida [1967] 1976, 5). The future anterior marks what is nec‐ essary but not yet actual—that which has the singular form of a universal but has not been made concretely universal as such. Douglass, by insisting on rights that have yet to emerge in the present time of his writing in 1862, reproduces the singularity of what was possible but not actual in the origi‐ nal Declaration of Independence in 1776. Douglass is, then, insisting on the universality of a singularity, which he makes universal through an act of interpretation. As Lewis R. Gor‐ don (2000) has suggested, Douglass’s “position [. . .] is that laws can be changed and interpreted and hence, made more just. The Constitution is, thus, an interpretable document, that is why the democratic process is a struggle” (45). It is, arguably not the framers of the US Constitution in 1776 but Douglass, in 1862, that makes the universalizable universal—or, at least, moves this singularity toward the space in which the humanism of humanism can think race (or at least racism) as something to be erased. With the erasure of racism, race would come under erasure, which (in Der‐ ridean form) implies its necessity but insufficiency for thinking human dif‐ ference. Here we are in the realm of what Joseph Slaughter (2007) calls the “paradoxes and anxieties about human rights that characterize the articu‐ lation of universal principles generally and the legislation of human rights in particular” (2–3).3 The universal is simultaneously possible and in need of actualisation. This is why humanism as a claim on rights is (always) in need of iteration.

3



As Joseph Slaughter (2007) reminds us, parsing a statement of John Humph‐ rey—the first director of the United Nations Human Rights Division—that “eve‐ ryone knows, or should know, why human rights are important” (2), the natural and originary bases from which human rights are seen to derive their force, must also be accompanied by a pedagogic function; a hermeneutic insistence on the force of what one insists to be originary to the human.

324 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS For Gilles Deleuze, just as the possibility of the event is nascent from its emergence point, its elaboration presupposes a becoming in repe‐ tition that is, paradoxically, not subsidiary to the originary event of which it is an antecedent. The antecedent is ancillary to the originary. As Craig Lundy (2012) puts it, for Deleuze, “the world is [. . .] in extrapolation: a pro‐ cess of continual emergence that is constantly undergoing adjustment and readjustment—negotiation—of various differences in intensity” (17). The promise of universal freedom is emergent in the conceits of the declaration as a virtuality that is not yet rendered actual. It is as a result of this that Deleuze insists on the way repetition makes action of theory. As Deleuze puts it: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condi‐ tion of historical action itself [. . .] historical actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify themselves with fig‐ ures from the past. (1991, 91) In fact, Douglass actualizes a potential of the US revolutionary prin‐ ciples, but he can do so only by insisting on their immanence to the origi‐ nary logic of the revolutionary and universalizable concept. In this way, Douglass as both actor and thinker remakes originary principles that are themselves merely a repetition in advance of his actualization. Douglass makes actual what was only possible and indeed, repressed or suppressed by the white men who framed the Declaration of 1776 or the Constitution of 1787. As Deleuze further puts it, “the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other” (1991, 90). The action of the revolutionary is itself a theorization of historical resemblance between past and present, but it can only be theo‐ retically plausible as an action. Repetition is never a historical fact, but ra‐ ther the historical condition under which something new is effectively pro‐ duced. It is not the historian’s reflection which remonstrates a resemblance between Luther and Paul, between the Revolution of 1789 and the Roman Republic etc. (90). And we should add to this etcetera, that, as Paul Gilroy’s work shows, modernity and enlightenment are not made in Europe and transplanted to the rest of the world but are instead made in the transac‐ tions between colonizer and colonized that elaborate modernity.



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 325 What Gilroy names the Black Atlantic is a site of modernity. Its rep‐ etition is as actualization of what is both new and what was always nascent in the concepts of those eventful declarations. As Deleuze continues, “we produce something new only on condition that we repeat—once in the mode which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamor‐ phosis” (1991, 90). Douglass does not only insist on the originary logical concept of emancipation given as universal in the American Declaration. He makes it universal by repeating its claims in the context of a historical mo‐ ment: between the Dred Scott decision and the possibility of the Emancipa‐ tion Proclamation. Douglass’s novel act of elaborating liberation is indeed a repetition of the logic of the Declaration of Independence, but what Deleuze’s idea of repetition allows us to see is that, paradoxically, the Dec‐ laration of Independence is only a repetition of what Douglass has made it become: not only virtually, but in action. Elaborations of such universal principles are only universalized by their grounding in the action of their subsequent elaborations—which, historically come from below and from the outside. But as I noted, the outside of modernity’s putative centre is, in rep‐ etition, often its unacknowledged motor force. For Paul Gilroy, the Black Atlantic is both repressed by modernity’s self accounting and productive of modernity itself. As Alex Weheliye (2014) has recently asserted, humanism has been a central site of contestation in black intellectual life in the US. Despite the exclusion of black folks from the category of the human ironi‐ cally, “humanity has always been a principal question within black life and thought in the west” (19). Weheliye suggests that the condition of possibil‐ ity of the human lies in this exclusionary measure: “in the moment in which blackness becomes apposite to humanity, Man’s conditions of possibility lose their ontological thrust, because their limitations are rendered abun‐ dantly clear” (19). For Balibar, the figure of exclusion from humanism, is, in a sense, the absolute human—the marker of the limits that both question the project of humanism and make it possible by remaking it. For Balibar (2012), in a similar register to Weheliye, that which is rendered a putative “foreign body”, through race or gender discrimination, “with her otherness, is the absolute human, it is the bourgeois arch‐human: no being is more hu‐ man, or to put it in Kantian terms, more clearly embodying the “destination” of the human” (225–26). If humanism is made from the outside, the idea of the human also appropriates these microhistorical changes that come from



326 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS the outside and claims them for itself—as though the revolutionaries simply intended what Douglass invents by insisting that they did. Hortense J. Spillers (2006) resonates with Deleuze, when she says: diasporic cultures [. . .] then, have been summoned to unmake the conditions of alienation, simultaneous with the actual, exploiting the force of it in order to make new, to bring into existence a rep‐ ertoire of predicates that were not there before so far as we can see. (25) As Spillers puts it here and as Gilroy’s idea of the “Black Atlantic” is the most extensive elaboration, diasporic relations with putative centers are not an aberration of modernity, nor are the subalterns that inhabit such spaces merely belated subjects awaiting the extended franchise of Enlight‐ enment. Rather, modernity and its emancipatory gestures of humanism are made (and contested) in such relational spaces of subalternity. W.E.B. Du Bois’s ([1903] 1994) question “would America have been America without her Negro people?” (163) is a universalizable question—extending far be‐ yond the shores of the United States and testifying to multiple subalterni‐ ties. As a herald of the limits of man, the subaltern insists on the invention of the human beyond the whitened limits of its declaration. It is now neces‐ sary to introduce the problem that must be overcome in this proposition. The trouble is that if we identify blackness or analogous forms of subalternity as a motor force of modernity and humanism, then we risk eliding the specificity of a given intervention by a specific subaltern voice. In this way, I (this white person writing to you now) may very well insist that humanism is made outside Europe—by the subalterns who remake its central projects. Yet so often, the assertions of such scholars of color as Gil‐ roy that I humbly echo here are verifiably drowned out by the ineluctable desire for origins that reproduce the enlightenment as located in Europe alone. This drowning out restages the intervention of a Du Bois or Douglass as merely a repetition of the Enlightenment as franchise (and not the more radical sense of repetition on which I have so far insisted). As Gilroy (1993) himself puts it, “European particularisms are still being translated into ab‐ solute, universal standards for human achievement, norms, and aspira‐ tions” (7–8), even when these achievements were neither products of Eu‐ rope, the west, or its various catachreses in splendid isolation. The problem,



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 327 then—which I take up in the next section—is how to think humanism as what Spivak calls a “universalizable” project without reproducing this logic or origins that always realigns the universal as the project of (white) “Man”. Humanism’s Pharmakon Striving for a New Humanism. Understanding Mankind. Our Black Brothers. I believe in you, Man. Racial Prejudice. Understanding and Loving. (Fanon [1952] 1992, xi) all you best dread the day when I am healed / of being a human. (“The Schooner Flight”, Walcott 1986, 357) If humanism always risks being overtaken by its nascent, exclu‐ sionar, what would it mean to be “healed / of being a human?” In “The Schooner Flight” as Walcott’s Shabine rides the waves with his comrade Vincent, a discussion takes place on modernity, mobility and the iterability of history. A “jet that was screeching over the Flight/ was opening a curtain into the past”, causing Vincent to cry out: One day go by planes only, no more boat. ... Progress, Shabine, that’s what it’s all about. Progress leaving all we small islands behind. (355) To which Shabine replies Progress is something to ask Caribs about. They kill them by millions, some in war, some by forced labour dying in the mines looking for silver, after that niggers; more progress. Until I see definite signs that mankind change, Vincent, I ain’t want to hear. Progress is history’s dirty joke. Ask that sad green island getting nearer. (355–56)



328 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS “Progress is history’s dirty joke”—troped as the aspiration of the human in its technological modernity. Progress is an image of modernity and enlightenment that would risk destroying Shabine and Vincent just as it did the Indigenous “Caribs” before them. Walcott is close to Fanon here. Fanon notes that humanism’s universalizable embrace is shadowed by the exclusionary “racial prejudice” that would set modernity’s literal and con‐ ceptual technologies on Shabine, Vincent and those who would remake a humanist modernity that always risks excluding them. Walcott and Fanon are proximate here, in so far as modernity, like humanism, is made by the subalterns that it would exclude and indeed destroy. As Ian Baucom puts it, limning the space of the South African township, “Fanon [. . .] understands himself to know and to see that the modernist zone of the present from which colonial societies will refashion themselves is the zone of the town‐ ship” even as this modernity of the township, the village or the ghetto is shadowed by the “brightly lit colonist’s cities: modernity or at least the illu‐ sion of modernity” (Baucom 2006, 69). For Baucom, following Fanon, “the colonial world [. . .] is a world cut in two but jammed together” (69). The pliability and “change” of mankind becomes, in Walcott’s text, an iterable potentiality for Shabine, but liberation requires an overcoming that would see Shabine “take over these islands,/ and all you best dread the day when I am healed/ of being a human” (Walcott 1986, 357). If the concept of the human and the human rights it undergirds cannot give rise to a novel mo‐ dernity, then humanism—at least for Shabine—is a condition from which the colonized subject suffers rather than a potential coincidence of life and citizenship that would arise to emancipate. There is a rupture at the center of humanism when it comes into contact with the experience of subalternity, not unlike so many of the uni‐ versalisms centered in Europe and “the west”. Modernity and its promises are a site of action and struggle in Deleuzian terms. Human rights are not born but made universal. In Weheliye’s sense, such emergences are “lines of flight from the world of Man”, inscribed in all its raced and gendered lim‐ itations on an otherwise universal potentiality" (2014, 132). As such, Douglass’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is a line of flight. Such lines of flight from the Man of humanism take the “form of prac‐ tices, existences, thoughts, desires, dreams, and sounds contemporane‐ ously existing in the law’s spectral shadows” (Weheliye, 2014, 132). But, as we have remarked, Douglass’s statement posits an eventfulness to produce



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 329 human rights over and against exclusionary racism through a logic of the universal (and hence, the originary—in this case, qua the trope of the orig‐ inal intentions of the US founding fathers). Douglass’s reinscription of the originary struggles against other such ascriptions of intention in ever com‐ pounding novel repetitions of the various originary speech acts and decla‐ rations of human rights. Even as Douglass relies on this ascription of inten‐ tion for the eventfulness of his novel repetition—his making universal and actual of the potentials of the originary declaration—corruptions of such gestures are found everywhere from the Dred Scott decision to Fox News— with its conservative insistence on the “intentions” of the “Founding Fa‐ thers”. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note of their own concept, lines of flight can be infected with fascism—“lines of death and destruction that di‐ vert the line of flight” (508). 4 Douglass, as Gordon writes, affirmed that, “laws can be changed and interpreted and hence made more just”, the space of repetition in which laws can be remade can also be their corruption, de‐ universalization, exclusion, and these tainted logics unfortunately nascent in the ambiguous conceptual structure of so many of the declarations we hold constitutive of the modern universals: human rights. If I have been in‐ sisting that universals can, in their repetitions and elaborations be rein‐ vented as vindications of rights and protections that were previously given to exclusion, then the risk of immanent or ongoing exclusions is also always potential. As Emmanuel Chukuwudi Eze (2008) puts it, “an act of invention or reinvention is always accompanied by an acute sense of the contingency of history” (26). What Fanon meant by a new humanism has been the subject of much debate, and much of this has centered around the relation between the declaration quoted above as an epigraph that begins Peau Noire, Masques Blancs and frames the question of violence in Damnés de la Terre, as Vivaldi Jean Marie (2007) has recently discussed. 5 In Fanon’s earlier thought, the attempt to think humanism is interrupted by the white gaze— just as in the cryptic reference to New Humanism, the desire to embrace

4 5



For a full discussion of this problem, see Protevi (2000). Vivaldi Jean‐Marie (2007) has recently attempted to establish the dialectical relation between new humanism and violent struggle. Jean‐Marie locates this question in relation to not only Gordon’s already‐cited attempt to locate Fanon as an existential thinker, but also earlier attempts by Perinbam (1983) and Onwuanibe (1983) respectively.

330 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS “Black Brothers”, is interrupted by the shadow of “Racial Prejudice”. It is this attempt to think beyond the interpellation of whiteness that under‐ girds Shabine’s warning of the consequences of his potential to be “healed/ of being a human”. For both Walcott and Shabine, the threat of anticolonial violence is a powerful possibility, but pales in comparison to the dialogic need to unify black political consciousness, as much in Fanon’s attempt to think the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) as a project for the people (rather than postcolonial elites) as in Shabine’s interlocution with Vincent. Similarly, attempts to locate a single and unitary universal—for in‐ stance, shifting the space of the originary from Europe to Africa—are sub‐ ject to this problematic. Fanon’s provocation that “the black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched”, meaning, as he elaborates “‘watched’ insofar as he might start something” ([1952] 1992, 18), is marked by a double relation with the self‐described defenders of the bas‐ tion of the universal. Such a statement is implicitly concerned with the dou‐ bled threat of subaltern education in so far as the repetition of the univer‐ salizable by the subaltern seeks to actualize what the colonizers would seek to repress.6 As Gordon reminds us, Fanon “points out that the location of the human being in a colonial, racist world has been displaced: human being has been distortedly collapsed into white” (2000, 52; emphasis in original). In this sense the idea of remaking the humanist legacy as a universal one, quickly places the innovations of the colonized within the frame of a hu‐ manism that represents itself as normatively white. Hortense J. Spillers similarly insists that the vicissitudes of culture and its universalizability cannot be solved by positing an essentialism of the kind proposed by Leopold Senghor’s Négritude or the Afrocentrism of

6



And, of course, to continue with Douglass as example, it is incumbent upon me to say that he educated himself. When Sophia Auld is scolded by her husband for aiming to teach Douglass to read and write, he finds a way through the ur‐ chins of Baltimore to teach himself to read. Douglass notes in his first autobiog‐ raphy that his apprehending a “powerful vindication of human rights”, came from reading the Columbian Orator—a 19th‐century conduct manual aimed at developing “the art of eloquence” (Douglass 1994, 42). As well as Sheridan’s speech on the Catholic Emancipation of Ireland, Douglass also cites a “Dialogue between a Master and a Slave”, contained in the Orator. Yet, here we see the degree to which Douglass’s education from western and American sources, also necessitated an act of interpretation. In the dialogue in the Orator, the slave convinces the master to free him, but becomes a servant instead; Douglass’s ambitions were no doubt loftier (The Columbian Orator 1800, Front Matter).

HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 331 Molefi Asante.7 This is not, of course, to say that taking the declarations of the North Atlantic as emergent (as even Douglass does) should ignore the fact that these moments are not arbitrary emergences (as universalizable as Senghor’s Négritude), but simply recognizing their dominance, influence and normativity as modes of thinking human rights (and, it must be said, the emancipatory potential of such figures that Douglass saw in them). In‐ stead, taking as one’s principle topos black elaborations of such arbitrary emergences centers the debate around the novelty that Douglass brings, through repetition, to projects that were universalizable but not yet univer‐ sal until they found their elaboration precisely in the thought of those whom they excluded. Here we are in the space of double‐consciousness. If humanism is both rendered universal by such subaltern intellec‐ tuals as Douglass and if the human is so often reproduced in its image as whiteness, then the subaltern remains split by the vestiges of exclusion given in the idea of humanism and human rights that she also invents. Spill‐ ers continues by taking seriously the difficulties of double consciousness elaborated by Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois: Since we cannot easily separate these imperatives from each other, we would have to say that New World black cultures, as well as their parallel formations in other parts of the globe, are not only Creole forms adopted from the implements, both ma‐ terial and imaginative, of the near‐at‐hand, but that they are also “schizophrenic,” if by that we mean compounded of a disposi‐ tion that carries both its statement and counterstatement, that would both undo alienation and constitute its own standpoint. (Spillers 2006, 25) The “parallel formations” of subalternity that share these charac‐ teristics of statement and counterstatement are divided in their repetition (and universalization) by what nonetheless insists on their potential exclu‐ sion—the precarity that disproportionately exposes blackness and femi‐ ninity to the state of exception that produces Homer Sacer.8 Black culture,

7 8



For a more recuperative reading of Senghor, see Diagne (2011). See Agamben (1998); on precarity, see Butler, (2004). It must be born in mind that, as Weheliye (2014) elaborates in Habeas Viscus, Agamben’s notion of bare life refuses the power of freedom to the subjects of power. Weheliye prefers,

332 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS Spillers notes, is rendered schizophrenically doubled in so far as it must be both the statement of humanist universality and a counter‐statement against humanism as whiteness. Yet, I argue, for Spillers to say that “black culture” is “schizophrenic”, is not to say that it is any more schizophrenic than the idea of the human that is both universal and exclusionary. For Jacques Derrida, the act of resistance that founds an ideal Re‐ public—in this case, the death of Socrates that founds Platonism—is at‐ tached to the name of pharmakon, for which “both remedy and poison, al‐ ready introduces itself into the body of [. . .] discourse with all its ambiva‐ lence” ([1967] 1981, 70). The idea of the human is the condition of the idea of universal legal personhood given in human rights as a set of institutions, a series of events and an aspirational project. If this iterable idea is given to the logic of difference and repetition, a line of flight that can be either “made more just” (in Douglass’s terms) or reproductive of exclusion, then could humanism be, itself, such a pharmakon? And if so, could we isolate the promise from the poison? What humanism could be born once we are “healed/ of being a human?” Further, man is both the sign of the universal in the declarations and the proper name of that which limits this universal‐ ity via gender and race. Derrida’s elaboration of the human that might be given to his logic of the pharmakon is complicated by its interlocution with the Heideggerean thought of Dasein. Derrida’s thought of the human proceeds back as early as “The Ends of Man”, and travels forward as far as the two essays on Heidegger’s strange humanism, given under the name Geschlecht as well as in the sub‐ sequent Of Spirit (1983, 1987a, 1987b) Recalling that Dasein names a pos‐ sible existent whose own being is a cause of its own reflection and con‐ cern—for which “Being is an issue for [the] entity in its very being”—we can see that the Heideggerian project that Derrida aims to extend is concerned with the abstract elevation of the concerns of humanism beyond the con‐ crete location of being in a given biological (and we might add, raced and gendered) embodiment (Heidegger 1962, 71). Yet, as Derrida elaborates in his two essays on the word Geschlecht in Heidegger’s usage, despite its ab‐ stract openness, even Dasein winds up in a relation of potential exclusion. The spirit of openness that would exceed the human as Man in Heidegger,

instead, the notion of flesh found elaborated in Hortense Spiller’s work—a con‐ cept that finds both joy and suffering potentially nascent within it.



