The Rights War in Literature and Culture: From Literary Humanitarianism to Savior Victimism

It analyzes the cultural narratives through which imperialism, white supremacy, and misogyny appropriate rights discourse to pose at once as savior and victim. While literary humanitarianism promotes rights as a contest of victimhood and disconnects international spaces, it explores literary strategies for reimagining social justice. Rights War tracks how the human rights framework is weaponized against the oppressed, and it makes the case for the central place of literature in understanding this seizure of narrative control. While literary humanitarianism depoliticizes suffering and positions the reader as a savior to traumatized Others, Rights War shows how contemporary fiction by women of color and queer writers across the African diaspora engage innovative narrative paradigms to address structural inequities. It analyzes strategies set out in this literature for disarming savior victimism, which it identifies as a pernicious cultural phenomenon in which the powerful proclaim themselves saviors to and victims of those they marginalize. As the disassociation of national rights from international human rights and the disconnection of civil and political rights from social and economic rights provoke a contest of victimhood, this book offers a renewed argument for the indivisibility of rights and the social justice function of literature.