Interrogating Rights through World Literature

This article examines the relationship between world literature and human rights through a reading of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Best of Friends (2022). Building on scholarship on the human rights novel, it argues that Shamsie’s recent fiction registers how access to both rights and literary visibility is structured by citizenship and class. Through its depiction of borders, bureaucratic discretion, and asymmetrical mobility, Home Fire exposes the uneven distribution of recognition under contemporary regimes of sovereignty. Best of Friends extends this inquiry by foregrounding elite global networks and the classed infrastructures that shape belonging. By drawing attention to questions of citizenship and human rights in real-life cases such as Shamima Begum’s, Shamsie prompts an interrogation of whose lives are considered grievable while also framing social class as a protective category that intensifies inequalities. Attending to materialist critiques of world literature, the article argues that the field’s engagement with human rights cannot be disentangled from the conditions of its own production and reception.