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 333 Derrida finds frequently to be tainted by its reliance on the logic of Ges‐ chlecht—a German word denoting type or genre that is contaminated by its connotations of racial and sexual difference. Derrida remarks that in elabo‐ rating the very open questioning of Spirit that makes Dasein as a project so radical, Heidegger retains the “trace [. . .] of Geschlecht, that frighteningly polysemic and practically untranslatable word (race, lineage, stock, gener‐ ation, sex)” (Derrida 1987a, 7). In Fichte—as predecessor to Heidegger—Derrida finds a paradox‐ ical relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism that manifests it‐ self in a logic of citizenship as Geschlecht. Geschlecht is given in a dialectic between inclusion and exclusion that is vested in a cosmopolitics of the spirit: “Geschlecht is an ensemble, a gathering together [. . .] an organic community in a non‐natural but spiritual sense, that believes in the infinite progress of the spirit through freedom” (Derrida 1987b, 163). As Derrida puts it, limning Fichte: “Geschlecht is not determined by birth, native soil, or race, has nothing to do with the natural or even the linguistic”, even as it retains both the capacity for exclusion and a trace of the signification of all these things in the connotative web it casts (Derrida 1987b, 162). Instead, Fichte’s Geschlecht is an idiom of spirit by which citizenship in a future Ger‐ man state might be imagined: certain citizens, German by birth, remain strangers to this idiom of the idiom; certain non‐Germans can attain it since, engaging themselves in this circle or this alliance of spiritual freedom and its infinite progress, they would belong to ‘our Geschlecht’. (Der‐ rida 1987b, 162) As Derrida argues, the form of Dasein is necessarily constrained by the insistence of nationalisms, even as it opens onto a cosmopolitanism— an ideal of world citizenship. Further, the human as Dasein is constitutively a being whose openness is as given as is the exclusionary potentiality that pursues it. Geschlecht as a concept is both that which opens onto strangers (those who attain it given that they are open to spiritual freedom) and fore‐ closed even for those who are nominally part of the community (through birth, but not spirit). In the German philosophical tradition linking idealism to phenomenology, as Derrida puts it, “the ‘we’ finally comes down to the humanity of ‘man’” (1987a, 163).



334 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS If then, Dasein, through its reliance on Geschlecht, is both the most open instantiation of “Man” and nonetheless absolutely exclusionary, then the logic of exclusion cannot be decontaminated by an abstract speculation on possible existence, or on spirit—however open it may be.9 Instead, it must be thought through the concrete modes of exclusion—the assem‐ blages of raced, gendered, and indeed, species‐inflected alterity—through which humanism is consistently limited under the sign of “Man”. Humanism is iterable and therefore open—as Dasein—or through its Geschlecht hu‐ manism is also exclusionary and therefore always at risk of closure. Hu‐ manism is a pharmakon; its very emancipatory nature is a spiritual open‐ ness, a possibility of being that risks redefinition as exclusionary. The po‐ tential limits that black intellectual thought calls attention to within this pharmakon lie in this question: if Dasein and Geschlecht were the conditions of the “humanity of ‘man’”, how might humanity go beyond ‘man’ as a lim‐ ited, raced, gendered singularity? Douglass, DuBois, Fanon, Spillers: their goal is to force this iterability to an openness that will unmake the (white) “Man” as the ground of humanism and as such, iterate humanism as the subject of its originary promise. Dasein is the radically open possible existent of self‐inquiry—and this existent simultaneously exceeds and is located in the human. If Dasein is itself given to exclusion, then, as I have been suggesting, time, recursivity and the thought of the radically external pose a potential solution to the paradox of humanism’s pharmakon. The human, as Dasein, or as potential existant, should find its political elaboration, then, not in the already in‐ cluded side of the pharmakon’s partitition, but in its deterritorialization by those on the side of the excluded. As Weheliye has recently elaborated, the particularity of the black feminist thought that arises in the intersection of Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is based in the sense that any feminism must re‐ code the human. For Wynter, says Weheliye, “a feminism that does not as‐ pire to create a different code for what it means to be human merely sketches a different map of man’s territorializing assemblages” (2014, 23). Here we see both a notion of repetition and remaking. What must be re‐ made, evacuated and overcome is precisely the man of humanism or as Weheliye put it, the only effective humanism is one for which the absolute outside undoes “the abolition of the human as Man” (23). For Weheliye,

9



This applies even to Agamben’s (2004) elaboration of the analytic of boredom in Heidegger.

HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 335 where dominant discourse seeks to develop upgrades of the current notion of humanity as Man, improvements are not the aim or product of the imaginaries borne of racializing assem‐ blages and political violence; instead they summon forms of hu‐ man emancipation that can be imagined but not (yet) described. (126–27) Weheliye sees such dominant discourses as the modernist‐human‐ ist declarations and the discourse of human rights are flawed so long as they are improvements of the notion of humanity as Man. Instead, it is in the assemblages arising from the fleshy engagements of the suffering that human emancipation can be attained. I would add simply that these assem‐ blages need not remain at the level of the absolute outside of the discourses of rights and justice that have been discursively dominant. If the humanism of the iterable declarations, from the late 18th century to the late 1940s, has been framed as first the humanism of Man, and later as a dispositif of the person, then that compels a certain Bildung.10 The assemblages of the flesh should not be thought of as purely heterogeneous to the dominant dis‐ courses of humanism’s pharmakon. Rather, this pharmakon must be con‐ sistently deterritorialized by a logic of repetition that comes from the out‐ side, from the assemblages of the flesh of subaltern life and thought. To be, as Walcott puts it, “healed/ of being a human”, is a necessary condition in the (re)making of a humanism that never was, except in its possibility, to‐ morrow.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans‐ lated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ‐‐‐. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balibar, Etienne. 1991. “Citizen Subject.” In Who Comes After the Subject? edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean‐Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge.

10



Here, as the term will suggest, I am reading Roberto Esposito’s (2012) recent work as it resonates with that of Joseph Slaughter.

336 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS ‐‐‐. 2012. “Civic Universalism and Its Internal Exclusions: The Issue of An‐ thropological Difference.” boundary 2 39 (1): 207–29. Baucom, Ian. 2006. “Township Modernism.” In Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, 63–76. London: Routledge. Buck‐Morss, Susan. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence. Lon‐ don: Verso. The Columbian Orator. 1800. Boston: Manning and Loring, Front Matter. http://www.classicapologetics.com. Accessed October 23, 2015. Damrosch, David, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 2011. “Comparative Lit‐ erature/World Literature: A Discussion.” Comparative Literature Studies 48 (4): 455–85. Davis, David Brion. 1975. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. [1968] 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capi‐ talism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneap‐ olis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. [1967] 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ‐‐‐. [1972] 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone Press. ‐‐‐. 1983. “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference.” Research in Phenomenology 13 (1): 65–83. ‐‐‐. 1987a. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‐‐‐. 1987b. “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand.” Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. In Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, edited by John Sallis, 161–96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



HUMANISM’S PHARMAKON 337 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. 2011. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Berg‐ son, and the Idea of Negritude. Translated by Chike Jeffers. London: Seagull. Douglass, Frederick. 1985. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews Volume 3 1855–63. Edited by John W. Blassingame. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ‐‐‐. 1994. Autobiographies. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Li‐ brary of America. Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover. Esposito, Roberto. 2012. Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. New York: Polity. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. 2008. “Language and Time in Postcolonial Expe‐ rience.” Research in Africa Literatures 39 (1): 24–47. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1992. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Lewis R. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding African Existen‐ tial Philosophy. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM. Jean‐Marie, Vivaldi. 2007. Fanon: Collective Ethics and Humanism. New York: Peter Lang. Lundy, Craig. 2012. History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativ‐ ity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press. Onwuanibe, Richard C. 1983. A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism. St Louis, MO: W. H. Green. Perinbam, B. Mari. 1983. Holy Violence: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press. Protevi, John. 2000. “‘A Problem of Pure Matter’: Deleuze and Guattari's Treatment of Fascist Nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus." In Nihilism Now! Monsters of Energy, edited by Keith Ansell‐Pearson and Diane Morgan, 167–88. London: Macmillan.



338 MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS Slaughter, Joseph. R. 2007. Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Spillers, Hortense J. 2006. “The Idea of Black Culture.” CR: The New Centen‐ nial Review 6 (3): 7–28. Walcott, Derek. 1986. Collected Poems 1948–84. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Bio‐ politics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. “Let Us Demand the Impossible: Communism.” Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Australia, November http://www.abc .net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/11/01/3352502.htm



Sovereignty of the Mind Philip Mead If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) repre‐ sent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation‐ state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality they put the originary fic‐ tion of modern sovereignty in crisis. (Agamben 1998, 131) The reception of Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book was symptomatic of the contradictions and limitations of the white Australian imaginary, at least where the public sphere of literary reception is con‐ cerned. That reception was shaped by a deeper lack of understanding of cultural difference and a limited comprehension of the possible social roles of literary narrative. The distinctiveness of the novel’s Indigenous perspec‐ tives, styles and contexts, including its address to non‐Aboriginal desires for constitutional recognition and reconciliation as well as contentions within the Aboriginal polity, have hardly been legible despite some knowl‐ edgeable and favourable reviews (see Williamson; Gleeson‐White). This scenario has frequently been one of the subjects of Wright’s writing: the constitutive role of story‐telling (in various modes, including conflictual) in Indigenous cultural life and survival, and the inability of such narratives to be heard or acknowledged within Australian public and political culture— “We know your story” is the refrain of settler Australia that begins Wright’s earlier novel Carpentaria. Whether traditional law and creation myths, or oral libraries of dreaming tracks and ancestral estates, or witness narra‐ tives, or literary fiction of deep time and recent history (as in Wright’s in‐ stance) the broader culture is reluctant to engage with these resources for a re‐founded national identity, even where they intersect with the institu‐ tions of government, limiting the broader cultural and historical under‐ standing of the nation, or how to think Australia.1

1

The Swan Book and Wright’s prize‐winning novel Carpentaria (2006) currently circulate as world novels where they have a powerful and distinctive presence

339

340 PHILIP MEAD Non‐Aboriginal Australia’s resistance to Indigenous story‐telling, in particular, is a symptom of its unresolved settler history—and the other way round: its settler history remains unresolved and anxiously shallow because of its imperviousness to Indigenous narratives of country and pol‐ ity. That history is marked by the varieties of residual racism—evident in historiographical contentions about foundational narratives (invasion, frontier violence, stolen generations)—and in conflicted iconographies like the Yirrkala bark petitions’ enshrinement in Parliament House and their absurd nomination there as "founding documents" of Australian democ‐ racy.2 It is also at work in a deeper reluctance to recognise or acknowledge the social work of literature and literary sociability that includes Aboriginal styles and modes, some of them radical adaptations of the western tradi‐ tions. This is especially the case when what is at stake are narratives about the nation’s future. While some Aboriginal writers have countered the in‐ herited thematics of historical—often nationalist—fiction in Australia by rewriting the past (Eric Willmot, Pemulwy: the Rainbow Warrior, Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance) the weight of that genre tends to lie with the white imaginary’s repression of historical injustice and violence, or more latterly, with the agonies and subterfuges of the settler‐historical conscience. But the idea of a public conversation about an Aboriginal future for Australia seems unthinkable, especially one framed by Aboriginal people themselves. The difficult issue with Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, it seems, is that it imagines a complex Indigenous future not just for Australia, but for the planet. Perhaps Australia resembles other modern nations with invader‐ settler histories in this respect, but the frequency with which members of the Australian political class, including the commentariat, express the need to find or tell “a narrative” seems resonant beyond the mainstream political and media spheres. The pathology (literally, suffering) that is readable in these public expressions is about the deep deformations of collective story‐ telling, a psychic economy of unspeakable histories, and the spectre of a



2



as complex literary narratives within transnational Indigenous literary circuits, and that therefore influence non‐Australian understandings and meanings of Australia. For example, Wright’s fiction was the focus of the Association of Aus‐ tralian Studies in China’s 2015 international symposium on the parallel study of Australian Indigenous people and Chinese Mongolian nationality. See Os‐ borne and Whitlock. Parliament House http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au

SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 341 story‐less future, or chaos. The suffering keeps erupting, irrationally, on the surface. As Yolgnu leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu (2016) underlines, in an‐ other narrative of life and land that he recognises is unassimiliable to white Australian imaginary, The Australian people do not wish to recognise me for who I am—with all that this brings— [. . .] the Australian people know that their success is built on the taking of the land, in making the country their own, which they did at the expense of so many lan‐ guages and ceremonies and songlines—and people—now de‐ stroyed. They worry about what has been done for them and on their behalf, and they know that reconciliation requires much more than just words. (29) What is often referred to, by non‐Aboriginal Australians, as the search for a “narrative” includes the wilful deafness and repression Yunipingu describes, but also the politicised view that media‐ownership laws, or “urban elite” ideology, give some groups more “control” than others over narrative, the “Big Story” of nation, history and economic re‐ ality (see Dunlop). Eruptive points here include the discursive pathology around anniversaries, like Australia Day (or Invasion Day), the Anzacifica‐ tion of history and identity, the risky discourse of “one nation” (against mul‐ tiethnic and heterogeneous peoples), and the continuing obsession with ra‐ cializing an Indigenous population.3 The relation of an idea of story‐telling, including the idea of its “bigness”, to political power, mainstream nation‐ alising, legal actions, and the mediasphere is obvious here, as is the assump‐ tion that those are the only social jurisdictions in which such an equation can be understood and in which its existential contradictions might be re‐ solved. The Swan Book is apparently about the world a century from now, but as an Indigenous adaptation of the speculative genre, it remediates the habitual western mentality of past, present and future. In this connection Wright has emphasised more than once the Mexican writer Carlos

3



For the history of the ideology of homogeneous political subjectivity in the North American context see Carlson 2016, 27.

342 PHILIP MEAD Fuentes’s analogous understanding of her Indigenous world‐view and tem‐ porality, or “dreaming”, as "writing all times": "All times are important in Mexico, and no time has ever been resolved" (“Alexis Wright Interview”). The Swan Book emerges out of other times, including deeply contested his‐ tories of settlement, and the present, the contemporary political economy of land rights, including resources and environmental policy. But it carries the story of the present (always entailing the past) forward into the future. And writing the future is also writing the present. Wright's new novel does a reverse take on earlier uses of displaced time where present and past are juxtaposed within a single timeframe, in Samuel Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung for instance, and also in the use of speculative future images in Indig‐ enous art like Gordon Bennett’s. The latter is closer to Wright but all involve a questioning of there being a single view of time and its linear European framework. As a way of following an important thread through this repre‐ sentational world of multiple temporalities and co‐present histories I trace the word “sovereignty” in and out of the novel, mainly because my argu‐ ment is that the novel is a multi‐faceted and self‐reflexive address to polit‐ ical and social aspects of sovereignty as they co‐exist in the past and the present, and how they might be understood in an immanent future. There is also the sense that the avian mythographic elements of the novel, revolv‐ ing around swans, brolgas, finches, chats etc., with their cross‐cultural syn‐ cretism, as well as its Indigenisation of the speculative narrative genre are a symbolic expression of Wright’s imaginative self‐determination and au‐ tonomy. Wright is well aware, as I demonstrate, of the narrow, legalistic and constitutional history and referents of the word sovereignty, but her fiction is a powerful expression of her concept of “sovereignty of the mind”, a much more expansive and wholistic understanding of Indigenous self‐determina‐ tion, and not just a mentally isolationist or abstract one. The word “sovereignty” occurs first in the prelude to the novel, "Ig‐ nis Fatuus", in the internal first‐person monologue of Oblivia. These confes‐ sional thoughts of Oblivia about the virus in the doll’s house of her brain occur some years after the main action of the novel, a mere will‐o‐the‐wisp, perhaps, in relation to the story it prefaces. The virus [in her brain] was quite interested in my idea of belong‐ ing everywhere, and asked why I took these journeys that bring in more places to crowd up its little world. I say that I begin locally,



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 343 navigating yellow‐watered floods that grow into even greater in‐ land sea‐crossings, to reach a rich alluvial plain that feeds shaded gardens, where the people who live there say they do not know me as ask why have I come. Always, I move on. (Wright 2013a, 4) In this later present, Oblivia is led on by her compulsion, her foolish brain fire, to travel in search of a homeland in the climate‐altered water‐ world of the future: "And so I travel, fired up with the fuel of inquiry about what it means to have a homeland"(4). As a mental traveller Oblivia is one of the survivors of Wright’s “rubble” or rubbish dump worlds, like Angel Day in Carpentaria, born in a tip, traumatised by abuse and neglect, rescued and befriended by a refugee from the post‐apocalyptic North, but cursed with the virus of imagining an "ideal world" (4) or "illusionary ancient homelands" (5). Oblivia’s utopian impulse exists in the face of her tragic ex‐ perience of real places, including the "dystopia of dysfunction" that is Swan Lake, the polluted, northern Australian ordinance dump where she lives (140). “This is where it begins as far as I’m concerned. This is the quest to regain sovereignty over my own brain” (4). So this is a mental world, an imaginary one, both internally, to Oblivia, and to the reader. The novel be‐ gins with the first‐person intimate display of a deeply divided mind, includ‐ ing that mind’s desperate grip on its quest for self‐determination. But the lesson of Wright’s fiction, and this is true of her other novels as well, is that such dreams of self‐determination occur in the midst of real extremes of political and social dispossession and, in The Swan Book, in an Anthropo‐ centric end‐world that is either threatened by or has descended into envi‐ ronmental chaos. The fugal rhetoric of Wright’s representation of mental states embodies the dissonance of dystopian reality and utopian dream‐ ing—the delicate suggestion of the supernatural in the marshlight ("Ignis Fatuus") and the real world clang of the word “sovereignty”. While the term “sovereignty” is variously abstract in reference, it clearly also refers to the state in its legal and territorial alignment with the nation, the international system of governance (the law of nations) and with the history of dispossession, as well as the ongoing biopolitics, of co‐ lonial rule. It has also appeared on the horizon of literary critics who want to read beyond the nation, either within the World Literature paradigm or within critiques of individual national traditions. Dislodging literary socia‐ bility and modes of interpretation from sovereign states and territory—



344 PHILIP MEAD that is, from geopolitical bounds and limits of space and history—has seemed, in recent critical discourse, like a liberating move, especially in re‐ lation to any Indigenous body of work that is always already constituted by the struggle against settler, invader and occupier nationalisms, including literary nationalisms. Worlding or reterritorialising readings of previously “national” texts tends to be driven by a desire to get beyond defensive, blind or essentialising territorialism, and the ugly, violent history of legal sover‐ eignty. Critics like Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock and Paul Giles aim to read the novel against and beyond bounded histories of the geo‐unitary na‐ tion with its (often mis‐ and disremembered) foundations in violence and dispossession, and its anxious, subjugating possessiveness about history, borders, identity and myth. Critical decolonisation or de‐nationalisation, here, seems to hold out the promise of local self‐determination for the In‐ digenous text: its governance of itself, the recognition of its unpatrolled cit‐ izenship, not of a postcolonial nation, or a postcolony, or even of a “First‐ World” World Literature, but of a trans‐Indigenous first‐nation of letters. In relation to writers like Alexis Wright, though, this reterritorial‐ ising turn may discount and distort some core realities of Indigenous life and thought. As Wright reminds us in an important speech, her Mabo lec‐ ture of June 2013 in Alice Springs in the same year The Swan Book was pub‐ lished—and which I will return to in detail—Aboriginal people have a par‐ ticular relationship to the word ‘ “sovereignty”’ and its definitional role across the historical periodization of their own subjugation. It is not easily escaped, nor do they want to escape it necessarily, given its powerful role in constitutions of the state and the recognition of its potential for Indigeni‐ sation. Various white historians, Henry Reynolds and Bain Attwood per‐ haps most notably, have traced and analysed the history of sovereignty in Australia at the conjunction of developing politico‐legal institutions and the depredations of settlement. But while they are aware of the valency of sov‐ ereignty debates in the present, those debates’ relation to constitutional recognition of first peoples, the instabilities produced by efforts at decolo‐ nisation, and self‐determination and treaty movements, as historians they are predominantly focused on the past (see Attwood 2009; Reynolds 1996). My reading of Alexis Wright’s fiction draws attention, rather, to the ways in which a concept like sovereignty even with its history of the political eras‐ ure of Aboriginal people, and for all its contentious role in the discourse of



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 345 race politics, can nevertheless be Indigenized at a number of levels, includ‐ ing the level of the imaginary, one of the most empowering expressions of self‐determination.4 Such possibilities for the Indigenization of the discourse on sover‐ eignty have been recognised by a disparate group of Aboriginal writers and intellectuals. In 2007 Aileen Moreton‐Robinson’s edited volume, Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (2007), addressed sovereignty, broadly focused on the present, under the headings of law, writing, history and policy. These included Moreton‐Robinson’s own chapter on Aboriginal autonomy and the perceived threat to national identity, Tony Birch’s cri‐ tique of amnesia in the past and the present, Philip Morrissey’s critiques of professional colonial history, Gary Foley’s powerful analysis of the Mabo decision and, in its wake, Native Title legislation and the ongoing contest about sovereignty, Tracy Bunda’s reading of Aboriginal women’s biography and autobiography as the expression of the counter‐colonising warrior, and Wendy Brady and Maggie Walter’s comparative and global perspectives on Indigenous sovereignty (see Moreton‐Robinson). This heterogeneous net‐ work of writings also includes the discussion of sovereignty and Aboriginal rights in Larissa Behrendt’s earlier book Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future (2003), with its chapter “Aboriginal Sover‐ eignty: A Practical Roadmap”, and some of the contributions in Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss’s Intervention (2015), an anthology of writings in response to the 2007 federal government's Northern Territory National Emergency Response, another in the long history of attempts to control a racialized population. These perspectives and arguments vary in their focus on the past or the present. Focused on the present, for example, is Toula Nicola‐ copoulos and George Vassilacopoulos’s Indigenous Sovereignty and the Be‐ ing of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins (2014). This extended essay in the register of philosophical argument and manifesto comprises an incisive analysis of the ontological drama of white Australian being. It argues that unable to re‐negotiate its property‐owning identity and its criminal history with a spectral Aboriginal sovereignty, white Australia therefore perpetuates Black Australia as the enemy. Collec‐ tively, then, these writings address sovereignty in relation to the contem‐ porary Australian polity and the discourse on human rights. That address

4



Some of the critical vocabulary here draws on the arguments and readings in Carlson (2016).

346 PHILIP MEAD Moreton‐Robinson suggests, occasions deeply anxious and furiously held political commitments: “public attitudes towards Indigenous sovereignty have changed very little since 1788 [she writes] and any assertion of Indig‐ enous sovereign rights continues to be met with rabid backlash and denial” (2007, xi).5 Alexis Wright’s (2013b) Mabo lecture, an important contribution to the “sovereignty talk” of this distributed collective I’ve just pointed to, referred to the context of these debates as a contemporary “story‐telling war”. Her language here would seem to echo Moreton‐Robinson’s view of the symbolic violence at work in the rhetoric of sovereignty debates. "We are in the middle of a story‐telling war”, Wright said, “aimed at the destruc‐ tion of our rights” (n.p.). This is not just a range of social and academic dif‐ ferences, it is also a mediatised struggle, including high‐profile opponents of the sovereignty “movement” as well as the influential speeches and me‐ dia appearances of proponents like Rosalie Kunoth Monks and the local ac‐ tivism of Muurrumu Walubarar Yidindiji, in his renunciation in 2015 of Australian citizenship and the declaration of the Yidindiji nation in North Queensland (see Daly 2015). In the midst of this tumultuous, sometimes bitter, contemporary discourse Wright’s rhetoric differs from that of other contributors, I think, because of her thinking as a novelist (a particular kind of Indigenous story‐teller, that is): "our future”, she said, requires us to be‐ come very mindful about preserving and rebuilding our oral tradition of good and skillful story‐telling practice" (2013b, n.p.). And she draws a pow‐ erful equation between Aboriginal legal activism in the heritage of Eddie Mabo and Indigenous cultural expression, particularly narrative. In other words, she extends this debate beyond the realm of the solely legal and ju‐ dicial by pointing to the role of stories and meaning in the cause of justice and rights and the most influential “Australian” story of the last three dec‐ ades, the story of Eddie Mabo:

5



These public attitudes tend to get lost in the republic debate in Australia when it surfaces intermittently—as in ex‐Prime Minister Paul Keating’s media around the publication of Kerry O’Brien’s book Keating (2015), an extension of his 2013 (that year again) four‐part ABC series. Keating sees Indigenous self‐ determination, understandably enough, in terms of Mabo and subsequent Na‐ tive Title legislation, but this is to mute the many voices of critique of post‐Mabo Indigenous self‐determination.

SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 347 I think the ideas that drove Eddie Koiki Mabo's dream of achiev‐ ing justice through the recognition of his inheritance and rights are ideas that we commonly think about as Aboriginal people. Most of us have spent our entire lives undertaking the hard work of trying to re‐connect or to stay connected to our tradi‐ tional country. That is the spirit of our culture. This is what I be‐ lieve he was interested in—the life of the spirit—the essence or backbone of what we are—of what gives meaning to our world—and of really understanding the value of stories. He knew that it is perfectly reasonable to be reasonably angry if someone tries to take away your rights, and that it is okay to allow our instincts to react to threats to our survival [. . .]. It is the stories from all times that have created the map of who we are, our laws, and what we are made of. If we lose this—if we start saying that knowing ourselves through our legacy of ancestral and historical stories and attachment to the land doesn't really matter to us in the so‐called modern world of Aus‐ tralia in the 21st century, then we will simply lose our identity and relationship to country. Our nations will no longer exist. It is this deep feeling for the stories of country that comes from our ancestors which not only tell us who we are, it also tells us where we have been, and provides us with the template and fun‐ damental principles to imagine what will be important to us in the future. The work of Eddie Mabo extended the story of who we are and our rights, and he did this by not letting other people continue to invent and dictate their own narratives about us—the narra‐ tive or story of terra nullius—which is linked to the story of as‐ similation, and the story of dispossession and oppression, that we are incapable of achieving what we set out to do and need to be protected from ourselves, or stories to denigrate and create self‐loathing among our people. (Wright 2013b, n.p.) The Swan Book emerges out of and addresses this contemporary socio‐spiritual understanding of political reality and narrative, of individual



348 PHILIP MEAD Indigenous activism and how to think, or narrate, the future of the nation within the continuum of “all times”. The novel, though, compared to this position statement in the Mabo lecture, is a much more complex and con‐ tradictory imagining of the future. Moreton‐Robinson and Alexis Wright both refer to “backlash’ and “war” in relation to the discourse on sovereignty and the legacy of Eddie Mabo. What they’re referring to is not just the reactions of non‐Aboriginal Australians to fundamental and constitutional challenges to “white Austral‐ ian being”, but also the rhetoric within the Aboriginal intellectual and lead‐ ership community itself, and while her Mabo lecture isn’t explicit about these political positions within the Indigenous community, The Swan Book explores and dramatizes them in its future projections for Australia and the globe. Marcia Langton’s Boyer Lectures for 2012, for example, The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom (2013), by one of Australia’s highest profile Indigenous intellectuals, were framed in terms of a different kind of story‐telling project: Langton writes in her introduction that in the lectures her goal was to change “the narrative from the tired old story of the black victim/protestor to a more informed account of Aborigi‐ nal engagement with modernity and the resulting cases of economic suc‐ cess and ingenuity against the odds” (13). (The ABC’s Boyer Lectures are the equivalent of BBC Radio 4’s Reith lectures in the UK, and the CBC’s Mas‐ sey lectures in Canada.) There were a couple of controversies occasioned by Langton’s lectures: first, a flare‐up in the on‐going contention with high profile climate and sustainability scientist Tim Flannery, a former Austral‐ ian of the Year (2007) and his “future eating” theory about the Aboriginal people as "enemies of nature" (in Langton’s phrase) because of their possi‐ ble contribution to the “first” Australian extinction of the Pleistocene meg‐ afauna (see Rose 2003). The other was a counter‐broadside from the con‐ servation movement, including Flannery, about the non‐disclosure, by Langton, of subsidies for her research by resource and mining corporations Rio Tinto, Santos and Woodside (McColl 2013). Rhetorically, Langton’s po‐ lemic was couched as a critique of the racist and colonising meme of the noble savage, which she sees as determining Green ideology and political practice: “They [national parks] are not wilderness areas. They are Aborig‐ inal homelands” (Harrison 2012,n.p.). But these controversies, relatively marginal in terms of Langton’s overall project, entirely overrode the real



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 349 polemical vehemence in the lectures, which was against what she referred to as the advocates of Aboriginal sovereignty. In the final lecture, “The New Narrative of Indigenous Success”, a title which again acknowledges the centrality of the conjunction of narra‐ tive and power to these contentions, she turns from an account of racist elements in the right‐wing commentariat (Quadrant magazine, radio shock‐ jocks, etc.) to what she describes as “other monsters stalking this land‐ scape: one of them is a favourite of the professional dissidents in the Abo‐ riginal movement: ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’” (Langton 2013, 138): There is a small and powerful group of Aboriginal people [Lang‐ ton writes] involved in the politics of this domain, stridently ad‐ vocating this concept. What does it mean? A separate state? En‐ actment of Indigenous rights? Such questions have never been answered, and the concept remains a slogan, one that points to a vaporous dream of self‐determination but does not require any actual activity in the waking world to materialise it. It is Australia’s version of the Marcus Garvey moment of 1950s Ja‐ maica that dreamt of the repatriation of African descendants to Africa and involved the proto‐Rastafarians in rituals such as waiting on the wharf for their saviour, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, to arrive on a ship and rescue them. In the early 1990s, some advocates for this idea of Aboriginal sovereignty had Aboriginal passports made and with them travelled inter‐ nationally for some years. (138–39) "It bemuses me", writes Langton, "that so many people are en‐ thralled by this absurd political ideology [. . .] a fatuous political path" (139; 140–41). Langton went further and identified an "undercurrent in the Rec‐ onciliation movement" where "many Aboriginal advocates of reconciliation have addressed themselves not to the settlers who want absolution for their ancestral past in Australia’s history, but to young Aboriginal people attracted to the Aboriginal sovereignty slogans" (140). Rather than refer to any of the important landmarks in the cause of Aboriginal land rights, like the Australian Aborigines League’s 1938 “Day of Mourning”, or the Yolgnu Gove petition case of 1963, or the Gurindji



350 PHILIP MEAD Wave Hill walkout of 1966, or Paul Coe’s case against the Australian gov‐ ernment (Coe v Commonwealth, 1979), or Mabo (1992) or Wyk (1996)— some of the important landmarks in the struggle for self‐determination— Langton cites the instance of the passports issued by Michael Mansell’s Pro‐ visional Aboriginal Government—“stunt” is her word—to ridicule the sov‐ ereignty movement (“Sovereign Union—First Nations Asserting Sover‐ eignty”: http://www.soverei gnunion.mobi). The Aboriginal passports inci‐ dent was also the occasion of outrage for the conservative Prime Minister John Howard. This is weird, given that the much more high profile instance of Aboriginal protest in this connection, and from only slightly earlier, is the tent embassy of 1972, an equally illegitimate “stunt”, one might assume, in terms of the critique of dominant white sovereignty. With its origins in of‐ fence at federal government denial of land rights and its symbolism of an imagined Aboriginal nation that needed representation in the national cap‐ ital, alongside the embassies of other sovereign nations, it expressed Abo‐ riginal people’s sense of being aliens, and unrepresented, in their own land. Even more curious is the accusation of messianic Garveyism, suggesting that this Aboriginal politics is in the name of a pan‐Australian Aboriginal state, to be led by a diasporic Aboriginal person, or Ras Tafari, and located in some distant, original homeland. The accusation of pan‐Aboriginal na‐ tionalism is particularly puzzling, given that it implies Aboriginal adoption of the colonising nation as the model for political struggle, the race‐based nation within a postcolonial nation. And insofar as the Canberra tent em‐ bassy did imply a kind of analogous adoption, it is ironic that Langton doesn’t mention it. “Professional Aboriginal dissidents”, in her view, “cling to their own form of Garveyism” (2013, 142). The Swan Book refracts some of this rhetoric of contemporary Aboriginal politics and history in ironic and satiric ways, particularly around the novel’s messianic Aboriginal leader, Warren Finch. Noel Pearson, perhaps the highest profile Aboriginal leader in Aus‐ tralia at the moment, and a co‐member with Langton of the 2012 Expert Panel on Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution, and whom Langton references in her lectures, is a co‐refuter of the idea of Aboriginal sovereignty, although not quite as vehemently (http://www.recognise.org.au/about/expert‐panel‐report/). Pearson’s writing suggests he feels more acutely the pressures of history and the pol‐ itics of nation; he lives the irresolutions of Australian Aboriginal being



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 351 (Pearson 2014, 41). His melancholic evocation of Galarrwuy Yunupingu and his worries about the future of his Yolgnu nation at the beginning of his essay about a more complete Commonwealth is a moving expression of this. Nevertheless, for Pearson, Aboriginal sovereignty is “absolutist, nihil‐ ist daydreaming about what should be” (quoted in Langton, 2013, 142), the antithesis of his own version of a pluralised Australian Indigeneity, with its layered identities, homeland communalism, the “right to take responsibil‐ ity”, and market liberalism (Neale 2014)—all concepts inflected, in Pear‐ son’s writing, for a settled, unified nation. For Pearson the project of an Aus‐ tralian State is incomplete rather than misfounded; the founding violence of its constitution can be revised and an ideal Commonwealth completed. Layered identities, for example, are homologous with the layered history of the "triune nation" (Pearson 2014, 51). Pearson’s position relies on a more juridical rhetoric than Langton’s, also foundational to white settlement, that sovereignty is “injusticiable”, a fact of white settlement reaffirmed by the Mabo case, just as it opened up the possibility of native title (40–41). Pear‐ son is not interested, as he says, in "tilting at the windmill of sovereignty as a question of legal legitimacy" (41). Extinguishing the doctrine of terra nul‐ lius didn’t mean recognising prior Indigenous sovereignty; the Mabo judge‐ ments were explicit about that. Pearson is deploying the technical legal term “injusticiable” as understood within the doctrine of the ”Act of State”, in this instance, describing the legal and political frame of the Constitution of Australia, which defines all the jurisdictions of a nation (see Reynolds, 1996). According to this doctrine there is no jurisdiction within the nation where its own “original” jurisdictions can be at law: questions about its own constitutionality, if you like, have no standing. The Australian constitution, as a matrix of power similar to other founding documents of western nation states, may be able to be amended or revised but its constitutionality itself can’t be fundamentally questioned. There are many aspects here but not the least in question, for Aboriginal discourses about sovereignty, are dec‐ larations that stem from the legal establishment of the document, like those in the opening words of the “Preamble” to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (of the UK parliament of July, 9, 1900), which reads: the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queens‐ land, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty



352 PHILIP MEAD God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Common‐ wealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established. Those people didn’t include Aboriginal people, so what is their re‐ lation to the people who had "agreed to unite"? What role did Aboriginal people have in this founding social and political contract of Australian sov‐ ereignty, except exclusion? These are the burning questions that Pearson wants to address, but not legally, and not even politically. He wants to ad‐ dress them metaphysically: “I am not interested in tilting at the windmill of sovereignty as a question of legal legitimacy (2014, 41) [. . .] I am not con‐ cerned with the legal question”, he writes, “I am concerned with the meta‐ physical question: the spiritual nation” (60). The deep tensions are obvious here, and irresolvable. Pearson doesn’t deny the "absence of Indigenous consent to the colonial claim to sovereignty" (41), but rather than address that directly and fundamentally, that is, non‐legalistically, he wishes to nar‐ row the understanding of sovereignty to the merely legalistic, a move to keep power contests contained within the limitations of constitutional amendment or revision. This is to deny the power of a wholistic, In‐ digenised concept of sovereignty to encompass political critique that rec‐ ognises an outside to the constitution, that allows its founding to be ques‐ tioned, that asserts a prior (if different) sovereignty, or the accommodation of plural sovereignties, and that deploys the metaphysical and spiritual dis‐ course of a land‐based polity and Aboriginal being. But this proposal of Pearson’s is precisely about the political recognition of Aboriginal people within the constitution, the rulebook of the nation as he refers to it else‐ where. The last thing rulebooks are is metaphysical or spiritual. Alexis Wright has been tilting at the windmill of sovereignty since she began working within local activism and social policy for Aboriginal self‐determination and land rights in the mid‐1970s. She was involved "ex‐ tensively in government departments and Aboriginal agencies across four states and territories as a professional manager, educator, researcher and writer and like Langton and Pearson has made a huge contribution to the cause of social justice for Aboriginal people" (see Wright 1997, half title page).6 In the 1990s, though, Wright’s activism took a turn from political

6



For a fuller account of these activist activities see Mead (2016).

SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 353 organisational involvement in Aboriginal causes to fiction writing. In a 2001 talk, “The Politics of Writing”, she explains: By the time I had come to making the decision to write a novel in the 1990s, I guess it was at a time of deep inner personal crisis I was experiencing about everything I had ever believed in about our rights as people. I was questioning the failures of our hopes for just about everything we fought for. Every idea and goal was overtaken by others. Governments found new ways of making our lives harder. We did not seem to gel as a political movement at either the national, state or regional level. As indi‐ viduals, as communities, as peoples with Indigenous rights, eve‐ rything we did to accomplish anything seemed to be a meaning‐ less exercise because the force of ingrained racism stood against us. I wrote Plains of Promise to deal with my inner crisis and loneli‐ ness of the soul. [. . .] I felt literature, the work of fiction, was the best way of presenting a truth—not the real truth, but more of a truth than non‐fiction, which is not really the truth either. (Wright 2002, 12)7 While creative story‐telling offered Wright a way through this per‐ sonal crisis in Indigenous and political self‐hood, it’s not as though narra‐ tive fiction presented an unproblematic alternative to political work, with all its formal challenges and its questions of existential origins and social utility. Wright has written, for example, about her worries about Carpenta‐ ria’s non‐standard narrative style:

7



Wright’s role in Aboriginal political movements was in fact more “writerly” per‐ haps than this 1997 paper "Grog War" suggests. For example, it "contains two chapters of fiction because I was asked not to identify members of the commu‐ nity who have suffered from the consequences of alcohol and the state of cross‐ cultural relationships in that town" ("Breaking Taboos") and while she was working for the Central Aboriginal Land Council she published short stories and creative essays.

354 PHILIP MEAD I also knew that I would pay a price for my decision to write a novel as though some old Aboriginal person was telling the story. I think what I feared most was that this kind of voice and style of telling would be flatly rejected in Australia. Every day I was writing the novel, I would begin the day by arguing with myself about how a manuscript written in this voice was taking a big risk. I knew that by using a story‐telling narrative voice in a language that was as much my own as it is of Aboriginal people in the Gulf, I was setting myself up for failure. (Wright 2007, 8) Part of the formal crisis here has to do with the extremity of the social history Wright wants to represent, the ground zero of human experi‐ ence that Carpentaria and The Swan Book narrate, the devastation of cul‐ ture and life‐worlds represented by violence and dispossession of coloni‐ zation and the poverty and despair that follow in its wake, right down to the present. “Rubble” fiction, she has said, borrowing the term from Günter Grass. What I would like to point to here is the way in which Wright’s work, what we might call her literary activism, has never given up on the idea of sovereignty or forms of self‐determination. It has rather trans‐ formed that notion—however informed by the realities, disappointments and failures of actual work in Indigenous cultural politics—to include a hard‐won understanding of the self‐governing imagination of literary fic‐ tion and in closely related critical projects. Together these constitute what she refers to as the sovereignty of the mind. As she said in the Mabo lecture: "We are often told to forget about Aboriginal rights, that our claims of sov‐ ereignty won’t feed people. I really think that assertion needs to be properly examined”.8 And in relation to the fictional aspect of this project, a complex, allegorical Aufhebung of the political and social realities, Wright insists:

8



Another aspect of Wright’s thinking about sovereignty of the mind, and one that is closely related to her Mabo lecture, is her Australian Research Council funded project “Australian Indigenous Storytelling”, an “essayed memoir” project (see also Mead 2016).

SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 355 The art of story‐telling [. . .] is a form of activism that allows us to work with our ideas through our imagination, knowledge and instincts, our principles and values of all times, past, present and future working together—as all times being linked and im‐ portant to us—not just what is good enough for the moment. This is where I try to work, and in my new novel The Swan Book, I have tried to imagine and write a story of the future, let’s say continuing the current situation a hundred years from now. (Wright, 2013b, n.p.) Sovereignty of the mind then is constituted as a complex, reflexive alternation between the social realities of Indigenous life and the different complexities of imaginative narrative and the possibilities of the contem‐ porary novel, including its potential for Indigenisation. In the apocalyptic world of The Swan Book the globe has been ravaged by climate change wars—"wild weather storms [. . .] the culmination of years of droughts, high temperature and winds in some countries, or in others, the freezing depths of prolonged winters" (2013a, 25). Some Aboriginal people, swamp people, have retained a home, "everywhere" else though, "probably mil‐ lions of white people were drifting among the other countless stateless mil‐ lions of sea gypsies looking for somewhere to live" (23). Some of these wan‐ dering hoards are seeking the refuge of remote, surviving Aboriginal home‐ lands, islands of Indigenous ecological and cultural survival in a world where land and climate have been lost. "Fleeing people became refugees marching onwards . . . Hunger was constant. Waves of vermin, rats dis‐ guised as men, drove the moving chains of humanity into traps. The killing of people was without reason, fruitless and endless" (27). Rising seas have flooded all the borders and boundaries of the present; those markers of the nation‐state and of geopolitical territory have disappeared and navigating the flooded lands, so that even for hardened refugee environmentalists, is life‐threatening. In a vision of Australia as hell, a trope that goes back at least as far as the convict era, Wright lodges the word “sovereignty” again, this time in relation to ecological warfare and the exploitation of Aboriginal land, and in shifting focalisations of one of her unique third‐person narrators. This is at the beginning of the section “Owls in the Grass” which describes Oblivia’s nightmare drive from her swamp home to Finch’s house in the city:



356 PHILIP MEAD it was hell on earth on this lonely single road, a highway stretch‐ ing a thousand kilometres over the heart of the country. This was the place where the mind of the nation practised war‐ fare and fought nightly for supremacy, by exercising its power over another people’s land—the night‐world of the multi‐na‐ tionals, the money‐makers and players of big business, the as‐ serters of sovereignty, who governed the strip called Desperado; men with hands glued to the wheel charging through the dust in howling road trains packed with brown cattle with terrified eyes, mobile warehouses, fuel tankers, heavy haulage steel and chrome arsenals named Bulk Hawl, Outback, Down Under, Cen‐ tury, The Isa, The Curry, Tanami Lassie, metal workhorses for carrying a mountain of mining equipment and the country’s ore. (Wright 2013a, 165) Yet this global future is not uniformly dystopian. Successful Indig‐ enous communities, like Warren Finch’s “Aboriginal Government Nation” have grown up “just down the road from the sites of earlier human and ecological depredations of Aboriginal land”, an "Army‐controlled Aborigi‐ nal detention camp" and military ordinance dump, and a spreading moun‐ tain of sand (115). Beyond Australia, this is a world in which non‐Indige‐ nous societies and governments have collapsed into global chaos, where claims to national sovereignty, whether territorial or governmental (state or nation, local or global), appear as short‐sighted and self‐destructive ar‐ rangements, a matter of a few hundred years. If sovereignty is defined by markers of territory and biopolitical legality, what happens when those markers disappear under rising seas and the refugee‐isation of whole pop‐ ulations erases any possibility of citizenship or belonging? In a flooded hemisphere there are no places to belong. In this extremity, humans have been forced into world governance. But Wright’s vision is a subtle and com‐ plex one, well exemplified in the character of Warren Finch, the central male character of the novel. At the point where Finch is introduced into the narrative, there is a long, Swiftian diatribe against the kind of Indigenous positionality and rhetoric represented by writers like Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson, contributing to the struggle for Aboriginal self‐determination but toiling within the strictures of hegemony:



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 357 they agreed by presenting themselves as being well and truly yes people who were against arguing the toss about Aboriginal rights. [. . .] anti‐culture, anti‐sovereignty, anti‐human rights, anti‐black armband history for remembering the past, anti‐ United Nations, or Amnesty International, as much as being anti‐pornography, anti‐paedophiles, anti‐grog, anti‐dope, anti‐ littering, anti having too many dogs and pussycats, anti any kind of diseases or ill health, anti‐welfare, anti‐poverty, anti anyone not living like a white person in their houses . . . anti anyone who opposed their human and personal rights, or their land rights, or their native title, anti never having enough heat in the weather, or anyone who got in the way of what they said was Aboriginal‐defined self‐determination. (Wright 2013a, 96–97) But Finch has been brought up by Aboriginal elders "in isolation, out bush away from everyone", he "shone like the rising sun, and was al‐ ready as fearless as their greatest ancestral spirits, would one day become the best man that ever breathed air on this planet" (95). Finch’s choice of Oblivia as his wife is heartbreaking for his own people who feel "resent‐ ment at the swamp people’s spite for allowing something like this to hap‐ pen when they knew that the destiny of the girl belonged elsewhere, to the clans‐country on the other side of the hills, in the homeland of their boy, more wondrous than the air itself" (95). The young Aboriginal woman, Oblivia, seems to stand for the most brutally traumatised sector of the Ab‐ original population—withdrawn, almost mute, terrified, “polluted” in the view of some of her own people—yet she has a protector and auntie in the old white woman Bella Donna of the Champions. Oblivia is also chosen by Finch, the talented young Aboriginal leader who has risen from his child‐ hood in the Brolga nation to Deputy President of Australia and who is rec‐ ognised as a possible global leader, given that national governments have disintegrated. The Brolga nation is chosen by "an international fact‐finding delegation to be their showpiece of what a future human world was all about" (106). But in the end it is Oblivia who survives, not Finch, who is assassinated. There is little space here for further analysis of how the swirling, multi‐focalised, kaleidoscopic narrative of The Swan Book narrates the fu‐ ture within the present and the past, and how that narrative extrapolates



358 PHILIP MEAD the future out of the present and the past. The futuristic, allegorical, sym‐ bolic mosaic of social and governmental possibilities that The Swan Book presents are neither predictable nor easy, and of course they belong to a different order of discourse from the socio‐legal framing of Indigeneity in Langton and Pearson and most of the “sovereignty talk” of the other Abo‐ riginal intellectuals I cited previously. For all of these writers, though, there is a clashing and vying story‐telling contest between these discourses, a narrative civil war within the Indigenous intellectual domain. Wright’s fun‐ damental point, I think—not without layered ironies and inflected by styles of Indigenous story‐telling—is that sovereignty is a question that can be posed in different ways, even while it remains a problem, and possibly a problem that won’t last. For her, the activist politics of Anthropocene fiction allows the question of sovereignty to be imagined in relation to deep time and the long future. “Other people’s sovereignty” is something that Oblivia hears about, sitting in the back seat of a travelling car after her marriage to Finch—a marriage that will become an imprisonment to a person who be‐ comes a series of media events—in a conversation between Bella Donna and the Old Harbour Master. "Who gives him the right to decide on other people’s sovereignty?" (Wright 2013a, 232; emphasis in original). The point is the question, who it’s coming from, who can hear it being asked. Sover‐ eignty may remain injusticiable in the Australian legal and cultural jurisdic‐ tion of the imperial and settler past, and in the troubled present, but the critique and even dissolution of that illegitimate form of sovereignty is com‐ plexly imaginable in Wright’s story‐telling about the future. But its Aborig‐ inal perspective, one that it seems white readers find difficult to read, is that the catastrophes of white settlement and of global ecology are co‐present in the now. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Gareth Griffiths and Dylan Lino for their very helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans‐ lated by Daniel Heller‐Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 359 Attwood, Bain. 2009. Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History. Melbourne, VIC: Miegunyah. Behrendt, Larissa. 2012. “Aboriginal Sovereignty: A Practical Roadmap.” In Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility, edited by Julie Evans, Ann Gen‐ ovese, Alexander Reilly and Patrick Wolfe, 163–77. Honolulu: Uni‐ versity of Hawai’i. Carlson, David J. 2016. Imagining Sovereignty: Self‐Determination in Ameri‐ can Indian Law and Literature. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press. Daly, Paul. 2015. “Indigenous Activist Murrumu Has Fought the Law This Week. But Who Will Win?” The Guardian, May 27. http://www.the guardian.com/australianews/2015/may/27/murrumu‐charged‐a fter‐driving‐with‐licence‐issued‐by‐his‐indigenous‐nation Dunlop, Tim. 2015. “A Good Political ‘Narrative’ Is No Substitute for Ac‐ tions.” The Drum, ABC June 18. http://www.abc.net.au/news/ 2015‐06‐18/dunlop‐a‐good‐'narrative'‐is‐no‐substitute‐for‐actio ns/6555160 Gleeson‐White, Jane. 2013. “Going Viral.” Sydney Review of Books, August 23. http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/going‐viral/ Harrison, Dan. 2012. “Langton Attacks Flannery for Holding ‘Racist’ Belief.” Sydney Morning Herald, December 8. http://www.smh.com.au/nat ional/langton‐attacks‐flannery‐for‐holding‐racist‐belief‐2012120 7‐2b14s.html Langton, Marcia. 1998. “Marcia Langton responds to Alexis Wright's Break‐ ing Taboos.” Australian Humanities Review. http://www.australi anhumanitiesreview.org/emuse/taboos/langton2.html ‐‐‐. 2013. The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom. Sydney: HarperCollins/ABC. McColl, Gina. 2013. “Langton Failed to Disclose Mining Company Funding.” Sydney Morning Herald, March 2. http://www.smh.com.au/nati onal/langton‐failed‐to‐disclose‐mining‐company‐funding‐201303 01‐2fbtx.html Mead, Philip. 2016. “The Injusticeable and the Imaginable.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 16 (2) https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/art icle/view/11400



360 PHILIP MEAD Moreton‐Robinson, Aileen, ed. 2007. Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sover‐ eignty Matters. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. ‐‐‐, ed. 2004. Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Can‐ berra: Aboriginal Studies. Neale, Timothy. 2014. “A Stake in the Game.” Sydney Review of Books, No‐ vember 11. http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/noel‐pearson ‐rightful‐place/ Nicolacopoulos, Toula, and George Vassilacopoulos. 2014. Indigenous Sov‐ ereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Aus‐ tralian Philosophy of Origins. Melbourne: re.press. Osborne, Roger and Gillian Whitlock. 2016. “Carpentaria: Reading with the Dirt of Blurbs and Front Pages.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature16 (2) https://openjournals.library. sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/11401 Pearson, Noel. 2014. “A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition and a More Com‐ plete Commonwealth.” Quarterly Essay 55. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Reynolds, Henry. 1996. “After Mabo, What About Aboriginal Sovereignty?” Australian Humanities Review, 1 (April). http://www.australianhu manitiesreview.org/archive/Issue‐April‐Reynolds. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2003. “Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies.” In Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, edited by Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke, 53–72. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Williamson, Geordie. 2013. “Alexis Wright Stages a Counter Intervention with The Swan Book.” The Australian, August 10. http://www.thea ustralian.com.au/arts/review/alexis‐wright‐stages‐a‐counter‐int ervention‐with‐the‐swan‐book/story‐fn9n8gph‐1226692942929. Wright, Alexis. 1997. Grog War. Broome: Magabala. ‐‐‐. 1998. “Breaking Taboos.” Australian Humanities Review, September. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue‐Sept ember‐1998/wright.html ‐‐‐. 2002. “Politics of Writing.” Southerly 62 (2): 10–20. ‐‐‐. 2007. “Gulf Music.” Weekend Australian, June 9: 8. ‐‐‐. 2013a. The Swan Book. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo.



SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MIND 361 ‐‐‐. 2013b. “Mabo Lecture: Native Title Conference, ‘Shaping the Future’.” Alice Springs. June 5. ‐‐‐. 2015. “What Is the Function of Literature? How Does Literature Imagine and Engage with the World? How Far is Translation Possible?” Third China Australia Literary Forum August 28–29, Writing & So‐ ciety Research Centre, Western Sydney University. https://www. westernsydney.edu.au/writing_and_society/events/china_austral ia_literary_forum_2015 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy. 2016. “Rom Watangu: The Law of the Land.” The Monthly, July: 18–29.



Two worlds Standing outside like a smoker I shelter under the eaves and watch rain not so much fall as emanate from a dull sky. A few birds silently squabble in the bare reaches of the hazelnut and Parsifal flicks his red tail and digs at the lawn with undivided impatience. Suddenly he darts up the lilac and disappears to some squirrelly imperative. Autumn again. I manage two autumns a year and two summers and am at home in all of them it seems, although last Thursday it was thirty three beside my pool and squirrels and this grand though sodden display of falling gold seemed little more than a dream to be woken from, or woken into.

* Questions we all know the answers to if we’re old enough: Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? (at a concert in Florence) When Michael Jackson died? (in Chicago) On 9/11? (in Heathrow) When the Wall fell? in tears in the fierce grip of a turn of history 362

in almost disbelief in belief and again in tears twenty years ago today

* Suddenly it’s winter children are dying in hot lands a market explodes into fragments of bodies somewhere mercenaries are pacifying protesters It’s well below zero squirrels have retreated into their bunkers puddles shatter into geometries of ice particles are massing into dense clouds for the first snowfall Somewhere there is nowhere to escape for children from the heat of explosions from the freeze of any hope they might have had of peace Andrew Taylor

363



Afterword Philip Mead This book had its origins in a symposium held at the University of Western Australia in March, 2014 to honour the career and work of Gareth Griffiths. This occasion consisted of a keynote paper by Joseph Slaughter on narratology and counter‐insurgency, and a response by Gareth Griffiths. The discussions that followed ranged widely over current issues in the dis‐ course of human rights, the postcolonial humanities and imaginative writ‐ ings, as well as other cultural expressions, of the Global South. Joseph’s pa‐ per, an earlier version of his essay on counter‐insurgency and narratology in this volume, “Life, Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say”, de‐ volved from the question that concludes his Human Rights, Inc.: the World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007), a paraphrase of H.G. Wells, “if we are not reading for human rights, what are we reading for?” (328). That influential inter‐disciplinary study is about the interwovenness of literary texts, including one of its canonical, constitutively ambivalent genres, the Bildungsroman, with the discourses of law, citizenship and hu‐ manitarianism. It focuses on the historical roots of the connections between literary form, and legal and public documents that define humanity. Gareth’s response, drawing on his deep knowledge of Asian, African and Caribbean writers, as well as linguistic variation and cultural difference, in‐ cluding the diasporic inflections of the Bildungsroman across the Global South, was about the specificities of how literary texts everywhere are wo‐ ven into the fabric of political life, governmentality and struggles for social justice. Gareth’s earlier work on African literatures in English, on key con‐ cepts in postcolonial studies, and, from the beginning, postcolonial theory (The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post‐colonial Literature (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin [1989] 2002) and the Post‐colonial Studies Reader (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin [1995] 2006), has shifted focus onto identity in settler societies—sometimes in collaboration with scholars in other fields, like David Trigger in Anthropology—and on US/African rela‐ tions in the 19th century, and mission texts and sacral/secular relations in the post‐colonial world. At the intersection of Joseph Slaughter and Gareth Griffith’s work, then, is the “juxtaposition of life and narrative” (as Slaughter

365

366 PHILIP MEAD says in his essay in this volume)—the complex and contradictory fact of im‐ aginative narratives’ social engagements—with state repression and colo‐ nising histories around the world, and with the institutional and discursive operations of critique about those engagements. What arose from that symposium was the sense that the discourse on human rights needed to be broadened to encompass the range of narra‐ tive and imaginative addresses to the question of human rights, and includ‐ ing writers’ practices. It became clear that the task now was to move the concern to how imaginative representations continue to effect the way hu‐ man rights issues are conceived and practised in the contemporary world. Some of the essays here still place that relationship within historical con‐ texts, but the overall drive of the book is to show how these representations engage with the contradictions and complexities of contemporary political concerns. Writers and artists themselves are one model here, in their un‐ derstandings of the ways in which narrative, stories and cultural expression inform and address the ideals of human rights and, at the same time, how they uncover the betrayals, silences and subversions of that discourse. Con‐ temporary examples of such social work of narrative include the French ac‐ tivist JR’s global participatory art project “Inside Out”, with its large‐format street “pastings” in 129 countries, and artist Ben Quilty and writer Richard Flanagan’s first‐hand witnessing of the European refugee crisis of 2016, and the artworks and writing in response to that crisis (http://www.in sideoutproject.net/en/about). Quilty was official Australian war artist in Afghanistan in 2012; Flanagan’s Booker Prize‐winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) tells the story of an Australian doctor‐pris‐ oner‐of‐war on the Thai‐Burma death railroad. Quilty’s exhibition and Flanagan’s accompanying essay (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2016) draw our attention to the stories of some of the nearly five million refugees flee‐ ing war‐torn Syria, but through the installation of crafted objects like wed‐ ding dresses and useless lifevests worn by the refugees (see Lloyd 2016).1 Another is Alexis Wright’s representation, as both political activist and fic‐ tion writer, of the intertwined social and literary meanings of Aboriginal sovereignty in Australia (see Philip Mead’s essay in this volume, “Sover‐ eignty of the Mind”).

1



See also Richard Flanagan (2016), which cites a number of the 2000 plus short “stories”, or incident reports of refugees in detention on Nauru from The Guard‐ ian’s “The Nauru Files”.

AFTERWORD 367 The chapters in this volume also draw attention to the many ways in which people who have suffered 20th‐ and 21st‐century human rights abuses, and who are neither writers nor artists, turn to narrative to express the reality and human specificity of their experience, like the many witness contributors of the “stolen generations” in Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aborigianl and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1997). Helen Gilbert’s chapter here, “On Show: Truth and Reconciliation in Canada”, is also about the forcible re‐ moval of Indigenous children from their families. It begins with an account of a Canadian Aboriginal group who, in 2011, walked across the country, gathering stories of their people, and seeking to tell them to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (about the Indian Residential Schools). Rather than focusing on the actual submissions to the commis‐ sion, Gilbert demonstrates how story‐telling and other kinds of perfor‐ mance around the conduct of the commission allowed the Canadian First Nations people both to express their historical trauma but also to critique the official reconciliation process. Gillian Whitlock’s chapter discusses the response of Australian teachers and schoolchildren to the detention of asy‐ lum seekers as part of the Australian government’s ‘Pacific Solution’ in the wake of the Tampa incident of 2001. Whitlock maps scenes of reading where the English classroom and Australian children’s literature become a focus of human rights activism and campaigns for social justice and the rights of the child in particular. Framing all these impulses to story‐telling in the face of trauma is Joseph Slaughter’s starting point, in his chapter, about (detainee #760 in Guantánamo Bay) Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s plea to his jailer: “Please, I want you guys to understand my story okay, because it really doesn’t matter if they release me or not, I just want my story under‐ stood” (15). Slaughter analyses the cruel anti‐social work of narrative that Slahi’s plea occasions. And Gareth Griffiths’ own chapter here, “‘Pictures on the Wall, Music in the Air’: popular culture forms, human rights agitation and fiction in Africa” extends our understanding of the increasing role of popular cultural expressions—at the other end of the spectrum from world‐historical statements like the UDHR—in the advocacy and defence of human rights. The focus of the chapters in this volume, then, is on the ways in which human and cultural imaginaries, as expressed in narratives of lit‐ erary, witnessing, popular, graphic, personal or artistic kinds address in the

368 PHILIP MEAD most urgent way the full range of experiences of human rights and human rights abuse. A small number of existing critical texts engage with the relation‐ ship of literature and human rights in the present, like the essay collection of Elizabeth Swanson Gould and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, (Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2013). This book is closest to our own project, but differs from it in two respects. First, it focuses nar‐ rowly on literary theory rather than on the way texts themselves, and writ‐ ers’ activism, reflect the issues. Secondly, it does not relate literary texts to the wider range of representational forms that the broader idea of “narra‐ tive” we endorse should encompass. Other texts do an exemplary job of ex‐ amining the specific ways in which particular violations of human rights or events in one specific region are reflected in imaginative representations, like Miriam Klein Kassenoff and Anita Meyer Meinbach’s collection Study‐ ing the Holocaust Through Film and Literature: Human Rights and Social Re‐ sponsibility (2004). But as here either they focus on a specific event, or in the case of Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice, edited by Ber‐ nadette Brennan (2007) restrict themselves to one region. These existing studies also tend to emphasize how abuses of rights are passively repre‐ sented in literature and other forms of imaginative expression and not on how these representations have an active role in responding to and devel‐ oping responses to human rights issues. A text which addresses the issue in ways similar to this project is the monograph by Elizabeth S. Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2012). Anker analyses the vital work performed by the narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights, a point central to our own project, but her study restricts itself to examining a few written literary texts and does not ad‐ dress the ways in which the work of these texts engages with other discur‐ sive forms of imaginative response to human rights issues. Nor does it en‐ gage with the ways other disciplines have engaged with these issues. Liter‐ ature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of hu‐ man Rights, edited by Ian Ward (2015), overlaps with our concerns in this volume but is more concerned with the relationship between legal defini‐ tions and broader discourses of human rights. The focus of Ward’s contrib‐ utors is far less on the textual concerns of human rights and their contem‐ porary representation than in the essays collected here.



AFTERWORD 369 The question of human rights has never been more urgent or more tragic than in the contemporary moment. At the time of writing more than 65 million people are wandering the earth as refugees or asylum seekers, or have been forcibly displaced from their communities and homes.2 This is a mass of humanity whose rights are denied or abused, living in tempo‐ rary camps, if they have survived their flights from danger, prey to people traffickers, without a home, without a state, without papers. They are flee‐ ing from economic, religious and racial persecution, from state‐sponsored violence, from genocide and from the indiscriminate violence of war. The question of human rights, then, originally understood as a set of universal values yet bounded by national jurisdictions is, paradoxically, thrown into contemporary crisis by a mass of human lives that are displaced from all national, legal or constitutional communities. The very universality of hu‐ man rights is challenged by a massive population who are outside nations, outside humanity in social and legal terms, and who are thus universally without rights. Meanwhile global conflicts and biopolitics remain subject to the stresses and contradictions of a world still structured by national territo‐ ries and governments. National administrations, conflicted about who is to be allowed a home, or where home is, enforce their borders, build detention centres, walls, fences, and extra‐legal facilities—often on islands—to ex‐ clude those seeking a home or asylum. Humanitarian and aid agencies, of‐ ten trans‐national in their ideologies and operations, work across frontiers and borders to ameliorate the effects of territorial conflicts. So national, re‐ ligious and ethnic conflicts, defined more than anything by human rights abuse, explode around the globe, at the same time as humanitarianism is driven by a sense of common humanity. Ned Curthoys and Golnar Nab‐ azedeh’s chapter about Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine, a humanitarian narrative, analyses how this textual and visual work addresses the politics of occupation and Zionist dehumanisation. This perspective on internal ref‐ ugees and exiles under an occupied homeland has been the subject of a shameful silence, they argue, in the discourse of human rights. But their reading also highlights the humour, playfulness and self‐reflexivity of

2

These figures are from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR): 65.3 mil‐ lion people forcibly displaced worldwide, 21.3 million refugees, 10 million stateless people (http://www.unhcr.org/figures‐at‐a‐glance.html).



370 PHILIP MEAD Sacco’s form that are part of its forceful depiction of dehumanisation, vio‐ lence and repression. Freedom and movement of peoples is also the theme of historian Ethan Blue’s chapter about how in the process of forging citi‐ zens’ rights nations also deny mobility and expel their Others. Blue anato‐ mizes this process in the history of deportation in the USA in the early 20th century, emphasizing the many imaginative disruptions to the officialdom and administration of deportation resorted to by those being ejected from the state. Jane Lydon also provides an historical complement to Sacco’s graphic narrative of Palestinian suffering in her chapter about UNESCO’s travelling photographic exhibition “Human Rights” which was brought to Australian in the early 1950s. She describes the utopian moment of this ex‐ hibition, designed to promulgate the new ethical and legal framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Although a travelling pho‐ tographic exhibition is a very different cultural expression from a graphic novel, juxtaposing the two provides an instructive history of the uses of vis‐ ualization in humanitarianism, especially when Lydon and Curthoys and Nabezedah remind us of the bitter realities glossed over and ignored by UNESCO’s universalist project—the absence of Friday from the Declara‐ tion’s reliance on the Robinson Crusoe narrative and Golda Meir’s state‐ ment of 1961 that “Palestine does not exist” (p. 205). Gareth Griffiths in his introduction points to the gaps and silences in the project of this book. These were the subject of discussions between us from the very beginning in that colloquium back in March 2014. And as he also mentions the prejudices against, and the mistreatment of, the men‐ tally ill was something we were both especially mindful of, from personal and family experience. This awareness, a nexus of experience and reflection on the course of human rights over the last three‐quarters of a century, is symptomatic of Gareth’s thinking about how questions of human rights— the reality of abuse, the barely credible idealism of language, and the phan‐ tom of the law—can only be addressed with the power of the imagination, at work in social life. And even that, as history teaches us, and as the chap‐ ters here substantiate, is subject to constant failure and betrayal. The discourse of human rights, by now a complex and extensive response to and engagement with this history and present contradictions of biopolitics, local and global, stretches from the highest forms of moral and philosophical rhetoric, as in the United Nations’ UDHR (1948) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to bureaucratic reporting of



AFTERWORD 371 every kind, to governmentality and legislation, to academic critique, to graf‐ fiti on a wall in an African city. Every level of this discourse is characterised by critique, contention, corruption and violence. Michael Hill’s essay here, for example, as an extension of Joseph Slaughter’s reading of counter‐insur‐ gency and narratology, examines the ways in which narratological tech‐ niques and understandings have been appropriated by the tactical dis‐ course of US counterinsurgency manuals where winning the battle for po‐ litical control happens at the level of culture, rather than on the battlefield. In the language and genres of “net‐centric war”, winning the battle of ideas is dependent on understanding how narratives work in social and cultural contexts. Here the longstanding humanist equation between life, literature and narrative is radically triangulated by violence and repression. Narra‐ tology can become an instrument of war, and the idea of the human, a tar‐ get. Nicholas Jose’s essay about Chinese diasporic writers, like Gao Xingjian, asks whether their literary narratives are weak or strong in critique of re‐ pressive political regimes. He highlights the always present dichotomy be‐ tween the inherent humanist and cultural value of “literature” and the po‐ litical effectiveness of narrative, even if it is only in the negative of attracting suppression and exile. Gillian Whitlock’s focus is on how narratives of de‐ tention by asylum seekers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea in the early 2000s have been absorbed into the curriculum of subject English in Aus‐ tralian schools as a form of humanitarian activism. Work such as this is part of a renewed approach to human rights issues that both highlights narrative as part of the way human rights are limited and policed, and suggests how these complex controls are resisted. Narratives and narrative forms are central to the ways we imagine and rep‐ resent issues as diverse as anti‐terrorist legislation, the cultural control of minority populations, the role of development theory and the function of international organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF, as well as the role of narratives in Indigenous land rights claims. The narratives in‐ volved range from official government and NGO publications through me‐ dia discourses and images to legal documentation of human rights abuses and human rights claims to the representation of these issues in imagina‐ tive literature and graphic art. The essays in this collection address human rights issues through their reading and analysis of narrative work within society and culture. At present these issues are raised in a number of disci‐ plinary contexts, for example in discussions of Indigenous human rights by

372 PHILIP MEAD anthropologists, by civil rights activists discussing the restrictions imposed as a result of anti‐terrorist laws in recent years, by students of literature and the law, by postcolonial literary theorists, by historians of human rights declarations, and others. But analysis of the social work of narrative is rarely at the centre of such discussions and is often restricted to brief ex‐ amples. Narrative here encompasses not only written forms but also oral accounts and the increasing use of visual media to tell “stories” and make claims. The idea that how we tell the stories of human rights is marginal to the processes of human rights is clearly disputed by these claims. The idea that imaginative representations are idealistic, even utopian as some would claim is contested by the power these imaginative forms have exercised in recent decades in recording and defending human rights, and in critiquing the abuse of human rights discourse itself. In his essay Michael R. Griffiths describes what he sees as humanism’s pharmakon, a theoretical frame about the openness or exclusionary nature of “the human”. That dyadic model allows him to expose the endemic Eurocentrism of humanitarian‐ ism—its identity of the human as “Man”—and the critique, from within, of universalism’s disruption at subalternity, in the work of writers like Fred‐ erick Douglass and Derek Walcott. Postcolonial reading is about addressing issues of imperial power and social resistance from within and between bounded forms like the na‐ tion, but in a globalising world the discursive and critical means to address repressive state structures remain weak. The court of human opinion, though, continues to be shaped and enhanced by the many worlds of imag‐ inative narration and the reading and analysis of how the stories of human beings are told and silenced, enabled and appropriated. This project is a contribution to the development of a language and method for reading this social work of narrative across the political and cultural domains of a con‐ temporary, post‐national world. The essays commissioned for and gathered in this volume, then, explore this simultaneously idealist and treacherous world of humanist and political expression, focusing on the role of narrative in particular. They each assert in their multi‐faceted ways that in the early 21st century we need to consider how human rights and humanitarian narrative is shaped by the various kinds of social work that it does, as much in the cause of po‐ litical violence as in the discourse of freedom and rights. Literary analysis



AFTERWORD 373 continues to offer a means of address and critique in relation to these com‐ plexities and contradictions in the social work of narrative in a contempo‐ rary world, even in instances where critical methodology itself is appropri‐ ated for anti‐progressive ends. Russell West‐Pavlov’s powerful reading of Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s 2011 detective novel Nairobi Heat illustrates the way in which the Rwandan genocide continues to have a shocking aftermath, including murder, decades later and in the opposite hemisphere. West‐Pav‐ lov argues that the detective narrative genre allows Mũkoma to represent the “aporetic” or profoundly contradictory “interwovenness of human rights abuses and human rights defence, responding to both geopolitical and historical entanglements” (187). In many ways the source of much of this recent reconsideration of literature and human rights is rooted in earlier critical paradigms such as postcolonial theory. At the same time the very breadth of the issues that this raises makes it difficult for any one person or discipline to properly address these concerns although the essays presented here do represent an integrated set of responses to these issues. Across and between the differ‐ ent approaches one overriding concern unites them: how narrative func‐ tions in the definition and practice of human rights in the contemporary world. This work develops new methods for relating imaginative narra‐ tives, critical reading and human rights in the contemporary period. It aims to bridge the perceived gap between artistic and official forms of human rights narratives, suggesting that the latter often grows out of and reflects the former and refutes the idea that imaginary forms are ineffective and utopian ways of addressing these concerns. It draws on a multi‐disciplinary approach to the issues raised with historical, literary, anthropological, vis‐ ual arts and media studies methods and readings all represented, and it co‐ vers a wider range of geographic areas. In recognition of the importance of imaginative responses to all these academic studies this volume is prefaced and followed by two poems by Andrew Taylor. One, “Holiday Snap” is about the unsuspecting ordinari‐ ness of a moment in the Mahgreb captured in a photograph that becomes resonant by virtue of subsequent events, the violence following the Arab Spring. The other, “Two Worlds” is about living in two hemispheres, man‐ aging “two autumns a year/ and two summers”, but reflecting the speaker’s awareness of the global synchronicities of terrorist violence and the death of children. “Somewhere there is nowhere/ to escape/ for children/ from

374 PHILIP MEAD the heat of explosions/ [. . .] of any hope they might have had/ of peace”. Taylor juxtaposes, via his empathetic speaker, the two worlds of those who suffer and those lucky enough to be elsewhere. The tragedy the poem points to is that it not “one world”, that the world of violence and the death of human rights co‐exists in time with the speaker’s privileged existence. Certainly, as Gareth Griffiths points out in his introduction, the language and legal frameworks of human rights seem “less and less adequate” to the political realities of the 21st century—something Andrew Taylor’s speak‐ ers in these poems seems to feel acutely, and that makes the persistence of the imagination, and the rehabilitation of language, all the more vital. I conclude this afterword by acknowledging how this project, from its beginning in the shared conversation with Joseph Slaughter, was shaped by the breadth and inclusiveness of Gareth Griffiths’ engagement with and understanding of progressive politics and the works of the imagination, on whichever continent and in whatever form they occur. That exemplary, ca‐ reer‐long engagement has shifted in focus and intent as Gareth’s essay here on popular forms of resistance across Africa demonstrates, but always it has been attentive to the ways in which the human imagination is both an instrument of destruction and a powerful means by which humanity might take control of its futures, in positive ways. This project is about how that imagination, and how it works, deserves closer attention.

Bibliography Anker, Elizabeth S. 2012. Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. [1989] 2002. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post‐colonial Literature. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. [1995] 2006. The Post‐ colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. 1997. Bring‐ ing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From Their Fami‐ lies. Sydney, NSW: Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Brennan, Bernadette, ed. 2008. Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice. St Lucia, QLD: University Queensland Press.



AFTERWORD 375 Flanagan, Richard. 2013. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. North Sydney, NSW: Penguin Random House. ‐‐‐. 2016. “Australia Has Lost Its Way.” The Monthly, September. https://ww w.themonthly.com.au/blog/richard‐flanagan/2016/01/2016/14 72713382/australia‐has‐lost‐its‐way Gould, Elizabeth Swanson and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, eds. 2013. The‐ oretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Kassenoff, Miriam Klein and Anita Meyer Meinbach, eds. 2004. Studying the Holocaust Through Film and Literature: Human Rights and Social Responsibility. Norwood, MA: Christopher‐Gordon Publishers. Lloyd, Tim. 2016. “Ben Quilty Documents the Syrian Exodus.” Advertiser, October 28. http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/lifestyle/sa‐lifest yle/ben‐quilty‐documents‐the‐syrian‐exodus/news‐story/44655 843c37d7ce7a1d1bbd9b69b536d Quilty, Ben. 2016. “Sappers & Shrapnel: Contemporary Art and the Art of the Trenches.” Art Gallery of South Australia, November 11, 2016– January 29, 2017. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. The Nauru Files. 2016. The Guardian, August 10. https://www.theguardi an.com/australia‐news/ng‐interactive/2016/aug/10/the‐nauru‐f iles‐the‐lives‐of‐asylum‐seekers‐in‐detention‐detailed‐in‐a‐uniqu e‐database‐interactive Ward, Ian, ed. 2015. Literature and Human Rights: the Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights. Berlin: De Gruyter.





Contributors Ethan Blue is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Western Aus‐ tralia. He is writing a digitally‐enhanced monograph on the history of US deportation trains in the early 20th century. His research is at the intersec‐ tion of critical prison studies, spatial history, histories of immigration, ra‐ cial capitalism and settler colonialism. Monographs include Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York Uni‐ versity Press, 2012), and the co‐authored Engineering and War (Morgan and Claypool, 2013). He co‐edited Punishment and Death: A Special Issue of Radical History Review (2006). Other writings appear in Journal of Social History; Pacific Historical Review; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; Na‐ tional Identities; Bad Subjects; The Punitive Turn (University of Virginia Press, 2013) and Settler Colonial Studies. Ned Curthoys is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia. He is the author of The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation (Berghahn Books 2013, paperback 2016), and, with Debjani Ganguly, he ed‐ ited the collection Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (Mel‐ bourne University Press 2007). He has published widely on the work of Hannah Arendt, German‐Jewish thought since Moses Mendelssohn, theo‐ ries of the public intellectual, representations of the Jewish diaspora in con‐ temporary literature, and the historical and political dimensions of the Is‐ raeli‐Palestinian conflict. He is currently working on a project exploring the influence of Arendt's epochal conception of the 'banality of evil' on literary and cinematic representations of perpetrators. Kieran Dolin is an Associate Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. His research interests lie in the con‐ nections between law and literature, particularly in the Australian and 19th‐century British contexts. He has published two books, Fiction and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (CUP, 2007), as well as articles. His current project is a study of Australian literature and the recognition of Indigenous title to land.

377

378 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of Lon‐ don, and co‐author of several books in postcolonial performance studies, notably Performance and Cosmopolitics (2007) and Post‐colonial Drama (1996). Her recent collaborative works include Wild Man of Borneo: A Cul‐ tural History of the Orangutan (2014) and a co‐edited essay collection, In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization (forthcoming 2017). She is currently visiting fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Envi‐ ronment and Society in Munich, supported by a Humboldt Prize. Gareth Griffiths is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Aus‐ tralia, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong. He has written and edited many books and articles on post‐colonial literatures and culture. These include the co‐authored The Empire Writes Back (1989) and African Literatures‐East and West (2000). His most recent book was the co‐ authored Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750–1940 (2015). Michael R. Griffiths is Lecturer in the English and Writing Discipline at the University of Wollongong. His work has appeared in such venues as Settler Colonial Studies, Discourse, Postcolonial Studies and The Journal of Common‐ wealth Literature amongst many others. Griffiths edited the book Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (Ashgate 2016) and co‐ edited a special issue (with Bruno Cornellier) of Settler Colonial Studies ti‐ tled: “Globalising Unsettlement”. His current monograph project, tenta‐ tively entitled The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature is under contract at the University of Western Aus‐ tralia Publishing. Mike Hill is Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He ed‐ ited Whiteness: A Critical Reader, NYU Press, 1997, authored Masses, Classes and the Public Sphere (Verso, 2001) and After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (NYU Press, 2004). His most recent book, The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2015), was co‐written with Warren Montag. He is currently finishing a book on 21st‐century war for the Uni‐ versity of Minnesota Press. Nicholas Jose is Professor of English and Creative Writing at The Univer‐ sity of Adelaide, where he is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Crea‐



CONTRIBUTORS 379 tive Practice. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, Ad‐ junct Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Syd‐ ney University, and a visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies Univer‐ sity. He was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard Uni‐ versity, 2009–10. His research interests include Australian literature and transcultural reading and writing. Sukhmani Khorana is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the Uni‐ versity of Wollongong. She is the editor of a Routledge anthology titled Crossover Cinema (2013). Sukhmani has published extensively on news tel‐ evision, diasporic film, and the reception of refugee narratives. With Kate Darian‐Smith and Sue Turnbull, she holds a current Australian Resarch Council Linkage project (including Museum of Victoria and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image as partners) examining the role of television in the experience of migration to Australia. Sukhmani is currently working on a new book project on food and mediated cosmopolitanism in Australia (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield). Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present. Her books include Eye Contact: Photo‐ graphing Indigenous Australians (Duke, 2005), The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights (NewSouth, 2012), which won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ History Book Award. She has edited Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014) which brings together Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal scholars to explore the Indigenous meanings of the photographic archive. She cur‐ rently leads the Australian Research Council‐funded project ‘Globalization, Photography, and Race: the Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photo‐ graphs in Europe’, which collaborates with four European museums to his‐ toricise their collections of Australian photographs and return them to Ab‐ original descendants. Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire was pub‐ lished by Bloomsbury in July 2016, exploring the ways that photography was used to argue for—or against—the humanity of Indigenous Australians from the medium’s invention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the importance of debates about colonization, Indigenous peoples and



380 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE empire in the gradual development of humanitarianism, and ultimately hu‐ man rights. Richard Martin is a Research Fellow in the School of Social Science at UQ. His PhD research (co‐supervised by Gareth Griffiths) examined relations between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people in the remote Gulf Country of northern Australia and representations of those relationships in writing about the region. After completing his PhD in 2012, Richard has continued to work in the Gulf Country on a range of academic and applied research projects, including native title claims and land negotiations. He has pub‐ lished a range of scholarly articles in leading academic journals, and co‐ed‐ ited a Special Issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (http://re‐ searchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/2303). Philip Mead is Chair of Australian Literature and Director of the Westerly Centre at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Networked Language: History & Culture in Australian Poetry (2010) and is the Austral‐ asian team leader for the DAAD‐funded, University of Tübingen‐led, Inter‐ national Thematic Network 'Literary Cultures of the Global South' (2015– 18). He is also part of an Australian Research Council research team inves‐ tigating literary knowledge in the making of English teachers. In 2015– 2016 he was Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Aus‐ tralian Studies at Harvard University. Golnar Nabizadeh is Lecturer in Comic Studies at the University of Dun‐ dee. Her research interests are in visual culture, comics, critical theory, trauma and memory studies. She has published on the work of Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, Shaun Tan, and the Australian online comic “At Work in Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story”, and is a peer reviewer for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. She has forthcoming a monograph entitled Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels with Ashgate Pub‐ lishing. Joseph Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, human rights, and third‐world approaches to international law in the Department of Eng‐ lish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has published numerous articles on African and Latin American literature, human rights, and intellectual property. His book Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, which excavates the shared logic



CONTRIBUTORS 381 underpinning human rights law and the form and ideology of the Bildungs‐ roman, won the 2008 René Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory. He is finishing two books: New Word Orders, on intellectual property and world literature, and Pathetic Fallacies, a collection of essays on human rights and the humanities. Andrew Taylor is Professor Emeritus at Edith Cowan University in West‐ ern Australia and the author of 17 books of poetry, Recent collections in‐ clude Collected Poems (Salt, UK 2004), The Unhaunting (Salt, UK 2009), which was short listed for the 2009 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, and Impossible Preludes (Margaret River Press, 2016). His pub‐ lished literary criticism includes the study Reading Australian Poetry (UQP, 1987). He has also written the libretti for two operas, as well as translating poetry from German and Italian. David Trigger is Professor of Anthropology at The University of Queens‐ land. His research interests encompass the different meanings attributed to land and nature across diverse sectors of society. His research on Austral‐ ian society includes projects focused on a comparison of pro‐development, environmentalist and Aboriginal perspectives on land and nature. In Aus‐ tralian Aboriginal Studies, Professor Trigger has carried out more than 35 years of anthropological study on Indigenous systems of land tenure, in‐ cluding applied research on resource development negotiations and native title. He is the author of more than 60 major applied research reports and has acted as an expert witness in multiple native title claims and associated criminal matters involving Aboriginal customary law. Professor Trigger is the author of Whitefella comin': Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia (Cambridge University Press) and a wide range of schol‐ arly articles. See: http://www.socialscience.uq.edu.au/david‐trigger Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen's Univer‐ sity, Canada. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (1995). Her writing and public speaking engage the broad sweep of postcolonial, cosmopolitan, global, secular, rights, migration and development debates. Her most recent essays appear in Cultural Studies, College Literature, Kunapipi, University of Toronto Quarterly, TOPIA, CSSAAME, and Modern Language Quarterly.



382 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Russell West‐Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the Univer‐ sity of Tübingen, Germany, and Research Associate at the University of Pre‐ toria, South Africa. Recent book publications include Spaces of Fiction/Fic‐ tions of Space (2010) and Temporalities (2013). An edited volume on The Global South and Literature is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2017. Gillian Whitlock is a Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is Postcolonial Life Nar‐ ratives: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford University Press, 2015) and she is currently working on a book based on the asylum seeker archives from Nauru. Chantal Zabus holds the “Institut universitaire de France” (IUF) Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13‐Sorbonne Paris Cité. Her most recent books include Out in Africa: Same‐Sex Desire in Sub‐Saharan Literatures and Cultures (2014); she has re‐ cently edited Transgender Experience: Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility (with David Coad) (2014); and The Future of Postcolonial Studies (2015). She is the Editor‐in‐Chief of Postcolonial Text (www.postcolonial.org).



Index 1

American Psychological Association, 49 Americas, 265, 268, 278 Amir, 310 Amnesty International, 3, 63, 140, 158, 167, 169, 314, 357 Amselle, Jean‐Loup, 187, 198 Anderson, Fay, 285 Angel Island, 274, 276 Anidjar, Gil, 23, 35 Ansar III, 217, 218 Antaki, Mark, 85, 96, 99 Anthony, Thalia, 95, 101 Anthropocene fiction, 358 Anthropocentric, 343 anti‐racist, 304 anti‐Semitic, 202, 212 Anti‐Slavery Society, 292 Apartheid, 39–42, 45, 47, 50, 221, 223 Archibald Prize, 305 Arendt, Hannah, 263, 275, 377 Arizpe, Evelyn, 174, 179 Armstrong, Nancy, 25, 35, 36, 68, 158 Aron, Stephen, 263, 275 Asante, Molefi, 331 Ashcroft, Bill, 105, 107–109, 118, 225, 365, 374 assimilationist policies, 86 Atkinson, Judy, 86, 99 Attwood, Bain, 344, 359 Auerbach, Eric, 40, 296 Aufhebung, 354 AugCog, 76 Austin, Janet, 167, 177 Australia Day, 341 Australia IS Refugees!, 167 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 302, 316 Australian Correctional Management, 164

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 265 1892 Geary Act, 264 1908 Continuous Journey Order, 268 1924 Immigration Act, 267

9 9/11, 18, 40, 63, 161, 172, 178, 362

A A Last Resort? 463, 164, 165, 177 Abacha, Sani, 231, 233 ABC Radio National, 302 Abelove, H., 42 Aboriginal state, 350 Abu Ghraib, 31, 172 Achebe, Chinua, 231 Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future, 345 Afghan, 74, 162 African Independent Churches, 49 African Lesbian Alliance, 43 African novel, 221 African space, 226 African‐American, 304 Afrikaans, 45, 53 Afrobeat, 230, 232 Afrocentrism, 330 After Nines!, 52 Agamben, Giorgio, 191, 295, 296, 308, 331, 334, 335, 339, 358 Aggleton, Peter, 49, 58 Agosín, Marjorie, 161, 177 Ah, Cheng, 124 Ahmed, Sara, 301, 315 Ai Weiwei, 126 Albertyn, Paolo, 43, 56, 58 Alfred, Taiaiake, 118, 120, 247, 259 Allbeson, Tom, 280, 294, 296

383

384 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 169, 177 Australian Human Rights Commission, 163, 169, 177, 286, 296 Australian Magazine, 291 Australian Navy, 312 Australian Women’s Weekly, 291 Australians Against Racism Inc., 167

B Ba, Jin, 126 Babangida, Ibrahim, 232, 233 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 79, 80 Balibar, Etienne, 62, 66, 72, 80, 81, 319, 320, 325, 335 Balzac, Honoré de, 131 Banana, Canaan, 39 Bantick, Christopher, 168, 178 Barale, M. A., 42, 56 Barnouw, Erik, 143, 145, 148, 158 Barthes, Roland, 189, 198, 281, 296 Baucom, Ian, 191, 198, 328, 336 Baxi, Upendra, 194, 198, 200 Behind the Wire, 307, 314, 316 Behrendt, Larissa, 89, 95, 99, 359 Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future, 345

Beijing, 126, 131, 138, 379 Belconnen Arts Centre, 305 Belgium, 272 Bellorín, Brenda, 174, 178 Bengithi Lizokuna, 50, 51 Benjamin, Walter, 25, 36 Bennett, Gordon, 342 Berger, John, 203, 216, 218, 219 Berglund, A., 48, 56 Berlant, Lauren, 170, 178 Bernard, Anna, 201, 219, 220 Berndt, Ronald, 108, 113, 118 Bernstein, Robin, 178 Betero, Uhuru, 227 Bhabha, Homi K., 109, 118, 163, 171, 178

Bhabha, Jacqueline, 171, 172, 178 Bicycle Thieves, The, 136 Biddulph, Steve, 166 Bildung, 335 Bildungsroman, 7, 8, 27, 40, 42, 59, 95, 106, 143, 144, 149, 155, 159, 186, 187, 189–191, 206, 365, 381 Biopolitics, 82, 338, 378 Birch, Tony, 345 Bird, Carmel, 93, 99, 118, 239 Bird, Jodi, 93, 99, 118, 239 Black Atlantic, 320, 325, 326, 336, 337 Black Australia, 100, 345 Black culture, 331 Black Power movement, 230 black sites, 73 black soul music, 230 Bleiker, Roland, 303, 316 Blue, Ethan, 370 Boag, Peter, 273, 275 boat people, 307, 308 Bocahut, Laurent, 56 Bomphray, Alexandra, 180 Book‐burning, 284 Booth, Wayne, 17, 36, 67, 70 border security, 303 Boughton, Bob, 291, 296 Boukaka, Franklin, 239 Boupacha, Djamila, 142 Bourdieu, Pierre, 35 Bourdieusian, 136 Boy Overboard, 175, 179 Bradley, John, 104, 108, 118, 119 Brady, Wendy, 345 Brain Machine Interface, 65, 75, 79 Breathless, 136 Bringing Them Home Report, 88 Brink, Cornelia, 285, 296 Brister, Rose, 206, 219 Brooks, Peter, 85, 99 Brooks, Philip, 56 Brown, James, 230 Brown, Keith, 26, 36 Brown, Sarah, 301, 316 Brown, Richard D., 37, 220

INDEX 385 Brown, Wendy 62, 80 Bruner, Jerome, 93, 99 Buchenwald, 283 Buck, Pearl, 321, 322, 336 The Good Earth, 121

Buck‐Morss, Susan, 321, 322, 336 Buell, Lawrence, 344 Buhari, Muhammudu, 232, 233 Bulosan, Carlos, 274, 275 Bunch, Charlotte, 139, 140, 142, 158 Bunda, Tracy, 345 Burnside, Julian, 93, 99 Bush, George, 80 Butch, 46, 57 Butler, Judith, 190, 198, 331, 336 Butler, Kelly Jean, 316 Byrd, Charles, 72, 80, 108 Bystrom, Kerry, 186, 196, 198

C Caine Prize, 237, 241 Campbell, David, 255, 259, 316 Camus, Albert, 87, 137 Cantonese, 122 Carlson, David J., 341, 345, 359 Carpentaria (Gulf of), 103, 104, 118– 120 Caruth, Cathy, 29, 36 Caste, 153 Caygill, Howard, 75, 80 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 296 Chamayou, Grégoire, 66, 80 Chang, Kornel, 268, 275 Chatwin, Bruce, 113, 119 Cheah, Pheng, 192, 198 Chen, Ran, 125 child removal, 90, 98 Chinese American geographies, 271 Chinese Centre of International PEN, 122 Chipkin, Ivor, 41, 57 chronotope, 79 CIA, 33, 64 Cinema Nova, 312 Civilian, 15, 82

Clarke, Phil, 197, 199 Clark, Jane Perry, 267, 275 Clifford, James, 35, 105, 119 Clunies Ross, Margaret, 108, 113, 119, 120 Coe, Paul, 350 Coetzee, J.M., 137, 378 Foe, 42

Cognitive Augmentation, 76 Collard v. Western Australia, 95 Colman, Robert After Nines!, 52

colonial explorer, 204 Comics, 220, 380 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 140 Commonwealth, 93, 107, 164, 233, 278, 290, 350–352, 360, 378 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 351 Communist Party, 121, 124, 130, 296, 297 Confession, 260 Confucius, 121 Constitution, 40, 41, 47, 48, 56, 83, 299, 321, 323, 324, 351, 352 Constitution Hill, 47 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 140, 158 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 89, 164, 169, 370 Coombe, Rosemary, 85, 99 Cooper, Frederick, 280, 297 Corntassel, Jeff, 109, 118 corrective rape, 42 Cosmopolitanism, 57, 198, 317 Counterinsurgency, 31, 37, 69, 70, 80 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 31, 65, 71, 75, 78–80 Cover, Rob, 232, 305, 316 Credibility, 21 Crew, Gary, 178 Critique of Violence, 25, 36

386 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE cross‐cultural, 207, 301, 304, 342, 353 Cubillo and Gunner, 93, 95 cultural citizenship, 167, 168 Cultural Revolution, 126, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135 Curriculum Materials Information Services, 169

D Dalit, 152 Daly, Paul, 346, 359 Damrosch, David, 322, 336 Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free, 52, 56 dark tourism, 206 Darwinism, 280 Dasein, 332–334 Davis, David Brion, 321, 322, 336 Davis, Mike, 62, 81 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 265, 275 Dawes, James, 85, 99, 188, 189, 199 de Costa, Ravi, 289, 297 De Genova, Nicholas, 265, 276 De Lauretis, Teresa, 36 Dechian, Sonja, 167, 178 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 319 Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, 294 Decolonization, 297 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe, 40, 280, 299, 370

dehumanise, 303 Deleuze and Guattari, 329, 337 Deleuze, Gilles, 72, 319, 322, 324– 326, 329, 336, 337 Deng, Xiaoping, 123, 200 Department of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs, 163–165, 168, 178 Department of Territories, 293, 297 Deportation, 263, 266, 275–277 Deportation hearings, 266

Derrida, Jacques, 27, 190, 199, 322, 332, 333 Of Grammatology, 15, 26, 36, 336 Of Spirit, 332, 336 Des hommes et des dieux, 52

Designated Civilian Official, 15 detention centre, 163, 164, 309, 369 Devereux, Annemarie, 286, 288, 290 Devi, Sampat Pal, 8, 142, 154 Diagne, Souleymane, 55, 331, 337 dialogical, 91, 92, 306 Dickens, Charles, 131 dignity of labour, 279 Dimock, Wai Chee, 344 Ding, Ling, 125 Discrimination, 6, 140, 158 Dixon, Robert, 161, 177, 178 Documentary, 94, 143, 148, 158, 159, 316 Doh, Anh The Happiest Refugee, 174, 175, 178 The Little Refugee, 175, 179

Doh, Suzanne, 179 Doherty, Megan, 166, 179 Dolin, Kieran, 9, 85, 377 Donaldson, Tamsin, 108, 119, 120 Doomadgee, 112–116, 118, 119 Douglass, Frederick, 319–326, 328, 330–332, 334, 337, 372 Doumbi‐Fakoly, 39, 57 La révolte des galsénésiennes, 39, 57

Douzinas, Costas, 40, 41, 49, 55, 57, 81 Human Rights and Empire, 40, 57

Dred Scott, 320, 321, 325 Driskill, Quo‐Li, 46, 57 Drohojowski, Jan, 292 Drone, 63 Du Bois, W.E.B., 266, 273, 276, 326, 331, 337 Dudek, Debra, 162, 167, 168, 179 Duganne, Erinna, 298 Duguid, Charles, 289 Dumas, Alexandre La dame aux camélias, 131

Duncan, Walter, 298 Dunlop, Tim, 341, 359

INDEX 387 Dunn, Kevin, 303, 316 Duras, Marguerite, 137

E East is East, 144 Edwards, Holly, 298 Einstein, Albert, 79 El Paso, 265 Elkin, A. P., 108, 113, 119 Ellis, Catherine J., 108, 119 Ellison, Julie, 147, 158 Elze, Jens, 195, 199 emancipation of women, 279 Emig, Rainer, 190, 199 Emmet, Melody, 43, 281 Empire, 81, 82, 100, 118, 276, 297, 316, 365, 374, 378, 379 enabling fiction, 41, 191 English in Australia, 169, 371 Enlightenment, 11, 25, 32, 200, 296, 326 Epprecht, Marc, 57 Hungochani, 51

Espionage Act, 63 Esposito, Roberto, 191, 199, 335, 337 Ethnographic, 103 Euro‐American, 4, 9, 187, 192, 193, 301 Euro‐American sexual politics, 54 Evatt, Herbert Vere, 286, 291, 292 Ewick, Patricia, 265, 276 Exclusion and Expulsion Division, 267 Eze, Emmanuel Chukuwudi, 329, 337

F Facebook, 310, 312, 313 Fanon, Frantz, 327–330, 331, 334, 337 The Wretched of the Earth, 218

Farman, Jason, 263, 276

Farrell, Mureen, 174, 179 Farrier, David, 308, 309, 316 Fedson, Joanna, 241 Feinberg, Leslie, 46, 57 Felski, Rita, 67 Feminism, 126, 152, 158, 159, 338 feminist, 141, 152, 158, 159, 170, 287, 304, 320, 334, 338 fetishized Other, 206 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 333 Fitzroy Crossing, 292 Foe, 42 Foley, Gary, 345 Fontanella‐Khan, Amana Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India, 143, 154, 155, 158

Forced migration, 173 Ford, Lisa, 89, 99 Foreign Languages Press, 126, 137 Forte, Maximilian, 73, 81 Foucauldian, 135 Foucault, Michel, 65 freedom from fear, 86, 141 of movement, 279, 290 of religion, 279 of speech, 86, 141 of the press, 279

Freedom of Information Act, 16 Freedom Stories, 307–309, 313–316 Freud, Sigmund, 29 Fringe Dwellers, The, 293, 294 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 330 Frow, John, 144, 152, 158 FTM, 42, 46, 50, 53 future anterior, 322

G gacaca courts, 197 Gale, Peter, 303, 316 Galeano, Eduardo, 87 Gana, Nouri, 18, 19, 25, 36 Gandhi, Mahatma, 47, 283

388 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Gao, Xingjian, 121, 131, 137, 371 One Man's Bible, 123, 127,137 Soul Mountain, 126, 127 Garawa, 103–105, 109, 118 Garveyism, 350 Gates, Robert, 69, 276, 337 Gay and Lesbian Archives, 43, 56 Gay Oral History Project, 51 Gay Star News, 55, 58 Gaza Strip, 204, 215, 217 Gearty, Conor, 81 Geertz, Clifford, 35 Gender, 36, 48, 59, 181, 199, 241, 382 Gender disorder identity, 53 GenderDynamiX, 53 genocide, 86, 90, 187–198, 200, 244, 253, 285, 296, 369 Gentry, Clemence, 273, 276 geopolitical, 63, 161, 187, 196, 206, 263, 344, 355, 373 George, Tommy, 103, 118, 120 German Idealism, 40 Geschlecht, 332–334, 336 Gibbings, Beth, 165, 179 Giles, Paul, 344 Gilroy, Paul, 226, 309, 316, 324– 326, 337 Girl Underground, 168, 179 Gleeson‐White, Jane, 339, 359 Gleitzman, Morris Boy Overboard, 175, 179 Girl Underground, 168, 179

Glendon, Mary, 286, 297 Global North, 195 Global South, 5, 187, 190, 195, 365, 380, 382 Globalization, 378, 379 Goetzman, William H., 263, 276 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, 59, 161, 177, 180, 220 Gordimer, Nadine, 41, 53, 57 Gordon, Lewis R., 323, 329, 330, 337, 342, 375 Govinden, Devrakshanam, 41, 57 Graffiti, 172

Grass, Günter, 87, 354, 355 Gregory, Derek, 67, 81, 83, 259 Greta, Olson, 85, 100 Griersonian documentary, 145 Griffiths, Gareth, 86, 100, 105, 107, 108, 118, 225, 358, 365, 367, 370, 374 Groth, Gary, 204, 212, 213, 215, 220 Ground Zero, 172 Grundy, Alice, 130, 137 Guandong, 265 Guantánamo Bay, 15, 18, 63, 162, 367 Guantánamo Diary, 15, 16, 37 Guattari, Felix, 336 Guha, Ranajit, 18, 25, 30, 32, 36 Guilliatt, Richard, 93, 100 Gulf Country, 104, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 116, 380 Gunda, A. R., 48, 59

H Habermas, Jürgen, 61, 64, 67, 81, 168 Halberstam, Judith, 46, 57 Hamston, Julie, 175, 179 Harlow, Barbara, 67 Harris, Geoff, 197, 200 Harrison, Dan, 348, 359 Härting, Heike, 18, 19, 25, 36 Harvey, David, 194, 199 Hasluck, Paul, 89, 90, 100 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 322, 336 Heidegger, Martin, 332–334, 336, 337 Heiss, Anita Intervention, 345

Helff, Sissy, 167, 179 Helper, D. M., 56 Hemingway, Ernest, 132 Herdt, Gilbert, 46, 59 Hermaphrodite, 49 Hester, Torrie, 265, 276 High Court of Australia, 87

INDEX 389 Hirsch, Marianne, 171, 179 HIV, 42, 48, 52 Hoad, Neville, 39, 57 Hobbes, Thomas, 72 Hodgson, Roy, 286 Holcombe, Sarah, 106, 107, 119 Holocaust, 62, 204, 285, 294, 296, 299, 368, 375 Holocaust memory, 204 Holocaust‐centric, 201

Holy Land, 210 Holzer, Jenny, 73 Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 331 Horace, 76 Hospitality, 199 Howard, John, 93, 168, 172, 176, 180, 350 Hsu, Madeline Y., 264, 269, 276 Hui, Ann, 137 Human Rights and Empire, 40, 57 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 88, 90, 91, 100, 163, 164, 178, 367, 374 Human Rights Commission, 89 Human Rights Law Network, 140, 159 Human Rights Plea for Aborigines, 289 Human Terrain Systems, 65, 70, 73, 75–79 humanistic, 16, 62, 66, 79 Hungochani, 51 Hunt, Lynn, 24, 81, 285, 297 Hutcheon, Linda, 87, 100 Hutchison, Emma, 316 Hutchison, Terry, 163, 164, 180 Hutu, 187, 195 Huxley, Julian, 280, 298 HyperCities, 274, 277

I Identity formation, 41 Ignatiev, Michael, 64, 82 Immigrant restriction, 265

immigration, 163, 164, 168, 177, 263, 275, 301 Immigration agents, 265 Imperial, 81, 297 Indian migration, 268 Indian Supreme Court, 55 Indigenisation, 342, 344, 355 Indigenous Sovereignity 345, 346, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins, 345, 360 Indigenous studies, 108 Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 112 Intelligence and Human Rights, 63 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 290 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 290 International Monetary Fund, 3, 223, 371 Intervention, 107, 345, 360 Invasion, 341 Invasion Day, 341 Iraq war, 172 Ireland, Judith, 304, 330, 352 Iser, Wolfgang, 197, 199 Islamophobic, 204

J Jabaliah refugee camp, 211 Jackrollers, 42 Jacob, Francis, 65, 82 Jacob, Kipp, 70, 82 Jain, Nishtha, 143, 155, 158 The Gulabi Gang, 142

Jakobson, Roman, 190, 199 Jakwa, Tinasha, 224, 241 Jameson, Fredric, 149, 153, 154, 159, 264, 276 Jamila, 312 Jean‐Marie, Vivaldi, 329, 337 Jenin, 206, 207

390 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Jerusalem, 207 Jonathan, Goodluck, 39, 233 Juarez, 265 Judeo‐Christian, 210

K Kafka, Franz, 137 Kalakuta Republic, 233 Kanstroom, Daniel, 265, 276 Kantian, 325 Kaplan, Louis, 281, 297 Kawano, Yoh, 263, 274, 277 Keane, Webb, 114, 119 Kennedy, David The Dark Sides of Virtue, 39, 57

Keys, Barbara, 82 Khalifa, Omar, 220 Khan‐Din, Ayub

East is East, 144 Who Bombed Birmingham?, 144

Khanna, Yogesh, 146 Khrushchev, Nikita, 293 Kill the Gays Bill, 39 King, Barney, 103 Kinzer, Stephen, 64, 82 Kipp, Jacob, 70, 82 Kleinman, Arthur, 285, 297 Kleinman, Joan, 285, 297 Klinghoffer, Leon, 205 Klocker, Natascha, 303, 316 Kozol, Wendy, 207, 214, 220 Kuddus, Omar, 55 Kurdi, Aylan, 176, 302 Kuti, Fela Anikulapo, 230, 232, 233, 236, 239 Kuxolelwa Abanjani?, 50, 59

L La Capra, Dominick, 87 La révolte des galsénésiennes, 39, 57 Labov, William, 20–24, 28–30, 34– 36 Lacan, Jacques, 29 Laclau, Ernesto, 190, 198

Lafreniere, Don, 264, 277 Lahaye, Tim

Left Behind 237

Lai, Him Mark, 274, 276 Lallah, Smoki, 227 Landon, Herman R., 267, 276 Langton, Marcia, 348–350, 352, 356, 358, 359 Latour, Bruno, 61, 81 Lau, Estelle T., 170, 261, 267, 276 Leane, Jeanine, 96, 98, 100 Lee, Erika, 264, 266, 276 Lee, Mabel, 126, 137 Lefebvre, Henri, 277 Left Behind, 237

Lekhi, Meenakshi, 144, 145, 159 Lescot, Anne, 52, 57 Levinas, Emmanuel, 168 Levy, Daniel, 204, 220 Leys, Simon, 129, 137 LGBTQ, 46 Liberal, 80, 81, 158, 377 Liberalism, 261 Life Matters, 302, 316 Life writing, 98 Lim, Jenny, 274, 276, 368, 375 Linden, Sonja Asylum Dialogues, 308, 309 Asylum Monologues, 308

Lindiwe, Mkasi, 42, 48, 49, 51, 58 Linfield, Susie, 285, 297 literacy, 153, 155, 172, 307 Liu, Xiaobo, 122, 130, 135, 137 Lodhia, Sharmila, 146, 148, 159 Longinotto, Kim, 153, 155–157, 159 Pink Saris, 153, 154

Louis, William Roger, 280, 281, 297 Lovell, Julia, 137 Lu Xun, 121, 126 Lucashenko, Melissa, 97, 100 Lucky Miles, 303, 317 Luker, Trish, 94, 95, 100 Lundy, Craig, 324, 337 Lydon, Jane, 291–293, 295, 297, 370

INDEX 391

M Mabo decision, 345 Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2), 87 Mabo, Eddie Koiki, 346, 347 machine learning, 78 machinic, 75, 79 Macintyre, Pam, 174, 180 Macintyre, Stuart, 291, 297 Magloire, Laurence, 52, 57 Maillu, David, 188 Makeba, Miriam, 223 Mallan, Kerry, 174, 177, 180 Malle, Louis Phantom India, 146

Mamdani, Mahmood, 195, 198, 199 Mandarin, 122 mandatory detention, 168, 301, 308, 314 Mansell, Michael, 350 Mao, Zedong, 123–125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 137 Maoism, 126 Maori, 254, 287, 289 Marais, Charl, 53, 58, 59 Martin, Fiona, 163, 164, 180, Martin, Richard, 9, 109, 112, 117, 119, 120, Martin, Keavy 257, 259–261 Marxist, 32, 39 Mathematics, 79 Mathonzi, N., 50, 58 May Fourth revolutionaries, 127 Mazibuko, G., 50, 58 Mbembe, Achille, 185, 191, 195, 199, 224–226, 239, 241 Mbugua, Audrey, 55 McAdam, Julie, 174, 179 McColl, Gina, 348, 359 McCulloch, Warren, 65 McGregor, Russell, 96, 100, 291, 298 McKeown, Adam, 264, 277 McLennen, Sophia, 85, 100 McRae, Heather, 94, 100 Mead, Philip, 8, 178, 180, 352, 354, 359, 365, 366

Meir, Golda, 205, 370 Merlan, Francesca, 107, 119 Merry, Sally Engle, 295, 298 Metropolis, 317 Mexican border, 265 migrant, 5, 171, 173, 176, 264, 266, 267, 269, 270, 273, 274 Migrant Resource Centre, 310 migration, 161, 162, 167, 170, 174, 175, 265, 268, 312, 379, 381 Millar, Heather, 178 Miller, J. Hillis, 10, 11, 67, 99 mine‐marriages, 52 Mitchell, W.J.T., 220 Mkandawire, Thandika, 197, 199 Mlisa, Lily‐Rose, 44, 51, 58 Mo, Yan, 122, 125, 130, 138 Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, 133, 134

Modernity, 259, 328, 337 Mohamad, 311 Moloney, Deirdre M., 273, 277 Momoh, Tony, 232 Monet, Germaine, 272, 277 Monks, Rosalie Kunoth, 346 Montag, Warren, 81, 378 Moran, Mark, 104, 119 Moreno, Jonathan, 76, 82 Moreton‐Robinson, Aileen, 346, 348 Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, 345, 360

Morgan, Ruth, 58 Morrissey, Philip, 345 Morton, Peter, 292, 298 Moyn, Samuel, 82, 319, 337 Mugabe, Robert, 39 Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, 200, 373 Nairobi Heat, 186, 196, 200, 373

multi‐platform narratives, 306, 307 Munro, Brenna South Africa and the Dream of the Love to Come, 41, 58

Museum of Modern Art, 281, 298 Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, 126 Museveni, Yoweri, 39 Musiitwa, Daniel, 238, 241

392 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Musil, Robert, 137 Mwangi, Boniface, 227–229 Mwangi, Meja, 188

N Nablus, 207, 212 Naidoo, Indira, 304 Naipaul, V. S., 137 Napoleonic Spain, 69 Narain, Vrinda, 139, 159 Narration, 37, 61, 83, 100, 159, 219 Narrative Dynamics, 76, 80, 83 Narrativity, 37, 278 narratological turn, 70, 75, 79 narratology, 31, 32, 34, 35, 70, 92, 99, 100, 365, 371 National Archives and Records Administration, 269–270, 272, 276–277 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 72 National Consultation on The Law and Legal Strategies to Combat Violence Against Women, 140 Native American, 46, 254 Native Title legislation, 345, 346 NATO, 63, 64 Nauru, 162–164, 166, 309, 366, 371, 375, 382 Nazi, 283, 285, 296 Nazism, 280 Ndiaye, Jupiter Tamsir, 55 Ndlovu‐Gatsheni, Sabelo J., 223–225, 230 Neale, Timothy, 351, 360 Ned, Neville, 103, 112 Négritude, 330 Neill, Rosemary, 105, 119 Neo‐liberal, 64, 80 Nesbit, Scott, 264, 277 Nesbitt, Nick, 187, 200 Net‐centric, 61 Netflix, 238 Nettheim, Garth, 100

neuroscience, 73, 75, 77 New China, 124–126 New Humanism, 327, 329 New South African Constitution, 41 New Times, 180, 293 Ng Ah Get, 270, 277 Ngurdurri, 113–115 Nichols, Bill, 143, 147, 150–152, 159 Nicholson, Xzarina, 103, 277, 316 Nicolacopoulos, Toula Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins, 345, 360

Nigerian English, 232 Njinge, Mpumelelo, 43, 58 Nkabinde, Nkunzi Zandile, 58 Nobel Lecture, 128, 134, 138 Nobel Peace Prize, 63, 121, 122, 126, 137 Northern Territory National Emergency Response, 107, 345 Noys, Benjamin, 25, 36 Nuemann, Klaus, 316 Nussbaum, Martha, 24, 304 Nyerere, Julius, 231

O Obama, Barack, 63, 81, 83 Obasanjo, Olesegun, 235 Occupied Territories, 203, 204, 208 Of Grammatology, 15, 26, 36, 336 Ogoni activists, 233 Olympic Park, 310 Ombati, Mokua, 227, 228–230, 242 Onwuanibe, Richard C., 329, 337 Organisation for Economic Development, 301 Osborne, Roger, 340, 360 otherness, 171, 172, 204, 325 Our Aborigines, 292, 297 Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo, 240, 241, Dust, 238, 242 Weight of Whispers, 237, 242

INDEX 393

P Pacific Solution, 162, 168, 171–172, 176, 307, 367 Palais Galleria, 282 Palestinian Arab, 202 Pan‐Africanist, 230 Pantaleo, Sylvia, 174, 180 Parker, Richard, 49, 58 Patterson, Annette, 169, 170, 176, 177, 180 Pearson, Noel, 337, 350, 352, 356, 358, 360 Pedwell, Carolyn, 301–306, 315, 317 Pegler‐Gordon, Anna, 271, 277 Pemulwy: the Rainbow Warrior, 340

PEN International, 3, 122, 167, 379 Perinbam, B. Mari, 329, 337 Peterson, Nicolas, 107, 119 Peutz, Nathalie, 265, 276 Pfaelzer, Jean, 264, 277 Phantom India, 146 Pharmakon, 319, 327 Photography, 277, 280, 296–298, 379 Pickering, Sharon, 303, 317 Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India, 143, 154, 158 Pink Saris, 143, 153, 154, 159 Pintupi‐Luritja, 106 Plath, Sylvia, 137 Platonism, 332 PLO, 205 Polkinghorne, Donald, 35 Pontecorvo, Gillo Battle of Algiers, 218, 220

Pope, Alexander, 130 Posner, Eric, 82 Post‐Colonial Transformation, 118 post‐whiteness, 79 Power, Paul, 302, 317 Presner, Todd, 263, 274, 277 Pretorius, E., 48, 58 Prince, Gerald, 57, 92, 100 Privacy Act 1988, 89

Protevi, John, 329, 337 Provisional Aboriginal Government, 350 Prupis, Nadia, 63, 82

Q Q&A, 251, 313

R Racial Discrimination Act 1975, 89, 107 racism, 72, 81, 87, 247, 280, 289, 317, 323, 329, 340, 353 radical interconnectivity, 65 Rainbow Nation, 47 Ramallah, 204, 219 Ras Tafari, 350 Reagan, Ronald, 237 Red Guard, 126 Refugee Council of Australia, 301, 302, 317 Refugee Week, 173 Refugees, 177, 200, 303, 316, 317 Reid, Graeme, 50, 56, 58, 59 Reid, Julian, 65, 81, 82 Reinhardt, Mark, 284, 298 Report on the National Consultation on the Law and Legal Strategies to Combat Violence, 159 Reynolds, Henry, 344, 351, 360 Richardson, Brian, 76, 80, 83 Ricoeur, Paul, 17, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 34–36, 76 Ridge, Mia, 264, 277 Right Now: Human Rights in Australia, 174, 180, 314 Rigoulot, Germaine, 272 Riley, Jonathan, 141, 159 Robinson Crusoe, 40, 299, 370 Rodney, Walter, 192, 200 Rooney, Brigid, 161, 178 Rorty, Richard, 24, 153, 159 Rosca, Ninotchka, 142 Roscoe, Will, 59

394 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Rose, Deborah Bird, 206, 348, 360 Rothberg, Michael, 108, 118 Rousseau, Jean‐Jacques, 2, 321 Rowse, Tim, 290, 298 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 246 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 88 Rudd, Kevin, 307 Run Lola Run, 136 Rwandan genocide, 186, 187, 373

S Sacco, Joe, 202, 220, 222, 369 Said, Edward, 40, 107, 118, 120, 143, 202–206, 210, 211, 214, 215, 218, 220, 280, 298 Homage to Joe Sacco, 210, 220

Sallis, Eva, 178, 336 Salyer, Lucy E., 264, 277 Sam, Tanya Chan, 50 Sameh, 207, 211 Sangoma, 42–44, 58 Sargent, Frank, Commissioner‐Gen‐ eral of Immigration, 266 Saro‐Wiwa, Ken Basi and Company, 231, 233 Sozabo: A Novel in Rotten English, 232, 242

Sartre, Jean‐Paul, 149, 153 Sassen, Saskia, 192, 194, 200 Satrapi, Marjane Persepolis, 214, 220

Scarry, Elaine, 142 Schaffer, Kay, 42, 50, 59, 85–93, 101 Schmidt‐Linsenhoff, Viktoria, 294, 298 Schmitt, Carl, 308 Schultheis Moore, Alexandra, 59, 161, 177, 180, 220, 368, 375 Scott, Kim That Deadman Dance, 340

Scott, Rosie

Intervention 345

Sekula, Allan, 281, 288, 298 Sen, Rukmini, 151, 159

Senghor, Leopold, 330, 331, 337 Sex reassignment surgery, 47, 52 Sexuality, 57, 58, 277 Seye, Moustapha, 55 Shah, Nayan, 273, 277 Sharpe, Wendy Seeking Humanity, 305–307, 315

Shen, Congwen, 124, 125 Shen, Rong, 124 At Middle Age, 125

Sheng, Keyi, 125 Death Fugue, 134, 138

Shephard, David, 263, 274, 277 Sibiya, Nakanjani Bengithi Lizokuna, 50, 51 Kuxolelwa Abanjani?, 50, 59

Siems, Larry, 16, 19, 37 SIEV X, 162, 165, 166, 179, 181 SIEV X National Memorial Project, 166 Silbey, Susan, 265, 276 Silverstone, Roger, 307, 317 Simba, Swifo, 227 Singh, A.P., 148 Singh, Asha, 146–148, 150, 153, 158 Singh, Badri 147, 151, 153 Singh, Jyoti, 142, 144, 145, 148, 152, 158 Singh, Mukesh, 145, 148, 150–152, 158 Singh, Ram, 149 Singh, Sundar, 268–270, 277 Sinnott, Megan, 44, 54, 59 Skrbis, Zlatko, 317 Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, 15–19, 22, 23, 25, 29, 37, Slaughter, Joseph R., 40, 41, 59, 64, 67, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 83, 85, 100, 107, 139, 140, 142–144, 153, 157, 159, 163, 180, 193, 218, 220, 248, 261, 280, 298, 323, 335, 338, 365, 367, 371, 374, 375, 380 Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law 7, 8, 62, 63, 76, 101, 106, 120, 189, 190, 192, 194, 200

INDEX 395 Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, 59, 218, 220, 368, 375

Slavery, 336 Sluga, Glenda, 280, 298 Smith, Claire, 105, 120 Smith, Janet, 252, 261 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 105, 120 Smith, Rupert, 64, 83 Smith, Sidonie, 42, 50, 59 Socrates, 332 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Issajewitsch, 87 Soros, George, 64 Soul Mountain, 126, 127 South Africa and the Dream of the Love to Come, 41, 58 South African Bill of Rights, 56 South African Medical Association, 48 South Asian Indians, 268 South Australian Aboriginal welfare authority, 94 Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, 345, 360 Sow, Baba, 55 Soweto gang, 42 Soyinka, Wole, 231 spatial imaginaries, 264 Spatial narratives, 264, 265, 267, 269, 274, 275 Spatial questions, 267 Special Broadcasting Service, 305, 316 Spillers, Hortense J., 326, 330–332, 334, 338 Spinoza, Baruch de, 72, 76, 80 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 3, 4, 11, 36, 108, 120, 322, 327, 336, 381 Steichen, Edward The Family of Man, 281, 298

Stolen Generations, 87, 91, 93–95, 98, 99, 367 Stolen Generations report, 87, 98 Stratton, Jon, 303, 317 Strehlow, T. G. H., 108, 113, 120

Strelein, Lisa, 87, 101 Stretton, Hugh, 286, 298 Struk, Janina, 285, 299 subaltern, 23, 25, 30, 32, 36, 86, 120, 274, 326, 330, 331, 335 Subalternity, 118, 319, 326, 328, 331, 372 Subject English, 161, 163, 169 Subjectivity, 316, 381 Subramanium, Gopal, 149 Sun Tzu, (Sunzi), 121 Sutton, Peter, 108, 120 SWAP, 312 Swift, Jonathan, 130 Sydney Film Festival, 312 Sznaider, Natan, 204, 220 Szörényi, Anna, 317

T Taipei Chinese PEN Centre, 122 Tampa, 162, 307, 367 Tan, Shaun, 175 The Arrival, 173, 174, 178–181 The Lost Thing, 172, 173, 176, 179, 180

Taylor, Diana, 12, 172, 181, 363, 373, 381 Tebogo, 42, 52, 53, 59 Temporary Protection Visas, 308 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 25, 35, 36, 68 Terrain, 65, 70, 82 Territory, 181 testimonial, 19, 49, 86, 87, 94, 204, 244, 245, 249, 253, 254, 258, 315 testimony/testimonies, 19, 29, 51, 53, 86, 91, 92, 95, 166, 167, 188, 201, 247–249, 257, 269, 272, 316 That Deadman Dance, 340 The Arrival, 173, 174, 178, 181 The Columbian Orator, 330, 336 The Dark Sides of Virtue, 39, 57 The Empire Writes Back, 105, 107, 108, 118, 225, 374

396 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE The Family of Man, 281–283, 288, 294, 295 The Golden Era, 125, 137 The Guardian, 158, 304, 359, 366, 375 The Gulabi Gang, 142 The Happiest Refugee, 174, 175, 178 The Kadaitcha Sung, 342 The Little Refugee, 175, 179 The Lost Thing, 172, 173, 176, 179, 180 The Post‐Colonial Studies Reader 365, 374 The Queensland Museum, 103 The Redaction Series, 73 The Swan Book, 339, 341, 343, 344, 347, 348, 350, 354, 355, 357, 360 The Sydney Morning Herald, 304, 317 Thomas, Steve Behind the Wire, 307, 314–316 Freedom Stories, 307–309, 313–316

Thula Sizwe, 222, 223 Tiananmen massacre, 121 Tiffin, Helen, 105, 107, 108, 118, 225, 365, 374 Todorov, Tzvetan, 189, 200 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich, 131, 154 Tommy‐Boys and Ancestral Wives, 43 Transgenderism, 39, 47 transition narrative, 41, 106 transnational governance, 41, 55 trauma, 29, 36, 46, 86, 87, 91, 97, 99, 116, 150, 164, 201, 204, 211, 248, 254, 261, 282, 298, 307, 311, 367, 380 Treverton, Gegory, 67, 83 Tribune, 291 Trilling, Lionel

Tutsi, 187, 188, 193, 195 Twining, William, 196, 198, 200

U UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 40, 44, 62, 67, 70, 74, 139, 144, 279, 280, 282, 283, 286, 288, 289, 294, 295, 367, 370 Udwin, Leslee, 8, 142, 144, 148, 150, 151, 160 UN Human Rights Committee, 63 UN Refugee Convention, 301 UN Security Council, 63 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), 55, 75, 83, 187, 200, 279, 280, 282, 290, 294, 299, 370 United Front period, 124 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 163, 164, 170 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, 105 United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 211 United States Department of Defense, 15, 19, 37 United States Department of the Army, 34, 37 US Army, 31, 33, 65, 69 US Civil War, 320 US Congress, 267, 278 US Declaration of Independence, 320 US deportation regime, 265 US National Security Strategy, 68 Uzodinma, Iweala Beasts of No Nation, 232, 238, 241

Sincerity and Authenticity, 128, 138

Tripadvisor Australia, 166, 181 tropological gamble, 76, 190 Tsang, Steve, 63 Tsotsis, 42 Tumarkin, Maria, 175, 181 Turkana, 239

V Van Klinken, A. S., 48, 59 Van Rijswijk, Honni, 95, 101 Van Vleck, William C., 266, 278 Vanstone, Amanda, 168

INDEX 397 Veney, Cassandra, 195, 200 Verma Committee Report, 149 Victim, 150, 199, 205, 220 Viljoen, Frans, 55, 59 Visweswaran, Kamala, 149, 157, 160 Vyshinsky, Andrey, 292

W Waanyi, 87, 103–105, 109, 112–114, 118 Walcott, Derek, 320, 327, 328, 330, 335, 338, 372 Walker, Liz, 50, 59 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 80 Walter, Maggie, 25, 286, 336, 345 Wang, Xiaobo, Wang in Love and Bondage, 124 Three Novels by Wang Xiaobo, 135, 138 Mister Lover, 135, 138 The Golden Age, 135

Wanjiku, 228 Watson, Samuel

The Kadaitcha Sung, 342

Weber, Max, 35 Weheliye, Alexander, 325, 328, 331, 334, 335, 338 Wellbeloved, Joy Rosemary, 53, 58, 59 Werlerman, CJ., 83 West African (Malian) Manden charter of human rights, 187 Western Pacific railroad, 268 White, Hayden, 19, 24, 27, 34, 35, 37, 67, 263, 264, 278 White, Patrick, 137 White, Richard, 278 White 'Afghans', 73, 74, 77, 82 White Matter, 77, 81 Whitefella, 104, 111–117, 119, 381 Whiteness, 74, 77, 78, 81, 100, 378 Whitlock, Gillian, 340, 360, 367, 371 Whyte, Jessica, 280, 299 Wielenga, Gori, 197, 200 Wieringa, Saskia, 43, 60 Wild, Stephen A., 108, 119, 120

Wild Time, 116 Williams, Fadhili, 239 Williams, Patrick, 201–203, 220 Williamson, Geordie, 339, 360 Willmot, Eric Pemulwy: the Rainbow Warrior, 340

Wilson, Richard, 37, 220, 295, 299 Winch, Tara June Swallow the Air, 96–98, 100, 101

Winter, Jay, 35, 280, 299 Wiradjuri, 96, 97, 98 Wobst, H. Martin, 105, 120 Wolof, 39 Wood, Stephanie, 34, 36, 306, 317 Woodward, Ian, 306, 317 Woomera, 292, 298, 309, 310, 312 World Bank, 3, 223, 371 World Literature, 178, 336, 343, 344, 368, 374 World War II, 62, 63, 71, 212, 278 Woubie Chéri, 52 Wright, Alexis, 8, 86, 90, 92, 101, 302, 339, 348, 352, 354–360, 366 Plains of Promise, 353 Carpentaria, 103, 104, 118–120, 339, 343, 353, 354, 360 The Swan Book, 339–344, 347 348, 350, 354, 355, 357, 360

Wright, Terence, 303, 317 Wynter, Sylvia, 334

X Xiao, Hong, 125 One Man’s Bible, 126, 127, 137 Soul Mountain, 126, 127

Xu, Zechen, 136, 138

Running in Beijing, 136

Y Yidindiji, Muurrumu Walubarar, 346 Yolgnu, 341, 349, 351 Young, Elliott, 265, 278 Yu, Hua, 130 Brothers, 133, 138, 327, 330 China in Ten Words, 132, 138 The Seventh Day, 133, 138

398 THE SOCIAL WORK OF NARRATIVE Yung, Judy, 274, 276 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy, 341, 351, 361

Z Zabus, Chantal, 5, 60 Zamani, Nahal, 63, 84 Zanzibar Film Festival, 237 Zelizer, Barbie, 285, 299



Zhang, Yuan, 138 East Palace, West Palace, 135

Zionism, 201, 202, 205, 211, 220 Žižek, Slavoj, 25, 37, 190, 198, 322, 338 Zulu, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 58, 222

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